Verbal Humor in Stand-up Comedy “Rock & Roast” with the GTVH Theory

Abstract

The General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) has been a significant pragmatics theory since Attardo and Raskin put it forward in 1991. Six knowledge resources (KR) are included in GTVH: script oppositions (SO), logical mechanisms (LM), situations (SI), targets (TA), narrative strategies (NS), and language (LA) to analyze verbal humor. As a comedic performance on stage, stand-up comedies have experienced explosive popularity in China in recent years. This paper extracted four excerpts from the final round of a stand-up comedy TV show “Rock & Roast” Series 5 and applies qualitative research to analyze them with the theory of GTVH. From the analysis, different KRs of SI and TA showed up to give the audience several interesting contents. In the SO KR, from the most to lowest abstract level are all used in the script. At the same time, LM, NS and LA KRs as tools serve for the contents. It is obvious that LM varies among these excerpts, but NS are usually the same and LA can be absent in the performances. The straightforward content KRs of SI and TA are more obvious, LM, but NS and LA are sometimes unnoticed, which are essential tools to make the text effective. It suggests the feasibility of combining Chinese stand-up comedy with pragmatics theory and it extends the traditional studies in this field.