A PRAGMATIC STUDY OF HUMOUR IN BRITISH SITCOM MIRANDA

PhD Dissertation Proposal

Submitted by
May Moe Kabyar Maung
1-PhD-E-4

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 A PRAGMATIC STUDY OF HUMOUR IN BRITISH SITCOM MIRANDA
1. Introduction
Humour is a universal human experience. The interpretation and creation of humour
often depend on cultural, linguistic, and contextual factors. In the realm of television, sitcoms
serve as a rich medium for analyzing humour, as they combine verbal and non-verbal cues,
character dynamics, and cultural references to generate comedic effects. British sitcoms, in
particular, have gained global recognition for their distinctive style. Among these, Miranda
stands out as the most typical example of British humour. Therefore, this study focuses on a
pragmatic analysis of humour in Miranda, employing theories such as Grice (1975)’s
Cooperative Principle, Berger (2017)’s techniques of humour, and Wilson and Sperber (2002)’
relevance theory.

1.1 Aims and Objectives

The aims of this research are as follows:
1. to examine the pragmatic strategies used to create humour in the British sitcom
Miranda.
2. to investigate the cultural and contextual factors that influence humour in Miranda.

The objectives of the research are as follows:

1. to identify the conversational maxims which are flouted in the British sitcom
Miranda.
2. to analyze the techniques of humour in the flouting of maxims.
3. to explore how humour in Miranda reflects British cultural norms.

1.2 Research Questions

This research will try to answer the following research questions.
1. What types of maxims are flouted in the British sitcom Miranda?
2. What are the techniques of humour in the flouting of maxims?
3. How does the sitcom generate humourous effects?
4. How does humour in Miranda reflect British cultural norms?
1.3 Definition of the Term
Sitcom and Humour
Situational comedy, also sitcom, is a specific genre of a comedy. It focuses on
the main character or a small group of people who tend to be funny. These characters
usually remain the same till the end of the show. Sitcoms are popular because the
characters face similar difficulties every day as we do. That is why the plot is usually
simple and set to the familiar environment such as work, the office or home (Ross
1998, 89).
Humor is essential for sitcoms because it attracts the audience’s attention.
Humor in sitcoms is often culture-specific. For example, British comedy has a
reputation for common use of dark humor (Ross 1998, 89). In Britain, it was
common for British television to have a relationship with British society. The British
television comedy, which has been present since the first days of broadcasting, can

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 be seen in the form of sitcoms, stand-up comedies or sketch shows. No doubt sitcoms
are one of the most enduring genres in British television (Bignell 2010, 187).
MIRANDA TV SERIES
Miranda is the main character of the popular British sitcom Miranda TV
series. Not only is she the main heroine, she also wrote this sitcom. Miranda TV
series aired from 2009 to 2015 and includes 3 seasons with episodes of about 30
minutes. The story revolves about its main character Miranda, who as a child attended
a boarding school for the middle and upper classes.
In the sitcom she interacts with her former school friends Tilly, Stevie and
Fanny. In the secondary school Miranda met Gary, whom she started to like and later
feel sexually attracted to. According to the story line, Miranda is 34 and single. She
runs her own shop with Stevie. Her bossy middle-class mother Penny is desperately
trying to find Miranda a husband as well as a proper job. Although Miranda owns a
joke shop, she lacks a complete sense of business. The series also features a restaurant
owned by Clive Evans, in which Gary, Miranda’s first love, works as a chef. The
restaurant is located next to Miranda's Joke Shop. In series three, the restaurant's chef,
Gary Preston, purchases the restaurant from Clive Evans. After many failed attempts
at dating, Miranda and Gary, decide to be just friends. Nevertheless, when Gary gets a
girlfriend called Rose, it provokes Miranda to start a new relationship with Michael
Jackford, a local reporter whose work soon takes him to Africa. Upon his return, he
proposes to Miranda, as does Gary when he realises his love for her. Miranda accepts
Gary's proposal rather than Michael's and they get married in the final episode
(Miranda TV Series).
The Creation of the Miranda
Miranda is a purely original work by an actress, comedian and writer Miranda Hart.
In 1994, a film director Jo Sargent offered Miranda to write a comedy during the
Edinburgh Festival. She opted for a sitcom, and in 2009 the BBC broadcast the first
episode. The series was preceded by the autobiographical radio show Miranda Hart’s
Joke Shop, which aired in 2008 by BBC Radio 2. The show was so successful for the
BBC that it attracted millions of viewers. Not only did Miranda Hart invent this
sitcom, she also wrote the scripts, played the main character and was a co-producer.
She was able to create an original show based on her individual style. The show was
unique for the time of production since a woman was in control over the whole
process from idea to production. Earlier British sitcoms or Britcoms were typically
created by at least two well-known and educated comedians, and directed by at least
two well-known and educated comedians (Hart 2014, 8; Bucknall-Hołyńska 2016, 4)
2. Literature Review
2.1 Philosophical Theories of Humour
Humour theory has its roots in philosophical tradition. Since ancient times, three
general approaches to humour can be traced: superiority, incongruity and relief theories
(Raskin 1985; Attardo 1994).

