A Pragmatic Analysis Of English Verbal Humor In How I Met Your Mother

Humor plays an important role in people’s daily life. It is the diamond of human wisdom, which can not only release mental pressure, avoid embarrassment but also can facilitate the interpersonal relationship. The study of humor dated back to ancient Greek, more than2000years ago. People studied humor by the light of many different disciplines, such as aesthetics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, ethnology, linguistics and so on. From linguistics, especially pragmatics, humor study is a relatively new topic. As the pragmatics develops, people tentatively explore humor from the aspects of some pragmatic theories, namely, the Cooperative Principle (CP), the Politeness Principle (PP), the Speech Act Theory (SAT), the Adaption Theory, the Memetics and so on.The humorous effects may be originated from the obedience or violation of the maxims of Cooperative Principle (CP) or the Politeness Principle (PP), or from misunderstanding the speaker’s intention, etc.Situation comedy originated from America, it attracts many people because of its laughable, amusing and humorous language style. Situation comedy is one of the successful carriers of verbal humor, which abounds in rich humorous language. Therefore, Situation comedy provides a wealth of material for the study of verbal humor from the pragmatics angles.Bergson (1917) divided humor into two categories, situational humor and the verbal humor. This thesis takes his division of humor as the basis to study humor from the perspective of pragmatics. This thesis tentatively employs Cooperative Principle (CP), the Relevance Theory (RT) and the Politeness Principle (PP) as its theoretical framework to explore the generation mechanism of verbal humor from these three theories by analyzing a large number of humorous languages in the situation comedy How I Met Your Mother. Because the seventh season is still updating, the research randomly chooses20episodes from the sixth season of How I Met Your Mother in order to get the newest and complete analysis material. This research uses quantitative as well as qualitative analysis methods. The qualitative analysis is used to analyze the generation mechanism of verbal humor in How I Met Your Mother, while the quantitative analysis is used to count the exact number and the percentage of violation of each maxim in Cooperative Principle (CP), and the Politeness Principle (PP).This research proves the feasibility of pragmatic analysis of literary works and shows there is a close relationship between linguistics and film and television literature. The verbal humor may be generated by deliberate violation of the maxim of CP, PP and the production of contradiction between maximal relevance and optimal relevance. This research is also used to examine the explanatory power of Cooperative Principle (CP), the Relevance Theory and the Politeness Principle (PP) on humor and to enrich the current linguistic study of humor from a relatively new angle. This research contributes a lot to the generation mechanism of verbal humor, which can help us to understand and appreciate verbal humor better, and provides some useful enlightenment for the composition of the verbal humor.