A Study Of Verbal Humor In The IT Crowd Under The Theoretical Framework Of Cooperative Principle

As an immemorial research issue, humor has attracted scholar’s attention for a long time. The earliest study can be traced back to the era of Plato and Aristotle. Since then scholars have made great efforts on humor study from different disciplines. Study on humor has made great progress over the centuries. Linguistically, studies such as semantics, syntax and pragmatics provide new and wide angle for humor research.Researches on humor from the perspective of pragmatics such as Grice’s Cooperative Principle(CP), Austin’s Speech Act Theory and so on are also being made by linguists. The present research is a case study of verbal humor under the theoretical framework of CP which has profound influence on the development of pragmatics and has become a central topic of pragmatics research. Although many scholars raised objection to it, CP is still one of the most useful pragmatics principles in analyzing verbal humor.Verbal humor is the clever use of language and is closely related to context. Sitcom, a popular type of TV program, is good material for humor study in context. The corpus in this thesis is from a popular British sitcom The IT Crowd which was awarded the BAFTA and the Emmy.While watching the video, the author identified each humorous utterance and then used CP to analyze them to see how verbal humor is generated through the violation of CP. Finally, the author concludes that the scriptwriter creates verbal humor in The IT Crowd by violating CP, especially by violating the quantity maxim of CP. The finding verifies that violation of CP may lead to humor. The author hopes that this can help people better understand and enjoy the verbal humor in The IT Crowd, use the sitcoms and apply CP to create humorous utterance and make themselves more humorous. The finding can also provide some reference for Chinese play writers in their creation of sitcoms.