Analyzing Verbal Humor In The Big Bang Theory From The Perspective Of Conversational Implicature

As a ubiquitous phenomenon, humor has been drawing attention from scholars and researchers of various fields. However, a special research of verbal humor, an important form of humor which mainly exists in conversations, is comparatively rarely conducted. Therefore, this research will fill this gap and focus on analyzing verbal humor from the perspective of conversational implicating to prove the intimate relationship between verbal humor and conversational implicature.To conduct this research, the author adopts The Big Bang Theory, which is a very popular American situation comedy around the world at present, as the data in this thesis, for it is full of humorous conversations. And to achieve maximal reliability and minimal subjectivity, both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis are adopted to analyze the selected data. The former method is used to calculate the total number of humorous conversations and the number and ratio of humorous conversations generated respectively by flouting each maxim of cooperative principle, the core principle of Gricean Conversational Implicature Theory; while the latter, which is the major analysis method employed in this thesis, is used to identify and analyze the humorous conversations selected on the basis of background audience’s laughter under the framework of Gricean Conversational Implicature Theory.In this thesis, it finds out that, on the basis of previous humor theories and studies, with the detailed and original analysis of data from The Big Bang Theory, the generation and interpretation of verbal humor is, to some extent, in accordance with the generation and interpretation of conversational implicature. To be specific, the generation and interpretation of many humorous conversations lies in the violation of each maxim or sub-maxim of cooperative principle. What’s more, it also finds out that the maxim of quality is more frequently flouted along with the use of rhetoric devices than other maxims’flouting situations.An analysis of verbal humor generation and interpretation with the very theoretical framework of Gricean Conversational Implicating Theory could have a profound and lasting effect, be it theoretical or applicable, Generally speaking, this research, with rather updated data and focus on one kind of humor-verbal humor, will enrich the theories of humor generation mechanism. Besides, this research might help the literary and artistic workers create more popular art forms and enrich people’s spiritual world. Furthermore, it could help the ordinary readers know better about verbal humor generation, improve their appreciation ability of verbal humor, and even make witty talkers out ol them.