On Verbal Humor Of Zhao Benshan’s Short Skits From The Perspectives Of Cooperative Principle And Relevance Theory

Humor is the lubricant of life. It can help people to release stress and enjoy life. As oneelement of humor, verbal humor plays a very important role in daily lives. For a long time,scholars have been trying to analyze humor through various aspects such as sociology,psychology, and rhetoric, attempting to expound the causes and effects of humor. Thecognitive interpretation of humor is one of the most intensely researched fields of languagestudy.As a form of language art, short skits are quite popular among Chinese people. ZhaoBenshan is one of the most famous performing artists. Verbal humor is the soul of ZhaoBenshan s short skits, while sometimes some viewers fail to understand some of the humorphenomenon effectively. Therefore, this paper intends to conduct a theoretical analysis ofverbal humor in Zhao Benshan s short skits from the perspectives of Cooperative Principleand Relevance Theory.Cooperative Principles takes the humorous effects from the deliberate violations of itsfour maxims and Relevance Theory perceives the humor as the discretion between maximalrelevance and optimal relevance. Through comparative analysis on verbal humor in ZhaoBenshan s short skits from the aspects of rhetoric devices, semantics, lexicology andphonology, the author finds that both of them have strong explanatory power for verbal humor.But they also have limitations. For humor caused by different cognitive context andostension-inferential model, Cooperative Principle loses its power but Relevance Theory stillworks. But Relevance Theory cannot interpret the humor caused by the irrelevance of theutterances of the speaker and hearer and Cooperative Principle can make up that defect.Taking the deficiency of both theories into account, the conclusion of this thesis can bereached that the best strategy to appreciate verbal humor in Zhao Benshan s short skits is thecombination of Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory. The author hopes people canhave a better understanding about verbal humor with the help of this strategy.