[摘  要]

幽默在西方文化中历史悠远，但国内直到20世纪30年代经林语堂先生的译介才初次听闻。林语堂先生对幽默进行了深入的研究与解释。言语幽默作为幽默的重要组成部分，是一种语言艺术,它遍及我们生活的每一个角落,是我们日常生活的一部分。格莱斯自合作原则提出之日起就激起了研究者的极大热情，发展迅速且更加具体细化，被广泛应用于对幽默的解释。《老友记》是美国经典情景喜剧,其幽默风趣的语言吸引了大批观众。本文从违反合作原则的角度，结合剧中实例来探讨《老友记》的对白幽默性,旨在提高英语专业学生对情景喜剧中英语幽默的推理和欣赏能力,加强对合作原则及英语语言幽默机制的理解。

[关键词] 幽默；格莱斯；合作原则；老友记

Abstract:

Humor has a very long history which dates back to the 8th century B.C. in western literature, but we didn't learn about it until the 20th century. The famous scholar, litterateur and linguist, Lin Yutang introduced this concept to China firstly and he studied and developed it into a new level. Verbal humor, a important component element of humor, is a language art. The Cooperation Principle proposed by H. P. Grice is one of the most important pragmatic principles which have been attracted much attention since proposed. This principle aroused many interesting possibilities for analysis among scholars. This very principle includes four norms and analyzes daily conversations from quantity, quality, relevance and manner. The four norms provide a relatively reasonable explanation towards the mechanism behind the humor utterance. The thesis is a tentative attempt to analyze verbal humor according to these four norms found in the American situation comedy Friends. Hence to investigate the underlying mechanism of verbal humor and let students understand English humor further and cultivate the students’ learning interest.

Key words: Verbal Humor; The Cooperative Principle; Grice; Friends

1. Introduction
People always laugh because of someone or something, and its main reason is humor. Using or understanding humor, which requires so much complexity and ingenuity, is a special behavior of human. The great humorist Charles Chaplin said that humor is the highest materialization of our wisdom. There is no doubt that humor is a kind of great wisdom, in most cases it sizes people up and gives reflection of the society and life from its unique angle of view and in typical style.According to the definition which Nash gave in 1985, humor is peculiar to mankind, corresponded with speaking, counting, understanding and other abilities. Another scholar, Steven M. Sultan, divided humor into five aspects: First, humor is an incoordination experience. Second, humor is the emotion chaos that beneath one’s calm exterior. Third, one can feel happy for his or her understanding of humor. Forth, humor can be realized by the execution of taboo behaviors, such as laughing in a church, or varnish errors, usually among kids. Fifth, humor is constituted with three parts, they are subtlety, joy and, of course, laughter. Subtlety is of cognitional-level. Joy belongs to emotional-level. Laughter is within physiological-level.