A Pragmatic Analysis Of Verbal Humor In The Sitcom The Big Bang Theory

Humor is an essential element of human life. As an important part of humor, verbal humor is pervasive in daily communication between people. Since verbal humor exists in the form of conversation, it has vivid features related to pragmatics. Analyses of verbal humor in conversational form are commonplace in books and papers on pragmatics. Previous researches of scholars show that verbal humor is closely related to pragmatics. One or even more pragmatic features can be located in verbal humor.As a ubiquitous language phenomenon, humor draws lots of attention from scholars and researchers of all fields. Humor has long been studied by scholars from the perspectives of aesthetics, sociology, rhetoric, philosophy and discourse analysis, etc. Three classical theories, namely the Superiority Theory, the Incongruity Theory and the Release Theory, were proposed in the history of humor study. Since1980s, researchers have begun to study humor from the perspective of pragmatics. The various studies conducted by different scholars show that many pragmatic theories can be employed to analyze humor, such as deixis, speech act theory, CP and RT, etc.The present research combines the three classical theories with pragmatics to analyze verbal humor in the sitcom the Big Bang Theory, with theoretic support of CP, RT and PP. We hope to, through the analyses, explain the mechanism of humor creation; study the feasibility of applying pragmatic theories to humor analysis and provide readers some help to better understand and employ humor. In the present study, data are collected from online video and edited into scripts. Qualitative and quantitative methods are used to study the collected verbal humor. Through the analyses, we find that pragmatic theories have very strong interpretative power over verbal humor; pragmatic rules are useful tools for people to employ to appreciate humor and become better users of humor.