Verbal Humor in The King of Stand-up Comedy from the Perspective of the Cooperative Principle

Abstract

Humor has long attracted scholarly attention as an important aspect of language and social interaction. Verbal humor is frequently employed by communicators in various contexts to implicitly convey intentions and ease tension, thereby facilitating smooth communication. Recent research on verbal humor has shifted focus from static, isolated words or sentences to dynamic, multimodal texts, such as talk shows, movies, plays, advertisements, and sitcoms. This study adopts the Cooperative Principle as its theoretical framework, using concepts from Incongruity Theory to analyze the processes underlying humor generation in the Chinese stand-up comedy show The King of Stand-up Comedy. The analysis shows that violating the four maxims of the Cooperative Principle is a common pragmatic strategy for producing verbal humor. The stand-up comedians often employ rhetorical devices such as metaphor, personification, pun, and hyperbole to flout the four maxims, thereby creating incongruities and generating humorous effects.