A Pragmatic Study Of Jacky Wu’s Verbal Humor

The way TV hosts speak has a great influence on the speech habits of young people and the evolution of language. Therefore it is of vital importance to explore the freshest language of TV hosts. Jacky Wu is the first Taiwanese TV host to appear on the cover of Time magazine. According to AGB Nielson’s investigation, many of Jacky Wu’s variety shows rank No.1in the audience ratings. As Time puts it, he’s the most popular entertainer in Taiwan. And as everyone knows, Jacky Wu’s success, his popularity and his charm are all due to his unique and brilliant verbal humor. Humor is the essential part of almost every culture and language. It prevails in various fields of people’s daily life. The research of humor has long been a hot topic for scholars of various disciplines such as philosophy, psychology and linguistics.The present study ventures on the analysis of Jacky Wu’s verbal humor from the perspective of pragmatics, with the cooperative principle and the politeness principle being the theoretical framework. The research questions which have been addressed include1) How is humor realized under the framework of cooperative principle and politeness principle in Jacky Wu’s stage language?2) What are the distributional patterns of the flouting of different maxims of cooperative principle and politeness principle that produce verbal humor in Jacky Wu’s stage language?3) Is the most frequently flouted maxim as is reflected in the answers to the second research question more effective in realizing verbal humor than the other maxims?Totally420humorous samples are collected from seven of Jacky Wu’s representative TV shows, which ensures the range and quality of the data. All of these collected samples are classified according to the definitions given by Grice and Leech, and the list of tables show the distributional patterns of the flouting of different maxims of cooperative principle and politeness principle that produce verbal humor in Jacky Wu’s stage language. Some of the samples are analyzed in detail to explore how humor is realized by the flouting of different maxims of cooperative principle and politeness principle.Results show that the approbation maxim is the most frequently flouted among all the maxims of cooperative principle and politeness principle. The maxim of quality is the most frequently flouted among the maxims of cooperative principle. A questionnaire is used and the flouting of the maxim of quality and the flouting of the approbation maxim are testified for their effectiveness. Analysis done with SPSS reveals that they are more effective in realizing verbal humor in Jacky Wu’s stage language.This study of Jacky Wu’s verbal humor from the perspective of pragmatics analyzes Jacky Wu’s verbal humor in detail. And more importantly it makes contribution to the study of humor under the framework of cooperative principle and politeness principle. The detailed explanations of the samples also offer classic ways of humor producing for every ordinary person.