An Analysis Of Verbal Humor In Two And A Half Men From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As a special form of verbal communication, humor has gained a lot of attention in academic world. Scholars at home and abroad have studied humor from different angles over the years such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, linguistics and other disciplines. They have achieved plenteous research fruits. The mechanism of humor’s generation and comprehension is their main object of study. But most of the previous studies of humor tend to focus on the study from the perspective of more than one theory in which the appropriate and inappropriate corpses are intermingled in these studies. So the findings of these studies are not convincing and profound enough.In 1986, Sperber and Wilson proposed Relevance Theory as a new theory from the angle of cognitive pragmatics, which has drawn widespread concerns abroad and at home. The previous studies on verbal humor with Relevance Theory mainly centered on the factors of humor production and the interpretative process of humor. Since these studies are limited in some aspects and thus are lack of comprehensive and systematic explanation for the production and comprehension of verbal humor. This thesis applies Relevance Theory to do an intensive study on the production of verbal humor effect and interpreting the strategies of verbal humor. In order to make this thesis more profound and concrete, the author chooses random samples from a very popular long-lived American sitcom Two and a Half Men, to expound the humorous effect production and strategies. The American situation comedy Two and a Half Men is a long-running popular show which is well-reputed among audience and attracts the attention around the world since it was aired in 2003. So far it has been updated to the 12 th season and it contains plenty of interesting humorous dialogues and these examples provide analytic material for the pragmatic analysis.The whole thesis consists of three parts: introduction, main body, and conclusion..Part One is the introduction. Firstly, the author makes a general overview of the background of this study which is comprised of the introduction to verbal humor, situation comedy and Relevance Theory. Secondly, the author elaborates the previous study about humor and Relevance Theory at home and abroad. At last, after expounding the research significance of this thesis, the author makes a brief introduction to the American situation comedy Two and a Half Men.The second part is the main body, which is made up of three chapters:.Chapter One is the literature review. In this chapter, the author first expounds the framework of Relevance Theory which includes the ostensive-inferential process, relevance and relevance degree, plus maximal relevance and optimal relevance. Secondly, contextual effect plays an indispensable role in communication. It determines whether this communicative activity can proceed smoothly or not. Therefore in this chapter, the author elaborates the contents of relevance theoretical context. Finally the author makes a brief introduction to verbal humor which contains the definition, classification and theories about English verbal humor. Furthermore, an introduction to situation comedy is followed.Chapter Two is the specific analysis of humor mechanism. In this chapter, the author randomly selects data from the sitcom Two and a Half Men to deeply interpret how the humorous effect is conducted from the perspective of Relevance Theory. Relevance Theory pays equal attention to both implicit and explicit communication and aims to explain how addresser gives his/her communicative intentions and how addressee interprets the intended meanings. This chapter generates from three perspectives. Firstly, in verbal communication, it contains two layers of information. One of them is informative intention and the other is communicative intention. It will cause communication stumble if the communicators don’t share the same understanding of these two intentions. Humorous effect can be generated by the differences between informative intention and communicative intention during the verbal communication. The second perspective is from the differences between maximal relevance and optimal relevance in the verbal communication. One of the important principles about Relevance Theory is the maximal relevance versus optimal relevance. Maximal relevance means that the recipient gains the greatest contextual information though the smallest effort of inference. While the optimal relevance means the addressee gains sufficient contextual information without unnecessary effort. However these two levels of relevance can often be misunderstood in a verbal communication. When hearers choose the inadequate assumptions about the relevance, it will produce a humorous effect. Thirdly, cognitive context plays a real important role in verbal communication. When the participants of the verbal communication don’t share the same cognitive background such as different encyclopedic information, different logical information or different lexical information, humorous effect will be generated.Chapter Three uses adequate examples to expound three humor strategies which include generation of ambiguity, misleading of logic environment, and exploitation of cognitive context. Generation of ambiguity can be presented from two aspects: one is ambiguity in word choice; the other is ambiguity in reference. The second strategy, misleading of logic environment, can also be divided into two methods. The first is the deviation of logic which means to break the convention or common practices. The second is the alteration of contextual assumption, which means the newly presented information is paradoxical or not consistent with those assumptions which have appeared in context. The last strategy is the exploitation of cognitive context from the hearer’s perspective. The hearer gets the optimal relevance by searching for the related assumptions from cognitive context. Hence the first sub-strategy is the optimal construction of cognitive context. The other sub-strategy is the cognitive inference for implicature. When comprehending a verbal humor, hearers need to strengthen their cognitive competence or inferential ability to infer the real communicative intention of utterances. This explains why the same humorous utterance evokes different degrees of joy among different people.The last part is conclusion, which is a summary of the new findings and the significance of this thesis. The study in this thesis gives a new understanding of Relevance Theory and the mechanism of verbal humor’s generation and comprehension. In addition, it makes a contribution to promote daily communication and English learning. Finally, the author points out the limitations of the study and proper suggestions for the future study.