Humorous Speech Acts And Pragmatic Strategies In American Sitcom Growing Pains

Humor is a very common but special linguistic phenomenon. Through a case study of a popular American sitcom Growing Pains, this paper is intended to study humorous speech acts in relation to pragmatic strategies within the framework of speech act theory. It aims to interpret how humor is produced and what the most effective strategies are exploited in the production of humor.According to Austin (1962), the speech act can be explored under three different facets: locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. Based on Austin's research, Searle (1975) carries on a further research on illocutionary acts, proposing the systemized felicity conditions and classification of illocutionary acts. Based on Austin and Searle's theoretical framework, the present study focuses on how humor achieves its effects both at illocutionary and perlocutionary levels. Then in the light of Hay's (2000) study on pragmatic strategies, the effort is made to discuss what strategy is the most extensively used one in the production of humor.The present study chooses 100 transcripts of informal conversations among family members and friends in Growing Pains. The results of the data analysis show that the illocutionary act of humor is different from general speech acts, and that the reason of producing humor is attributed to violating one of the felicity conditions, such as Sincerity Condition. Declaratives never appear in the data analyzed, whereas representatives are mostly preferred by the conversational interactants. Aggression-based strategies are the most effective ones.