Humour as a multifunctional strategy to communicate propositional meanings in sitcom discourse : a relevance-theoretic account

This paper views humour as a conversational strategy, whose potential is to serve a number of different, sometimes divergent, goals simultaneously. It will be demonstrated that the sole purpose of humour rarely lies in amusing the audience. Drawing upon the relevance-theoretic view on communication, the objective of the paper is to report on research into a variety of functions that a conversationalist may possibly attain by dint of a humorous episode in sitcom. On the relevance-theoretic approach, it is assumed that the meaning communicated by the speaker can range from fully determinate to less determinate. It will be shown that whilst the former meaning has to do with the recovery of humorous intention, the latter is related to non-humorous functional information. Overall, the paper shows that the functions served by humour can be grouped into the categories of affiliation, aggression or cognitive benefits.