The Application Of Verbal Humor In Good Luck Charlie: Character Study In View Of Pragmatic Perspectives

As a way of verbal communication, humor is extensively used in our dailyspeech. It is not just a device to lead people to laugh and relax, but most importantly,it inspires people to ponder over the issues reflected in humor utterances, such as thelinguistic skills, human cognition, or even the character of the humor initiator. Humorresearch has a long story. Many scholars, ranging from the ancient Greekphilosophers to modern linguists and psychologists, have studied humor from variousperspectives, such as philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, sociology, physiology, andlinguistics, etc. Since the birth of pragmatics, accompanied with the establishment ofCooperation Principle, Politeness Principle, Speech Act Theory, etc, many scholarshave applied pragmatic theories and principles to researching verbal humor in sitcoms,but few have studied the character features reflected in humor utterances produced byemploying pragmatic skills. As Leech (2001) states,“we must also recognize theimportance of inference in the determination of characters”,“a person’s characters areinferred from outward behavior, especially from speech”. It hence can be concludedthat humor to some extent can reflect the character features of humor producer. Sincesitcom offers a coherent and consistent character features, unlike randomly selectedhumor fragments, the author is inclined to choose Good Luck Charlie as the text forhumor analysis. This thesis intends to use pragmatic theories, mainly Presupposition,Deixis and Speech Act Theory, to analyze humor with a view to probing into thecharacter features reflected in verbal humor.The methodology of the study is: first, season one and season two of the sitcomGood Luck Charlie are chosen as the target script. And then the author will select allthe humor conversations that can be expounded by the three pragmatic theoriesmentioned above. And next, a case analysis to36of the most typical samples whichaccount for the hypothesis that pragmatic approaches to humor can mold distinctcharacter features is going to be conducted.The thesis comprises six parts. Chapter one gives a brief introduction of thesitcom and the background information of the study. Chapter two is the literature review. It offers the definition, classification of humor and reviews studies of humorhome and abroad. Chapter three expounds the three theories: Presupposition, Deixisand Speech Act Theory as the theoretic basis. Chapter four applies the threepragmatic theories to the case study of humorous utterances. Chapter five summarizesthe dramatic functions of humor manifested in Good Luck Charlie. Chapter sixconcludes the discoveries of the thesis and the limitations.Through comparatively detailed analysis to the text, some major findings of thestudy can be concluded as follows:(1) Pragmatic approach is still an efficient way in analyzing verbal humor.Flexible use of pragmatic skills makes verbal communication more witty andthought-provoking, leading people to think about the mentality and cognition behindthe humor utterances, and highlights diverse character features.(2) Pragmatic analysis of character features can deepen the recognization ofdifferent characters.