Gricean Cooperative Principle and Humor in Media: the Case of Mind Your Language Series

Abstract

The cooperative principle by Paul Grice is set to framework cooperation between participants in conversations in order to make their communication successful. The violation of this principle does not entail failure of the communication process but it might lead to the generation of verbal humor. The purpose of this paper is to check whether this claim is valid or not for the specific case of the British sitcom mind your language. In order to fulfill this task, a number of conversations within the most rated episode of the sitcom were studied. This dissertation presents a qualitative content analysis of some randomly picked scenes from the selected episode in which all the conversations of the scene were analyzed, looking for an intentional (violation) or unintentional (flout) breaking of maxim(s). Sampling happened at two levels; the first one which is purposeful, to pick one of the episodes on the basis of their ratings at the Internet Media Database (IMDb) and the second to choose randomly a number of scenes within this episode. The results showed that whenever there is a flout/violation of maxim(s) in any of the conversations, there is a funny effect. This result indicated that it is valid to consider verbal humor for this episode as a product of not adhering to the cooperative principle. This work helps enrich the field of humor studies in general and the Gricean cooperative principle in particular.