Flouting Grice’s Maxims in Some Selected Clean Jokes: A Pragmatic Study

Abstract

Jokes are verbal forms that have humorous effect when told and their humorous effect causes laughing on the part of the listeners. One of the reasons that cause the humorous effect of jokes is flouting the maxims of the cooperative principle, known as Grice’s maxims. Grice’s maxims are seen as a type of agreement between the communicators to cooperate in communication. At the same time, they are not considered as rules. This research tries to explore which of Grice’s maxim(s) are flouted to create the humorous effect in jokes. It also tries to find out which maxim is flouted the most. The sample jokes were chosen randomly by the researchers and descriptive qualitative method is used to analyze the data accumulated. The analysis of the twenty clean jokes chosen is based on Grice's cooperative principle. The analysis shows that the maxim of quality is the most flouted as compared with other ones. And the maxim of relevance is flouted more than the maxim of quantity. Similar researches can be conducted on other types and forms of humor or on other types of jokes.