| Since the 1980s, with the development of pragmatics, more and more verbal humor studies from pragmatic perspective. Situation comedy is one of the most popular programs in which verbal humor plays an important role.The present thesis attempts to reveal the cognitive process of understanding verbal humor by analyzing instances of humor in Friends, using Relevance Theory and Cooperative Principle as theoretical frameworks, and further, to compare the two theories in terms of their power and means in humor interpretation.Analyses of the verbal humor used in Friends have further proved the explanatory power of these two theories in understanding humor, each of which, however, has its own merits and limitations:Relevance Theory is more effective in analyzing rhetoric humor, while Cooperative Principle does a better job in explaining humor by speaking irrelevant utterance when the speakers are in bad moods. Therefore, the combination of these two theories provides the best framework for interpreting the cognitive process of humor understanding. This thesis does the research mainly with qualitative analysis. The verbal humorous utterances in 34 episodes which are selected randomly from sitcom Friends are taken as data resources. The research process is to derive the verbal humor examples from the original texts firstly and then classify them into different categories in terms of pragmatic theories and finally analyze them in details. To sum up, it is an effective way to make humorous utterances analysis by means of relevant pragmatic theories. The findings of this thesis can help the people to comprehend and appreciate the humorous utterances in English sitcoms as well as in daily communication. By applying the pragmatic approach to the explanation of the mechanism of humor in the specific context-sitcom, the corresponding theoretical hypothesis is further verified and developed and the findings can also provide a clued to playwrights in their play writing. |
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