A Pragmatic Analysis Of Verbal Humor In American Sitcom Good Luck, Charlie!

Humor, as an essential part of human life, has been studied by scholars from many different angles, such as aesthetics, psychology, philology and sociology. Verbal humor, as an important fraction of humor, is very common in everyday communication. With the development of pragmatics, more and more scholars began to study humor from the pragmatic perspective. Many linguistic theories are used in the studying of humor such as Cooperative Principle, Relevance Theory, Speech Act Theory and so on.Sitcom is short for situation comedy, which originated in America. It attracts many people because of its amusing, laughable and humorous language style. Sitcom abounds in humorous utterances, which provide affluent and rich material for the pragmatic study of verbal humor.Bergson(1917) divided humor into two categories, namely situational humor and verbal humor. And this thesis takes this categorization of humor as a basis to study humor from the pragmatics perspective. Based on Cooperative Principle (CP), Politeness Principle (PP) and Relevance Theory (RT), the thesis attempts to explore the mechanism of generating verbal humor of the sitcom by analyzing a large number of humorous utterances in the sitcom Good Luck, Charlie!, and hopes to help the readers have a better understanding and appreciation of those verbal humors.20episodes of Good Luck, Charlie! are chosen as the analysis material which are all downloaded from www.shooter.cn. Both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis are used in the research. Qualitative analysis is used to analyze the generation mechanism of verbal humor in Good Luck, Charlie!, while quantitative analysis is employed to count the exact number and the distribution of the violation of each maxim in Cooperative Principle(CP) and Politeness Principle(PP). The research confirms the strong interpretative power of those three linguistic theories on verbal humor, by illustrating that humor could be generated through the violation of the maxim of CP, PP and the production of contradiction between maximal relevance and optimal relevance. This research contributes to the exploration of the generation mechanism of verbal humor, which can help us have a better understanding and appreciation of verbal humor, and will provide some useful suggestions in the composition of verbal humor.