An Analysis Of The Verbal Humor In American Sitcom Friends From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

Sitcom is one of the most popular programs and in it humor plays an important role. Verbal humor, as the essence of humor creation in sitcom, is also one of the most effective ways of interpersonal communication. However, many linguists only studied the verbal humor from the semantic and rhetorical perspective. Since the 1980s, with the development of pragmatics, more and more linguists have made great contribution to the humor research from the perspective of pragmatics. The popularity of sitcom which is the carrier of verbal humor has provided plenty of materials for pragmatic research of verbal humor. As one of the most popular American sitcoms, Friends has achieved great success in the verbal humor creation. It is full of unexpected, interesting and popular humorous dialogues. The pragmatic research of these humorous dialogues could provide insights for the comprehension of verbal language and the creation of sitcom scenarios.This thesis intends to employ three pragmatic theories which are the Cooperative Principle, the Relevance Theory and the Politeness Principle, to analyze the numerous examples of verbal humor in the famous American sitcom Friends. The analysis shows that humor effects could be achieved by the deliberate flouting of the maxims of cooperative principle, creating the gap between the maximal relevance and optimal relevance, and deliberate of flouting the maxims of politeness principle.This thesis mainly does the research with both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The verbal humorous utterances in 30 episodes which are selected randomly from sitcom Friends are taken as data resources. Various pragmatic theories are employed to analyze the numerous examples of verbal humor in sitcom Friends. The research process is to derive the verbal humor examples from the original texts firstly and then classify them into different categories in terms of pragmatic theories and finally analyze them in details. The quantitative analysis is also employed in the research of the sitcom in terms of the flouting of the cooperative principles and politeness principles. Based on these analyses, the underlying generation mechanism of humor, namely the deep structure of English verbal humor has been tentatively explored. By applying the pragmatic approach to the explanation of the mechanism of humor in the specific context, sitcom, the corresponding theoretical hypothesis is further verified and developed. The findings of this study have provided some useful suggestions for people to comprehend and appreciate the verbal humor and also for playwrights to create verbal humor in sitcom play writing.