| Zhao Benshan's comic skits are representative of the comic skits in general, and his humor has been much liked and appreciated by the audience. Many researches are conducted to analyze Zhao's comic skits from different perspectives. However, from the literature available, it is found that most of the researches focus on the linguistic features and styles of Zhao's works. Few tentative studies have been made of the humor in Zhao's comic skits from the perspective of social linguistics. This thesis, therefore, attempts to undertake an insightful research into the humor of Zhao's comic skits from the perspective of the Cooperative Principle and its four maxims.Based on a review of previous studies on comic skit and the theory of Cooperative Principle, this thesis carries out a quantitative and qualitative study of the humor in Zhao's comic skits created by flouting the maxims of the CP. Quantitative research is used to find out the distribution of the occurrences of the flouting of the maxims of the CP and what characterizes the humorous language in Zhao's comic skits. Qualitative research is undertaken to analyze how humor in Zhao's comic skits is generated by the flouting of the maxims.Detailed studies lead to three findings. Firstly, most of the humorous effect in Zhao's comic skits is achieved because his language constantly flouts the maxims of the Cooperative Principle and generates Conversational Implicature. Secondly, the flouting of the maxims of the Cooperative Principle, namely, the Maxim of Quantity, the Maxim of Quality, the Maxim of Relation and the Maxim of Manner all play an important part in the generation of humorous language in Zhao's comic skits. Among the four maxims, the Maxim of Quality is the most frequently flouted one, and the Maxim of Manner is the least frequently flouted. Thirdly, as for the flouting of the specific sub-maxims of the four maxims of the CP, Zhao's comic skits have the following three characteristics. First, the second sub-maxim of Quantity is more often flouted than the first one. Second, as far as the flouting of the Maxim of Quality is concerned, most of the cases flout the first sub-maxim of Quality. Besides, in cases of flouting the Maxim of Quality, many rhetorical devices, namely metaphor, irony, hyperbole, and meiosis are employed. Third, most of the cases flout the Maxim of Manner by being "obscure". The last sub-maxim of Manner "be orderly" is basically observed in Zhao's comic skits.Findings of the study may provide some practical and theoretical implications. On the one hand, the findings of the study, to some extent, contribute a little to uncover the mechanisms of humor creation and interpretation in comic skits; on the other hand, this study also sheds some light on the future studies on other linguistic phenomena from the perspective of the Cooperative Principle. |
