An Analysis Of Verbal Humor In How I Met Your Mother From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

Humor is the wisdom of life. With the help of context, humor can achieve itseffect by using rhetorical approaches such as metaphors, puns, exaggerations, andironies. It can help people to lighten the pressure of life. As human’s uniquecommunicational capability and tool, the creation and expression of humor need thehelp of language. Thus, in some extent, humor is the unique capability andcommunication of human.Humor has been widely discussed since ancient times. As an interdisciplinaryresearch subject, humor phenomenon is focused in many fields, such as psychology,anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and literature. Recently, with the develop oflinguistics, humor phenomenon has been focusing, people begin to do further studiesand pay more attention to this language phenomenon which is common but at thesame time special. As for the classification of humor, on account of the variousclassifying purposes of humor, there is no unified standard yet. This paper will baseon Henri Bergson’s classification of humor, that is, verbal humor and non-verbalhumor, analyze the verbal humor in the American sitcom How I Met Your Motherfrom the pragmatic view.As one major carriers of verbal humor, sitcoms are very popular among thepublic. It reappears the humorous side of daily life in the exaggerated and interestingway. In usual case, it uses a family or a group of friends as an unit of background.Owing to the fact that sitcoms are close to the reality in life, the language in the playis simple and humorous, well-welcomed by the public, they can be used as thecorpus for analyzing the verbal humor and provide rich materials for the research. In this season, the verbal humor is typical and the generation of the humor phenomenonvaries from one to another, which is good for data collecting and analysis.This paper uses Cooperative Principle (CP for short) and Relevance Theory(RT for short)as the theoretical frame, by analyzing the verbal humor examples inHow I Met Your Mother, the humor mechanism will be further discussed. Forinsuring the veracity and unity of data, all the examples are from the third season.This paper uses the approach of combining of qualitative and quantitative research,and the qualitative approach is mainly used in analyzing the humor mechanism,while the quantitative approach is used in calculating the frequency of the verbalhumor that violate the maxims of CP and RT. By doing this, it can further explain theeffect that CP and RT bring to humor mechanism. By analyzing the verbal humoreffect, this paper indicates that in some cases, the creation of humor can not be fullyexplained by a single pragmatic theory. Some humor phenomenon needs to beinterpreted with two or more theories, while some can only be explained by onesingle theory. Thus, this study suggests that verbal humor can be listed separately asa principle of pragmatics, this will be beneficial for explaining the verbalphenomenon in daily life. Meanwhile, by doing this, more language learners canfully understand the verbal phenomenon in the process of learning this language, italso provides theoretical foundation for the language learners when they are trying toexplain the verbal humor phenomenon in the pragmatic perspective, and theircommunication skills can be enormously improved. At the same time, this study alsofurther test and verify the relation between pragmatics and film and televisionliterature and popular culture, and this enrich the practical application value ofpragmatics from another angle. This study can do help for further understanding themechanism of verbal humor, and this has a profound significance for us to createliterature and film and television products.