Research on the Humor in Friends from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

Abstract

Once after the publication of Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1986) by Sperber and Wilson, Great attention and interests have been aroused in linguistic field. More and more linguists have paid great attention to the relevance theory. In Relevance Theory, cognitive hypothesis and ostensive-inferential communication provide a reasonable explanation for the mechanism of humor generation; in the meantime, the intensity of humor effect comes from the contrast between maximal relevance and optimal relevance, as well as the degree of processing effort and cognitive effect. Firstly, this paper explains the mechanism of the humor generation from the perspective of cognition and communication. Secondly, it also analyzes the main influencing factors of the intensity of humorous. Thirdly, it also points out two significant things, the one is the contrast between the maximal relevance and optimal relevance, the other is the extra processing effort has a great impact on the intensity of humorous effect and endeavor to provide a theoretical basis for it. Apart from this, based on the classical humorous cases in the Friends, this paper gives a detail analysis with the purpose of providing a convinced method for humor study.