Résumé:
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.
