A Pragmatic Analysis Of Verbal Humor In American Sitcom Friends

The sense of humor is an inevitable element in our daily life. We can take advantageof humor to avoid our embarrassment or confrontation with others in our daily life,hence scholars at home and abroad are willing to focus on this study to make our lifemore enjoyable. Sociologists focus their study on humor from the superiority theory;researchers in cognition from the incongruity theory; psychologists from the relieftheory, making great achievements in parole analysis based on solid experiments. Butthe humor study from the pragmatic field has just begun and has enough potentials inresearch. Accordingly, the author gave her pragmatic study of verbal humor inAmerican sitcom Friends.Not only language, but together with non-language stuff like voice, tone, facialexpression, and gestures, play a role in understanding verbal language. Differentlanguage producers, different addressees, different time or places, different socialcultures will make totally different communication effects. That is why we ChineseEnglish learners have great difficulty in understanding American or British sense ofhumor. This essay focuses on the humor study in American sitcom Friends, togetherwith the imaginable laughter in the comedy. The paper take of advantages ofpragmatics including cooperative theory, that is the maxim of quantity, the maxim ofquality, the maxim of relevance, and the maxim of manner, relevance theory, that isostentation and inference, maximal relevance and optimal relevance, as well asspeech act theory, that is locutionary act and illocutional force. The author combinesqualitative study with quantitative study to make it more objective.The results indicate that humor effects could be achieved by the deliberate flouting ofthe maxims of cooperative principle, which are quantity, quality, relevance andmanner; From the point of relevance theory, humorous effects can be achieved fromthe inference, from the gap between maximal and optimal relevance, and from thedifferences in a cognitive effect between the speaker and addressee and to furtherexplore the mechanism generation of verbal humor in the model of speech act theory.Through the study on the mechanism of verbal humor with the help of pragmatic theories, sociologists, psychologist, and linguists have got more search basis, whilethe study promotes the common people’s understanding and appreciation of humor.