Abstract
This paper focuses on analyzing the effect of verbal humor in the famous American sitcom Friends from the perspective of Conversational Implicature of Pragmatics. Although the effects of humor in this sitcom are presented in various forms, what is in common is that the dialogues between the actors and the actresses are usually beyond the expectations of the audiences, and then produce the “laughing point”——the humorous implicature. To make the dialogues humorous, the actors would always violate the four maxims of Cooperative Principle: the maxim of Quantity, the maxim of Quality, the maxim of Relation, and the maxim of Manner. Through exploring the pragmatic rules of verbal humor, the study is expected to improve people’s comprehension and appreciation of American humor, thereby contribute to the deeper understanding of the inherent law of English language.  
Keywords   verbal humor   Conversational Implicature   Cooperative Principle

本文运用语用学中的会话含意理论分析著名美剧《老友记》所取得的言语幽默效果。通过对剧中相关对白的深入分析发现，尽管《老友记》所展示的幽默形式是多样的，但幽默的产生通常源于演员们的对话出乎了观众的意料,从而产生“笑点”——即带有幽默性的会话含义。演员们通常采用违反合作原则中的四条准则，即量的准则、质的准则、关系的准则和方式的准则来实现对话的幽默。本文旨在通过探究言语幽默的语用规律，提高人们对美式幽默的推理和欣赏能力，加深对英语语言内在规律的理解。
关键词   言语幽默    会话含意   合作原则

As a young branch of pragmatics, Conversational Implicature (henceforth CI) aims at discovering how people manage to understand implied meaning in communication. Since the establishment of this theory — when in 1967, as a linguist and a philosopher, Paul Grice made a speech in Harvard University on this topic, CI has been proved useful in a wide range of fields, such as analyses of daily conversations, and has helped explain how messages encoded with different meanings are successfully passed on from the speaker to the listener.
To further explain this theory, researches have been conducted by many famous linguists, including Leech (1983), Levinson (1983), Peccei (2000), Yule (2000) and so on. These researches contribute to the adaptability of the theory of CI, thus making it possible for other scholars to use it as a practical tool to deal with more questions.