Pragmatics of humor

Abstract

This chapter addresses some aspects of the cognitive pragmatics of humor. Humor involves a violation of Grice’s principle of cooperation. Humor is not a flout of the principle of cooperation, at least at the time of processing. Other topics addressed include the necessity for an implicit aspect to humor (essentially, the text cannot reveal the incongruity until the punch line), the Least Disruption Principle, i.e., the idea that the violations of cooperation for humor have to be kept as small as possible, and irony, which is closely related to flouting but includes a residual violation which makes it humorous. Finally, the chapter addresses the intentionality of humor: either the speaker, or the hearer of a humorous exchange (or both of them) have to be intentionally interpreting the exchange as humorous for it to be perceived as such.