A Pragmatic Study Of Verbal Humor In Friends

As a popular phenomenon in the daily life, humor is mainly presented in the form of verbal humor in the daily communication. Humor is commonly seen in the situation comedy. And the main way to create laughter in a situation comedy is the verbal humor, so is the well-known American situation comedy Friends. As to how to understand the verbal humor and how verbal humor is produced, scholars from different academic fields give different answers.A lot of scholars have studied the production mechanism of verbal humor from the various perspectives, such as psychology and aesthetics. It is not until the 1970s that humor began to attract the attention of the linguistic scholars. Among the massive linguistic theories, the Cooperative Principle, proposed by the famous American philosopher Herbert Paul Grice, is believed to be the strongest tool for explaining the production of verbal humor. Grice summarizes the principle in people’s daily communication —the Cooperative Principle and its four maxims—the quality, quantity, relation and manner maxims. And verbal humors are produced by violating these maxims.Through the qualitative analysis method, the present study is intended to analyze the verbal humors collected from the second, fourth, sixth, eighth and tenth seasons in Friends based on the Cooperative Principle. To be specific, the objectives of the thesis are to find out to what degree the verbal humors in Friends are produced by violating the four maxims of the Cooperative Principle, to disclose the production mechanism of verbal humor and to help the audience have a better understanding and appreciation of the verbal humor in Friends.This thesis falls into five chapters. The first chapter is the introduction, which generally introduces Friends, the objectives and the methodology of the thesis. Literature review serves as the second chapter. It consists of two sections. Section one is the previous study of humor and section two is the previous study of humor in Friends. The theoretical framework of the thesis is arranged in the third chapter. In the third chapter, the Cooperative Principle and its four maxims of quality, quantity, relation and manner are introduced. The fourth chapter is the body of the thesis. Through the collection and analysis of the data, the thesis shows that approximately seventy five percent of the humorous utterances are produced by the violation of the four maxims of Cooperative Principle. Some examples in Friends are selected to illustrate how the verbal humors violate the four maxims. The last chapter is the conclusion, which summarizes the findings of the thesis and gives suggestions for the further study. The findings indicates that the verbal humors in Friends are mainly produced by violating the four maxims of Cooperative Principle and the production mechanism of humorous utterances in Friends largely depends on the Cooperative Principle.Compared with the previous studies, the present study will make a difference with the support of the sound data, the detailed analysis and convincing findings in the thesis. The thesis is intended to help the audience have a better understanding of the verbal humor in Friends. Moreover, it may provide reference for people to develop a sense of humor.