A Study of Verbal Humor in Man with a Plan from the Perspective of Cooperative Principle

Abstract

Man with a Plan, starring Golden Globe winner Matt LeBlanc, is a distinct representative of American sitcoms. The language in the play is close to real life and extremely humorous. There are a large number of conversational fragments in all kinds of situations that defy the maxim of the cooperative principle and create unexpected humorous effects. This paper attempts to adopt the cooperative principle theory of Grice to analyze the speech phenomenon that violates the cooperative principle in the dramas and figure out the production mechanism of verbal humor and its particularized conversational implicature from the quantity, quality, relation and manner maxims respectively.