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 From a linguistic point of view, incongruity theories become the most popular theory
to analyze humour. They see humour as based on a simultaneous occurrence of elements that
are incompatible with each other and their connection is meaningless, which can be seen
humorous or shocking.
Secondly, the theory of superiority emphasizes usually negative attitude against the
producer or a user of humour towards its target. This kind of humour is known for being
purposely offensive for such reasons as gender or ethnicity. Humour has become a weapon
with which we can ridicule someone and express our superiority over him. That's why people
initiate offensive humour when they feel threatened by their identity – for example when
members of minority groups are more successful than the majority.
Third group includes the theories of relief. These focus on the recipient of the
humour. In this sense, humour is a valve for instincts the realization of which is incompatible
with social morality. Within this approach humour is viewed as "one of the so-called
substitution mechanisms which enable to convert one’s socially tabooed aggressive impulses
to acceptable ones and thus avoid wasting additional mental energy to suppress them"
(Krikmann 2006, 27).

2.2 Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Conversational Maxims

Grice (1975) proposes that participants in a conversation obey a general ‘Cooperative
Principle’ (CP), which is expected to be in force whenever a conversation unfolds:
“Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it
occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are
engaged.
Four conversational maxims are:
I. Maxims of Quantity:
1. Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the
exchange.
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
II. Maxims of Quality:
Try to make your contribution one that is true.
1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
III. Maxim of Relation:
Be relevant.
IV. Maxims of Manner:
1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
4. Be orderly
2.2.1 Flouting Maxims
When speakers appear not to follow the maxims but expect hearers to appreciate the
meaning implied, we say that they are flouting the maxims. Just as with an indirect speech act, the
speaker implies a function different from the literal meaning of form; when flouting a maxim, the
speaker assumes that the hearer knows that their words should not be taken at face value and that they
can infer the implicit meaning.
Flouting quantity

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 The speaker who flouts the maxim of quantity appears to give too little or too much
information. If Peter asks ‘Well, how do I look?’ and Mary replies ‘Your shoes are nice’, Peter knows
that Mary is not impressed with the rest of what he is wearing.
Flouting quality
The speaker flouting the maxim of quality may do it in several ways. First, they may quite
simply say something that obviously does not represent what they think.
Speakers may flout the maxim by exaggerating as in the hyperbole ‘I could eat a horse’, or
‘I’m starving’, which are well-established exaggerating expressions. No speaker would expect their
hearer to say ‘What, you could eat a whole horse?’ or ‘I don’t think you are dying of hunger – you
don’t even look thin’. Hearers would be expected to know that the speaker simply meant that they
were very hungry.
Similarly, a speaker can flout the maxim of quality by using a metaphor, as in ‘My house is a
refrigerator in January’ or ‘Don’t be such a wet blanket – we just want to have fun’. Here again,
hearers would understand that the house was cold, and the other per- son was trying to reduce other
people’s enjoyment.
Flouting Relation
If speakers flout the maxim of relation, they usually expect that the hearers will be able to
imagine what the utterance did not say and make the connection between their utterance and the
preceding one(s).
For example,
A: There’s somebody at the door. B: I’m in the bath.
Here B expects A to understand that his present location is relevant to her comment that there is
someone at the door; that he cannot go and see who it is, because he is in the bath; and that she should
go instead.
Flouting Manner
Those who flout the maxim of manner, appearing to be obscure, are often trying to exclude a
third party. Thus, if a husband says to his wife ‘I was thinking of going out to get some of that funny
white stuff for somebody’, he speaks in an ambiguous way, because he is avoiding saying ‘ice cream’
and ‘Mandy’, so that his little daughter does not become excited and ask for the ice cream before she
has had her meal.

2.3 Techniques of Humour

There are four basic categories under which all techniques of humour can be
subsumed (Berger, 2017).
1. Language: The humour is verbal.
2. Logic. The humour is ideational.
3. Ideational. The humour is existential.
4. Action: The humour is physical or nonverbal.
According to Berger (2017), there are 45 techniques of humour based on these four
categories.

