Abstract:

Humor is a bridge that helps people socialize and communicate, making conversation interesting and life pleasant, which attracts attention of both domestic and foreign experts. American sitcom Two Broke Girls contains abundant verbal humor cases and is loved by the audience around the world, so the paper is to make a pragmatic study on verbal humor in the play, though humor consists of verbal humor and non-verbal humor. The reason lies in that the witty dialogue is characteristic of the play. The purpose of this paper is to explore the working mechanism of verbal humor from pragmatic perspective. Through the deep analysis of abundant verbal humor cases, the thesis is intended to figure out how verbal humor works in this sitcom Two Broke Girls from the point of view of Cooperative Principle and Politeness Theory. Not only does this study help Chinese English learners comprehend pragmatics, appreciate verbal humor much better and improve the learners’ language competence, but also cultivate their humor awareness and thus improve the ability of English communication.

Key words: humor; Two Broke Girls; Cooperative Principle; Politeness Theory

摘要：幽默是帮助人类进行社交与沟通的桥梁，能使人与人之间的交流变得轻松愉悦，增加生活的乐趣，因此倍受国内外专家学者的关注。幽默包括言语幽默和非言语幽默。美国情景喜剧《破产姐妹》中富含言语幽默并深受世界各地观众的喜爱，因此本文从语用角度研究该剧的言语幽默。机智巧妙的谈话是本剧的特色。本文旨在从语用学角度探讨言语幽默的工作机制。通过丰富的言语幽默案例分析《破产姐妹》如何从合作原则和礼貌理论的角度实现言语幽默的，不仅有助于英语学习者理解语用学和更好的欣赏言语幽默，并能提升学生的语言能力，还能培养他们的幽默意识，从而促进英语交际能力的进步。
  
关键词：幽默;《破产姐妹》;合作原则;礼貌理论 

Introduction
Nowadays, on account of the worldwide communication and rapid internet development, Chinese movie lovers are in directly touch with a lot of English movies and TV series. Among them, the sitcom is the most popular form. Much attention has been paid to it, especially by the young generation. However the Chinese audience can understand the content of the scenes by scripts in the sitcoms, but they sometimes could not get a thorough understanding about the implied meaning, which is an inevitable concern on account of diverse cultures.
It is known that pragmatics is a relatively new branch of linguistic study discussing the relationship between language and its users, and it thus provides a new perspective to explore the mechanism of human communication including verbal humor. It contains lots of witty dialogues in Two Broke Girls. At the same time, verbal humor is the most significant part of the sitcom and it has offered a large number of practical materials for pragmatic analysis.