The Pragmatic Analysis of the Verbal Humor in Two Broke Girls—from the Perspective of Cooperative Principle

Verbal humor refers to a language artistic style through the use of humorous language to express emotion and convey information, so as to arouse the comfort and interest of the audience, and to influence, enlighten and delight the audience.The Cooperative Principle is one of the basic principles of the use of language. It requires both interlocutors to be cooperative and helpful in conversations. This paper selects Grice's four maxims of cooperative principle-quality maxim, quantity maxim, relevance maxim and manner maxim to analyze the causes of humor in the conversation between different roles in the English sitcom Two Broke Girls from the perspective of cooperative principle. Two Broke Girls, an English sitcom comedy, focuses on daily life, with diverse roles and humorous language, which provides a rich corpus for the pragmatic study of verbal humor. This paper mainly selects three conversations between different roles: the dialogue between friends, elders and strangers. This paper analyzes these conversations under the guidance of the cooperative principle. And this study aims at exploring the association between the Conversation among different roles and the violation of cooperative principle, as well as the association between verbal humor and topic selection. This study found that the degree of intimacy between different roles would affect the frequency of violation of cooperative principle and the topic choice of verbal humor.