A Study On Verbal Humor In How I Met Your Mother From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

Humor is everywhere in our lives.In the long river of history,research on humor has emerged one after another.Scholars in various fields have made fruitful research on humor from different angles.In the twentieth century,with the development of research on pragmatics,more and more researchers began to analyze the phenomenon of verbal humor from the perspective of pragmatics.The research trend of humor has presented a multi-perspective and multi-level pattern.The sitcom was first produced in the 1920s by American Radio,and has now evolved into the popular TV show in the world and a mainstream form of entertainment around the world.Verbal humor plays an important role in sitcoms and is the soul of comedy creation.Sitcom is very popular among the audience because of its witty,humorous and infectious language.A good sitcom not only brings spiritual enjoyment to the audience,but also provides a rich humorous language as a corpus for those who concentrate on humor resear-ch.Sitcom is a successful carrier of verbal humor.It contains a large number of humorous languages,and these humorous languages are not isolated but integrated into their context.Therefore,sitcom is a very appropriate and representative corpus resource to study verbal humor from the perspective of pragmatics.This article will study the verbal humor in sitcoms from the perspective of pragmatics.Based on the cooperative principle theory in pragmatics,this study makes an in-depth discussion on the verbal humor in the first and second seasons of the American sitcom How I Met Your Mother,so as to solve the following three research questions:first,the generation mechanism of verbal humor,that is,how it is generated in this sitcom through violating cooperative principle;second,the frequency of humor in terms of violating cooperative principle,and which maxims are frequently applied in generating humor;thirdly,the implication of the study of verbal humor for English teaching and intercultural communication.Based on the above research questions,this paper combines qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis.According to the textual analysis of verbal humor,the general law of speech humor generation mechanism is found.From the statistical analysis of data,it is shown that in the cooperation principle,the proportion of generating verbal humor by violating the quality maxim is the highest,and among all the sub maxims,the frequency of generating verbal humor by providing more information than required is the highest.Finally,the thesis also combines the research results with English teaching and cross-cultural communication,and puts forward corresponding suggestions,and discusses relevant enlightenment.