A Pragmatic Analysis Of Verbal Humor In Friends

Where there are humans, there are humors. Humor is a particular characteristicof human beings, which exists in nearly every culture, every country and every race inthe world. As a matter of fact, more and more people have realized the power ofhumor and tried to be humorous. Humor is an ever-lasting topic for human beings.Researchers have studied humor from different disciplines: philosophy, psychology,linguistics, ethnology, aesthetics, sociology, pragmatics and so on. Recently, humorhas been concerned by more and more linguistics as humor is mostly produced bylanguage. Thus, owning the ability to respond to language is an important factor tounderstand and appreciate humor. However, comparing to understand the commonEnglish language, comprehending English humorous utterances is much moredifficult. One good way to solve the problem is to analyze humor from the pragmaticperspective. Therefore, this thesis tries to adopt American sitcom Friends as the data,starting from a perspective of pragmatics, to analyze the underlying mechanism ofhumor under the theoretical framework of Cooperative Principle, aiming to intrigueEnglish learners’ interest in English humorous utterances and to enhance theirunderstanding to English humor, and then to improve their English application ability.Since H P. Grice delivered his famous lecture of Cooperative Principle in1967,Cooperative Principle has been believed to be a strong explanatory tool for explainingthe comprehension of all kinds of verbal communication, including verbal humor. Inlight of Cooperative Principle, the thesis takes a qualitative approach to the analysis ofthe verbal humor in the American sitcom Friends. All the25examples in this paperare chosen from the copied transcripts in the video version of the sitcom downloadingfrom the website http://tv.sohu.com/s2012/friends/. Within the framework ofCooperative Principle, the realization of a piece of humor is closely related to twoelements：conversational implicature and flouting one maxim of Cooperative Principle.The American linguist Grice pointed out from the angle of pragmatics that people all follow one principle that is Cooperative Principle in language communication.However, linguists also notice that language users do not always observe the principlewhile they communicate and in this case the violation of the four maxims often leadsto meaning, known as conversational implicature. People frequently break some ofthe principles on purpose to produce certain conversational implicature in certaincontext. Under the framework of Cooperative Principle, the thesis is going to answerthe following questions: How does the verbal humor create under CooperativePrinciple? How do language users flout the four maxims to generate verbal humor?The paper is intended to illustrate the creating mechanisms of the verbal humor inFriends from the perspective of Cooperative Principle proposed by Grice. And we canconclude from this thesis that violating the Cooperative Principle and its maxims is animportant mechanism of English humor in Friends.The thesis also concludes application of studying verbal humor in Friends.Friends can be applied to English viewing, listening and speaking class in Englishteaching. It can improve the students’ skills of listening and speaking. It has alsoproved that using sitcom in English class helps the students to appreciate the humor ofthe sitcom and know better about different culture. And English viewing, listening andspeaking class makes demands on English teachers. As an English teacher, he isrequired to employ humor properly to enliven the classroom atmosphere and achievefruitful teaching. The thesis has arrived at the conclusion that Cooperative Principle iseffective in the analysis of verbal humor in sitcoms.The thesis is of great significance both in theoretical and practical aspects, but itstill has limitations. It is recommended that humor in real life, non-verbal humor insitcom and cultural difference in sitcom should be researched in the future.