A pragmatic approach to verbal humor in Kenyan Stand Up Comedy: The case of Churchill Show

Abstract

Humor plays an important role in everyday life. Humor is probably specific to human species and verbal humor certainly is, as it is expressed through language use in a certain context to achieve humorous effects. There is an increased proliferation of verbal humor in stand up comedies in Kenya over the last decade. The local television industry has also invested in ensuring that they get the best verbal humor to enhance their viewership. As such, Churchill Show one of the verbal humor comedies in Kenya has captivated Kenyans in the last decade. This explains why it forms the basis for this study. Verbal humor is often created by flouting the Gricean conversational maxims. The deviation creates incongruous experience for the audience leading to laughter. How this discrepancy in expectations is explained, has not been dealt with extensively especially in stand up comedies. In Kenya, there is currently no study that has determined the conversational maxims that are flouted by the comedians in Churchill Show to create verbal humor and therefore the understanding of forms of humor as well as discourse topics created by conversational maxim flouting remains passive. The study’s objectives therefore determined conversational maxims flouted in Churchill Show to create verbal humor, described the forms embedded in maxim flouting and explained the discourse topics exploited by the comedians in humor creation in Churchill Show. It applied the Gricean cooperative principle to explain the maxims flouted by the stand up comedians as well as the principles of relevance theory to demonstrate how humor is evoked. The study adopted a descriptive qualitative research design since it emphasizes on the phenomenon of the use of language in its context in data interpretation. The main data of this study were in the forms of utterances taken from various seasons and episodes ranging from 2011 to 2019 where popular stand up comedians in Churchill Show were purposively selected. 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. This was followed by analysis of the forms of humor that came about from the flouted maxims after which; discourse topics resulting from maxim flouting were discussed. The findings drawn from this study were that the selected stand-up comedians flouted all the four conversational maxims in their utterances to create humor. As the comedians flout the maxims they employed strategies such as irony, satire, self-deprecation, stereotypes and hyperbole to enhance their humor creation. As social critics, the comedians also exploited discourse topics such as ethnicity, social class, marriage and family, gender, education, sports, love and relationships in their humor performance. The study concluded that the relevance theoretical framework is appropriate in explaining the inferential process which the audience apply in humor interpretation in order to achieve optimal relevance. This study will contribute knowledge in pragmatics especially the Grice conversational maxims and implicatures. It is recommended that another study on the most flouted maxim and the most employed humor strategies in Churchill Show can be carried out