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

Humor is a pervasive phenomenon and humor research has a long history, dating back toPlato and Aristotle. Through out history, humor has been studied in different fields:philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and so on and so forth.Traditionally, there are three classic theories of humor: incongruity theories, hostility theoriesand release theories.In1985, Victor Raskin proposed the Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH). Since itsearliest presentation, SSTH has attracted steady interest from the academic world and itsstrong explanatory power in humor analysis cannot be denied. But as with any theory, SSTHalso has its own limitations. For one thing, of the two evoked scripts, only when the firstscript can not work properly will the reader/hearer activate the second script. SSTH does notoffer any explanation as to why this is the case, and why the second script will not beactivated in the first place. For another, SSTH differentiates humor from non-humor, but isunable to account for quality differences in humor. These limitations, however, can beovercome using Relevance Theory (RT), presented by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. RTprovides a general guiding principle for human cognition. This thesis then suggests that verbalhumors can be better analyzed from a new perspective: combining SSTH and RT.From this new perspective, this thesis analyzes30randomly picked samples from thefourth season of the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory in order to find the major humorstrategies employed in this sitcom and the cognitive processes involved in humor generationand interpretation.One of the major findings of the thesis is that the playwrights of The Big Bang Theorytake advantage of linguistic factors as well as pragmatic knowledge to achieve humorouseffects. Linguistic humor can be further subcategorized into: phonetic humor, lexical humorand syntactic humor. Pragmatic humor can be subcategorized into: logic-violation humor,politeness-violation humor and intention-violation humor. Altogether six humor strategies areput into use in this sitcom.Based on the analysis, the cognitive processes involved in humor generation andinterpretation are summed up as follows:Step One: The speaker utters the first part of the humor, which has severalpotential interpretations. According to RT, the hearer naturally picksthe maximally relevant interpretation and the first script is thusactivated. Step Two: When the second part of the humor is revealed, the hearer realizes thefirst interpretation is not compatible with this part. He is forced toabandon this interpretation and start relevance seeking again.Step Three: Finally, one optimally relevant interpretation which is compatible withboth the first and the second part of the humor stands out. The secondscript is therefore activated.Step Four: The oppositeness between the two scripts as well as the gap betweenmaximal relevance and optimal relevance results in laughter. A humoris successfully generated (from the speaker’s side) or interpreted (fromthe hearer’s side).