An Analysis Of Verbal Humor Inamerican Sitcom The Big Bang Theory From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

Humor, as a common phenomenon in daily life, is performed beyond cultures, races,genders and social classes. Humor, plays an important role in intercultural communications.Many scholars have shown a deep interest in humor research since ancient times. They carryon researches on humor from various perspectives, such as rhetorics, psychology,philosophy, sociology, etc. With the development of pragmatics, more and more scholarsstudy humor from the perspective of pragmatics.Humor can be classified according to different standards. Bergson divides humor intosituational humor and verbal humor. Situational humor is generated by the formation ofsituational context. Situation humor does not need to be described in words, while verbalhumor is mainly produced by the formation of language. The American sitcom The BigBang Theory is popular all over the world. The language in the sitcom is vivid andhumorous, which can be taken as the research data for the study. The study adopts aqualitative methodology. The corpus for this study consists of21episodes of The Big BangTheory selected randomly from all the original scripts of The Big Bang Theory that weredownloaded from the Internet.The study makes a pragmatic analysis of the verbal humor in the sitcom The Big BangTheory by some major theories in Pragmatics. Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principleand Speech Act Theory are major theories in pragmatics. The study testifies the feasibilityof analyzing the verbal humor in sitcoms from the perspective of pragmatics and exploresthe generation mechanism of verbal humor under the pragmatic theoretical framework. Onthe basis of the pragmatic analysis, it is found that humor is generated by deliberately orunintentionally violating CP, PP and illocutionary act. Furthermore, the study is helpful forthe viewers to get a deep understanding of the verbal humor in the sitcom The Big BangTheory. It also does good to the second language learners for having an easier learningenviroment and arousing their learning interest.