Abstract:
There is an increased proliferation of verbal humour in stand-up
comedies in Kenya recently. The local television industry has also
invested in verbal humour to enhance their viewership. The study,
however, sought to investigate conversational maxims flouted
in Churchill Show to create verbal humour. The study relied on
the Gricean cooperative principle and the principles of Relevance
theory to explain the maxims flouted by stand-up comedians. The
study adopted a descriptive qualitative research. The primary data
of study comprised purposively selected utterances from stand-up
comedy performances from 2011 to 2019 in Churchill Show. In
collecting the data, the researcher applied attentive observation.
Being a qualitative study, data analysis commenced during data
collection. Content analyses of spoken words in the TV tape were
transcribed. Classification of the data into maxims flouted was first
done and discussed. The findings showed that the selected stand up comedians flouted all the four conversational maxims in their
utterances to create humour. As the comedians flout the maxims,
they employed strategies such as irony, satire, self-deprecation,
stereotypes and hyperbole to enhance their humour creation.
The study concluded that the relevance theoretical framework is
appropriate in explaining the inferential process that the audience
apply in humour interpretation in order to achieve optimal relevance.
The study contributes knowledge in pragmatics, especially the Grice
conversational maxims and implicatures.