A Pragmatic Study Of Verbal Humor In Friends

Humor is a pervasive phenomenon which plays a vital role in people’s life. It sparks people’s wisdom and shows a positive attitude towards life; it can offer pleasure, resolve the confrontation between people and make the society more harmonious. Humor has been paid special attention to by many researchers from different fields, but the generally-accepted definition of humor is not given. The current study attempts to study the process of the production of humor by applying the cooperative principle and the relevance theory to the analysis of the humorous utterances in the American situation comedy Friends.The Cooperative Principle put forward by Grice is one of the important parts of pragmatics. Before that humor is seldom investigated from the pragmatic point of view. Grice’s Cooperative principle and its four maxims are effective in the explanation of the verbal humor. The analysis of the humor examples in Friends using the cooperative principle shows that the humorous effect is achieved when the speaker violates the cooperative principle and its maxims intentionally or unintentionally. The Relevance Theory provides is a general theory used for the human cognition and communication, which offers a new perspective of the analysis of utterances. The Relevance Theory proposes that the process of interpreting humor is a process of searching for relevance. For the hearer, it is a dynamic process of searching relevance in the seemingly unrelated utterances. The principle of relevance is the only criterion which guides the humor interpretation. According to the Relevance Theory, humor arises from the disparity between the optimal relevance and the maximal relevance. The Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory are both powerful in explaining the cognitive process of the humor interpretation from the pragmatic perspective. The analyses of the humorous utterances found in Friends have proven the explanatory power of these two theories in understanding the verbal humor. However, these two theories have many differences regarding the theoretical sources, inferential process, and how to define "meaning" and "context". In the interpretation of humorous utterances, they also hold some different ideas. The main differences of these two theories are the generating mechanisms of humor and the interpretation of the rhetorical figure. The Cooperative Principle proposes that irony and metaphor are generated when the speaker violates the four maxims, especially the maxim of quality. However, according to the Relevance Theory, metaphor is viewed as a loose talk of the literal meaning. Irony is regarded as an echoic usage of people’s previous experience. The hearers try to find relevance from what seems unrelated.To conclude, the analysis of the humorous utterances from the pragmatic perspective is effective in the explanation of humor. The combination of these two theories provides a better framework for the interpretation of the cognitive process of humor. Compared with the plain language, the humorous language is harder to understand. This study can assist the English learner to better understand and appreciate the humor in the American situation comedy and in the daily communication and it makes some contribution to the study of humor while facilitating the humor communication.