Abstract: Humor is a common way of communication and it is a kind of speech act which people use speech to cause laugh. The Two Broken Girls is a popular sitcome in America which is full of verbal humor. This paper will use general framework of cooperative principle, which was put forward by Herbert Poul Geice, to analyse the humorous conversations in Two Broken Girls. People in Two Broken Girls sometimes break cooperative principle intentionally or unintentionally for different reasons, such as for releasing pressure, avoiding or assuaging awkward scene, saving face and so on. And in this way, humor is generated. This paper will research humorous conversation in Two Broken Girls to get a clearer idea of how humor is generated and to get a further study of humor at the same time.

Key words: Two Broken Girls, verbal humor, cooperative principle， reasons for humor, humorous effects

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1. Introduction1

2. Humor.2

2.1 Definition of humor..2

2.2 Classifications of humor...2

3. Cooperative theory.3

3.1 maxim of quantity..3

3.2 maxim of quality3

3.3 maxim of relevance3

3.4 maxim of manner...3

4 Analysis of humorous utterance in Two Broken Girls...4

4.1 About Two Broken Girls4

4.2 The violation of Cooperative theory....4

4.2.1 The violation of maxim of quantity4

4.2.2 The violation of maxim of quality..5

4.2.3 The violation of maxim of relevance..6

4.2.4 The violation of maxim of manner.7

5. Verbal humor and verbal humor effects in Two Broken Girls..8

  5.1 Verbal humor 8

5.2 Verbal humor effects...9

5.2.1 Releasing pressure9

  5.2.2 Avoiding or assuage awkward scene9

  5.2.3 Saving face..10

6. Conclusion10

7. Bibliography.10

8. Acknowledgements ..11