A Pragmatic Analysis Of Verbal Humor In Forrest Gump

Forrest Gump is a miracle of90’s American movie. Not only had this movie made300million US dollars locally and657million US dollars globally, winning6major Oscar Award, but also the movie itself has perfectly integrated the fantastic encounters of the hero, serious historical moment as well as the living story of ordinary person, it has displayed almost every aspect of American lives in the times through a unique perspective. The movie is telling us the most important events happened in the American society and political life during the decades by the growth and live of a retard. It could be considered as a love story film, a political film, a heart-touching film or even just an entertainment film.The study of linguistics by the pragmatics has no longer been constrained to the theoretical study. Under current situation that sciences of various kinds and different subjects mutually interfaced and developed, pragmatics has been profoundly applied into many fields, like translation, teaching, cross-cultural communication and interpersonal communication, etc. besides, many linguists has applied pragmatic theory to the study of language humor, which helps us further understand humor, especially providing a new angle and view to foreign language humor, and the result is fruitful.This paper has applied pragmatic theories to analyze the languages used by the hero in "Forrest Gump" during his interpersonal communications through3different perspectives to further expand the application of pragmatic theories between the retarded and ordinary people.The pragmatic principles applied in this paper are Cooperative Principle by H. P. Grice, Politeness Principle by Leech and Speech Act Theory by Austin. Cooperative Principle is one of the important guideline principles for human language communications; it could better explain the literal meaning of the language and the communication purpose. The conversation could carry on smoothly only when people complying with this principle. This is especially important to the retarded Gump with simple mind. However, in many cases of daily lives and also in the movies, many people disobey the Cooperative Principle intentionally, so Politeness Principle, as a necessary supplement to Cooperative Principle, could better explain why people disobey the Cooperative Principle. Speech Act Theory considered that people will carry out certain behavior when we talking, that is explain the humors in the movie caused by Gump’s understanding of some lines in the movie. Through Analysis of Forrest Gump, we could find out that Gump, as a retarded, usually understand the words via the conversation’s literal and superficial meaning, therefore, often he is the follower of pragmatic principles. On the contrary the normal people around him and had conversation with him are the violator of pragmatic principles due to certain reasons.Based on analysis, the author of this paper found out that people in Forrest Gump have to disobey the Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle to express the actual meaning they want to deliver by the conversation, meanwhile, Gump, a retard with only75IQ, can hardly smoothly understand the real meaning of the words by others. Therefore, people who communicate with Gump must use different conversation strategy to make the communication carry on, thus the phenomenon of language humors happened simultaneously.