Incongruity And Resolution Of Verbal Humor

Humor is a unique communicative activity and mean of communication to human, which frequently appears in literature, film, television, advertising and daily communication as a linguistic phenomenon, reflecting the speaker’s wisdom and attitudes to life and bringing us great pleasure. As an artistic form to express humorous sense in language, situation comedy (abbreviated as sitcom hereafter) has been gradually won popularity among domestic audience.The humorous utterance is a main reason for sitcom to attract the audience, and whether the audience can appreciate the sitcom depending largely on the understanding of the humorous utterance. With the gradually popular of American sitcom in China, it has aroused the interests of researchers who are engaged in linguistic studies.The author chooses the latest language material—The Big Bang Theory as the object of study, and collects humorous utterances in this sitcon as research data.By adopting one of the most influential humor theories, the Incongruity-Resolution theory, supporting by Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Leech and Levinson’s Politeness Principle, the author processes a descriptive analysis of the data to interpret the producing and generating of humor. This thesis interprets the verbal humor in The Big Bang Theory from the perspective of violating the CP and PP maxims on the one hand, and tests the interpretation power of "Incongruity-Resolution" mechanism in the generation and perception of it on the other hand.Through analysis, this thesis gets the following conclusions:First, Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle provide an appropriate explanation on the implicature of humorous utterance. The flouting of the four maxims of CP and six maxims of PP can be used to interpret the humorous utterance respectively. However, it should be pointed out that not all the violation of the CP and PP maxims can generate humorous effect. Thus, it is supposed that there is a humor mechanism for the generation and perception of humor. Second, with the abundant data analysis, it is not difficult to figure out that we laugh because the humorous utterance always provides us with some information out of expectation. The incongruity resolution here plays an important role. The humor mechanism of Setup-Incongruity-Resolution model is tested with the data. It shows that this humor mechanism is applicable in explaining the verbal humor in The Big Bang Theory. In addition, since humorous utterance is the most significant component of modern American sitcom and humor exist not only in The Big Bang Theory but also in the rest of American sitcoms, the SIR humor mechanism has a certain degree of explanatory power for the humor in other American sitcoms, too.