A Pragmatic Analysis Of The Verbal Humor In Desperate Housewives

Humor is ubiquitous, penetrating into every aspect of our lives, such as verbalcommunication, medical science, literary works, education, advertisement, TVprograms, even arts. Although scholars have showed interests in the study on humorfor centuries, and now there exists hundreds of theories of humor from differentperspectives, such as sociology, psychology, physiology and linguistics, onlysuperiority theory, incongruity theory and release theory stand out and becomeacceptable to the majority of scholars among so many theories. Based on the previousstudies on humor, the exclusive study of language itself can not adequately explainhow humor is produced and appreciated. Therefore, it is necessary to involve contextin humor study and carry out humor research from the perspective of pragmatics.The thesis focuses on the pragmatic analysis of verbal humor in DesperateHousewives. Precisely speaking, the thesis discusses the generation of verbal humorfrom the angle of Grice’s Cooperative Principle, Sperber and Wilson’s RelevanceTheory and Austin’s Speech Act Theory, of which CP is given priority to. Twenty-oneinteresting conversations drawn from Desperate Housewives are served as thematerials for study. These identified humorous utterances are then analyzed andgrouped according to the pragmatic approach.From the pragmatic analysis of the verbal humor in Desperate Housewives, it iseasy to figure out that humor can be elicited by the violation of four maxims ofCooperative Principle, inconsistence between speaker’s optimal relevance andhearer’s maximal relevance and the incongruity between illocutionary act andperlocutionary act. Based on the internal relationship between these theories, thethesis gives the suggestion that the humorous effect will be increased with thecombination of these theories. Also through the analysis of Desperate Housewiveswhich is like a reproduction of reality, we can have a good knowledge of functionsthat humor serves in society. In the meanwhile, with the rapid development ofAmerican TV plays in China and the further communication between China and America, there is a great demand for more researches on verbal humor as a distinctivefeature of American TV plays. Therefore, the study on verbal humor can increase ourconnoisseurship and the effectiveness of cross-cultural communication.