An Analysis On The Verbal Humor In The Big Bang Theory From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Humor is an art form, and also a good way of communication. As is known to all,situation comedy is expected to reach some kind of humorous effect. The Big BangTheory is an American sitcom, which reflects the life of four scientists and anattractive blonde waitress. The reason why the sitcom became such a popularmasterpiece contributes to the perfect portray of the eccentric characteristics of thesefour scientists. The main source of jokes in this comedy is derived from the maincharacter Sheldon Cooper who has a particular sense of humor. All of the strangefeatures of a man are imposed on him. It seems that such characters annoy us in thefirst place, however his amusing behavior and funny abilities offset with thoseirritating moves. Therefore, all kinds of humorous clips in this sitcom require theauthor to appreciate and interpret the reason of such humor production.Taking American sitcom the Big Bang Theory as the data source, the thesis fullyinterprets the understanding of humor through phonological, semantic, pragmatic andrhetorical approaches. And it analyzes how the humorous effect is produced in theframework of relevance theory.Firstly, from relevance—theoretic point of view, cognitive environment and mutualmanifestness are the most important notions that can account for humor in the bestapproaches. If the speaker and the hearer fail to reach the cognitive environment thatis mutually manifest or the hearer can not infer the communicative intention of thespeaker due to the different cognitive environment, the humorous effect will beproduced.Secondly, because of mismatches in memory and perceptual systems,the hearermay overlook a hypothesis that the speaker thought would be highly prominent, ornotice a hypothesis that the speaker had overlooked. Therefore, misunderstanding andmisinterpretation of the speaker's utterance will yield an unexpected humorous effect.Thirdly, humor understanding is an effort—making process． In humorouscommunication,the speaker often prefers to convey her meaning in an indirect way．Thus the hearer has to make more processing effort to infer the speaker's realintention．And the usage of such indirectness shows that the author must intend theindirect reply to achieve some additional contextual effects, which can never beachieved by the direct one. This will give rise to additional comedic effects.Lastly, the production of humorous effect is mainly derived from the contrastbetween the maximal relevance and optimal relevance. The hearer is easy to reach themaximal relevance with the least processing effort. However, the unexpectations thatthe speaker utters next will break the maximal relevance and motivate the hearer tosearch for the optimal relevance. The wider the gap between the speaker and thehearer becomes, the more complicated and difficult the seeking for an optimalrelevance will be, hence, a better humorous effect is likely to be achieved.