A Comparative Analysis Of Verbal Humor In The Big Bang Theory-From Perspectives Of Cooperative Principle And Speech Act Theory

Humor has been an important part in our daily life. It contributes to create a harmonious atmosphere in communication, to reduce the stress in work and life, and it also brings laughter and happiness to human beings. As time passed, the scholars researched on humor unremittingly. However, as the most common way to convey humor, verbal humor and related study only thrived in recent decades. With a large amount of foreign situation comedy imported into China, these outstanding works enrich our spiritual world, also, lots of corpus for verbal humor study has been provided. “The Big Bang Theory” is a popular worldwide spread American sitcom, it is famous for the humorous lines and conversations, which contain many comprehensive factors including science, culture, and social background. The paper tries to expose the mechanism and the specific process of the generation of verbal humor’s by analyzing the humorous conversations in The Big Bang Theory.Based on the humor research at home and abroad, the paper puts forward an hypothesis:the process of how humorous effect is generated and interpreted in verbal humor is just the same process that how literal meaning or implication in sentence is realized and conveyed.Thus, Grice’s Cooperative Principles and Austin and Searle’s Speech Act Theory are chosen as the theoretical basis, the author tries to prove the authenticity and rationality of his hypothesis with a comparative analysis on these two theories.Under the guidance of these two theories, with large amount of case studies, the author summarize the conclusion as follows: Verbal humor is generated when people understand the literal meaning or implication of the utterance in communication. According to Superior Theory, in some situation, misunderstanding or unacquaintance of the meaning also leads to humorous effects. Both Cooperative Principle and Speech Act Theory help to interpret the humor as they are useful in meaning analyzing. With the comparison of these two theories, the author holds that Speech Act Theory does a better job. Cooperative Principles help the audience to judge the rationality of the words in communication, and to reveal the intention of the speaker. Speech Act Theory treats the speaker’s word as speech act, and analyzes the four conditions in it. The essential condition and propositional condition helps the audience tounderstand the content of conversation, while sincere condition and preparatory condition help the audience to reveal the intention and attitude of the speaker. Speech Act Theory also helps to explore why and how the speaker realizes his intention. In certain situation, related knowledge for background culture is also an important factor for humor generation in sitcom.