A Pragmatic Study On Verbal Humor Of Zhao Benshan’s TV Sketches

Conversation is the most common form to communicate among people in daily life. It seems that conversation in daily life is scattered and random, but in fact both sides in conversation usually abide by a set of invisible and effective rules to constrain what they have said. These rules guarantee that the conversation goes smoothly and achieve the goal of communication. Cooperative principle and politeness principle, as the two important theories within pragmatics, have been extensively applied to interpret the conversation.Among all kinds of TV sketches in China’s comedy circle, Zhao Benshan’s TV sketches can be said to be one of the most popular and influent TV sketches. Zhao Benshan’s TV sketches are characteristic of humorous and witty language and strong agrestic breath. They have very high artistic value of appreciation and have been liked by numerous audiences by their unique artistic styles. At present, many scholars have been studying Zhao Benshan’s TV sketches from several fields, such as aesthetics, psychology, semantics and so on, which have made great achievements. This thesis makes an attempt to use cooperative principle and politeness principle to analyze Zhao Benshan’s TV sketches and discuss what language strategies have been used in these classic TV sketches.This thesis firstly introduces some basic concepts, such as the definition and classification of humor, and gives an overview of Zhao Benshan’s TV sketches. Then in the theoretical framework of pragmatics, this thesis, based on the two classic theories---cooperative principle and politeness principle elucidates the maxims of the two principles. It takes Zhao Benshan’s classic TV sketches which are performed in CCTV Spring Festival Gala in recent years as corpus. By analyzing large quantities of Zhao Benshan’s TV sketches, some important conclusions can be drawn in the study. To violate cooperative principle and politeness principle will not influence successful conversations; on the contrary it will make the conversation more vivid, funny and profound. Compared with politeness principle, it is more common to violate cooperative principle. Among the violation of the maxims of cooperative principle, it is the most frequent to violate the maxim of quantity, next is the violation of the maxims of manner and quality, and it is the least frequent to violate the maxim of relation. Finally, this thesis summaries some major findings of the study and it points out the limitation which still needs large room to improve.