A Comparative Study Of Verbal Humor In American Sitcom From The Perspectives Of The CooperativePrinciple And Relevance Theory

Situation comedy has become one of the most popular artistic programs, which ismainly due to the fact that it embodies a considerable number of humorous pointsmaking the viewers laugh continually. With humor being regarded as the crystallizationof human wisdom, sitcom is like a muster reflecting on the wisdom. Humor in sitcom isdifferent from ludicrousness. The latter is displayed only for laughter, while the formerwith its delight and interior meaning remains with the receivers long afterwards. Besides,sitcom owns its special features which distinguish it from joke books: characters ofdistinct personality, the plot of coherent fragments and the setting already preset. Inconcordance with the development of the plot in sitcom, humorous utterance or to sayverbal humor between characters is the core artistic means of sitcom.Consequently the unique charm of sitcom earns it both the audience’s favor and theattention from scholars. Researches conducted by them are mostly in the fields ofdiscourse analysis, foreign language teaching and cross-cultural study and have achievedimportant results. However, they neglect such a fact that sitcom arouses laughter bymeans of humor, which means that studies on humor in sitcom is not plenty enough.Besides, seen from the present situation of researches on humor, scholars, both ancientand modern, Chinese and foreign, have carried out detailed studies on verbal humor fromdifferent perspectives. However, nearly all the studies have been conducted from onestandpoint. Comparison of the interpretations in light of these theories and analysis ofconfinements of each theory are relatively less. Particularly in pragmatic studies, it iscommon to apply one theory or more separately to verbal humor. Comparative studies oftwo theories, the Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory, applied to verbal humor insitcoms are relatively rare.In response to the current situation of researches, this thesis, under the guidance ofthe Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory, makes an attempt to discover anoptimal method to interpret verbal humor in sitcom by analyzing materials of verbalhumor selected from contemporary American sitcoms.This thesis is composed of three parts: Introduction, the Body, and Conclusion.Introduction serves as a general survey of the previous studies on verbal humor topoint out the blank in the past study so as to illustrate the theoretical value and practical significance of this thesis which makes a comparison of interpretations of humor fromthe CP and RT.The body of this thesis is divided into three chapters.Chapter Ⅰis literature review. It firstly defines the term sitcom in order to exploreits features. Secondly, definitions of humor the former studies give from different anglesare reviewed in order to probe into the nature of humor. And then the traditionalclassification of humor is presented, followed by the subdivision of verbal humor insitcom. Lastly, two theoretical frameworks this thesis employs, namely the CooperativePrinciple and Relevance Theory, are to be introduced briefly with the four maxims of theCP presented at length and the basic points of RT introduced, for example,ostensive-inferential model, cognitive environment, and the definition of Relevance aswell as the Principle of Relevance.Chapter Ⅱ and Chapter Ⅲconstitute the main body of this thesis.Chapter Ⅱis devoted to the detailed analysis of verbal humor in sitcom under theguidance of the CP and RT in order to explore the inner generating mechanism of verbalhumor. The first part is designed to be based on the CP and its four maxims to examinehow verbal humor violates the maxims so as to find out the reason of laughter it arouses.And the following section is from the relevance-theoretical point of view to analyzehumorous utterance and proceeds into examining the relevant degree between the optimalrelevance inferred by the hearer and the maximal relevance carried in the utterance. Thecontext, according to which the speaker makes his utterance, may be not ostensiveenough to the hearer, or the hearer may have limited cognitive ability. Such factorsalways lead to mismatch between the maximal relevance and the optimal relevance. Thehearer expects the speaker to provide utterances of the most relevance, whereas in factthe speaker only supplies utterances of the optimal relevance, which causes one sameutterance connote different assumptions. It is the sharp contrast between these twoassumptions in the degree of relevance that gives rise to humorous effect.Chapter Ⅲ is to compare the interpretations of verbal humorgiven by the twotheories in order to delve into the validity of each theory so that an optimal method tointerpret verbal humor can be explored. Firstly, it discloses the differences in generatingmechanisms of verbal humor given by the two theories. According to Grice’s Cooperative Principle, humor is the result of the violation of the maxims. However,Relevance Theory takes humor as arising from the gab between the maximal relevanceand the optimal relevance. Secondly, according to the subdivision of humor in sitcom inChapter Ⅰ of this thesis, that is, based on linguistic deviation, interpretations of verbalhumor through the CP and RT are put into comparison. And then this chapter furtherexpounds the validity of each theory when applied to verbal humor realized by means offigures of speech. At last, the limitation of each theory in its application verbal humor isrevealed separately.Conclusion summarizes what have been discussed above. In this thesis, thecomparative analysis of verbal humor in sitcom further proves that neither of these twotheories is perfect although they are both considered the most influential in interpretingverbal communication. Humor in sitcom is created in concordance with personalities ofthe characters and the development of the plot, and therefore, to understand verbal humorin sitcom can not be separated from the cognition of characters and the setting. That is tosay, the CP alone cannot get the optimal result in interpreting verbal humor in sitcom, forthe CP is not at the basis of cognition, whereas RT can. Considering the limitation of RT,this thesis promotes a better approach to appreciation of verbal humor in sitcom: tocombine the Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory.