Violating Cooperative Principle to Achieve Humorous Effect

Humor is a kind of literature that can be found everywhere in our daily life. It is also a kind of language art that can be created by various reasons. This essay will analyze humor from a knowledge of pragmatics—cooperative principle (CP) and show how the humorous effect achieved ascribed to the breaking the four maxims of the cooperative principle. It also provides a lot of examples to show how to achieve humorous effect by applying Grice’s cooperative principle. The creation of humor and violation of CP have close relationship. Violating CP in the surface may create humor. A better understanding about humor will be achieved under an analysis of CP. As a linguistic phenomenon, humor has its own charm. It’s good medicine,that can improve interpersonal relationships and make others feel comfortable.