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2.4 Relevance Theory
Relevance theory is an important contribution to the field of pragmatics and offers a
systematic interpretation of human communication based on the contextual characteristics of any
given language. Relevance theory is based on the Cooperative Principle of Grice (1975) and the
related maxims of: Quality (Truthfulness), Quantity (Informativeness), Relation (Relevance) and
Manner (Clarity). Grice’s approach to human communication goes beyond the goal of encoding
messages to consider intentions which are central to his inferential communication model. Based
on Grice’s theory, Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson founded relevance theory as an approach to
human communication as a cognitive process (Sperber & Wilson, 1985, 1995, 1998, 2002, Wilson
& Sperber, 2002), a body of work which Gutt (1991) extended to theorize translation within an
inferential paradigm of communication.
Previous Researches
Ying Cao (2019) conducted a PhD dissertation titled “Humour and (Im)politeness in
Chinese Sitcom Discourse: A Case Study of Ipartment” at Western Sydney University. This
dissertation investigates the interaction between humour and (im)politeness in Chinese
sitcom discourse, using the popular sitcom Ipartment as a case study. This study employs a
combined theoretical framework, integrating Brock’s (2015) participation framework in
sitcom theory, the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) (Attardo, 1994), and
(im)politeness theories (Bousfield, 2008; Brown & Levinson, 1987; Culpeper, 2011), to
explore these interactions within the Chinese sitcom Ipartment. The research focuses on
four key aspects: (1) the semantic and pragmatic dimensions of humour, (2) the production
and reception of humour among characters, (3) the functions of humour at two
communicative levels (between the collective sender and TV viewers, and among
characters), and (4) the social and cultural aspects of humour in contemporary Chinese
discourse. Using the first season of Ipartment (20 episodes) as the primary corpus, the study

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introduces a new analytical framework to classify and interpret conversational humour,
identifying 2,861 lines of humour, with 1,526 classified as aggressive and 1,335 as non-
aggressive. The findings reveal a predominance of aggressive humour, often directed solely
at amusing TV viewers and resulting in power dynamics between characters. Non-
aggressive humour, in contrast, plays a more solidarity-based role. This study not only
proposes new definitions for conversational humour and its forms in sitcom discourse but
also contributes to understanding the socio-cultural implications of humour and
(im)politeness in Chinese communication.
Feng-shuo Pai (2017) conducted a dissertation titled Subtitling Humour from the
Perspective of Relevance Theory: The Office in Traditional Chinese (2017) at the
University College London. He investigates how relevance theory can explain the subtitling
strategies used to handle humour in the British sitcom The Office when translated from
English to Traditional Chinese. Pai constructs an English-Chinese Corpus of The Office
(ECCO), which contains sample texts, media files, and annotations, providing a rich
empirical basis for analysis. The study develops a typology of humour based on the concept
of frame and introduces a taxonomy of subtitling strategies to enhance the corpus. Through
both quantitative and qualitative analysis, Pai’s research demonstrates that the principle of
relevance plays a key role in the subtitling of humour, guiding the choice of subtitling
micro-strategies within broader macro-strategies. The study identifies a statistically
significant relationship between humour types and subtitling strategies and highlights the
subtle ways in which relevance theory operates, with the subtitler investing cognitive effort
to ensure the acceptability of subtitles. Furthermore, Pai classifies the degree of mutual
dependence between humour types and subtitling strategies into three levels: strong, weak,
and null, offering valuable insights into the complex interplay between humour and
subtitling.
Rafa Rejeibi’s 2022 PhD thesis, A Relevance Theoretic Approach to Explicating
Humour in Subtitling Sitcoms from English to Arabic, investigated the subtitling of humour
in How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) from English to Arabic. Rejeibi explores the use of
explicitation, a strategy that contrasts with typical subtitling norms, due to technical
constraints. The study applies relevance theory, along with frameworks for humour
rendering (Mateo, 1995) and explicitation as a macro-strategy. Findings show that
explicitation strategies, such as addition, substitution, and expansion, are employed to
disambiguate humour and enhance viewer understanding. The research concludes that less
incongruity in the source text leads to fewer explicitation strategies, and that humour’s
effectiveness increases when viewers infer underlying meanings, rather than having them
explicitly stated too early.
Maria del Carmen Curco Cobos’s (1997) PhD dissertation titled “The Pragmatics of
Humorous Interpretations: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach” at University College
London. This study explored how humorous effects are created and understood through the
cognitive framework of Relevance Theory. The thesis challenges linguistic theories that
treat verbal humour as an inherent property of language and instead argues that humour
arises from the mental representations hearers entertain during discourse processing. Cobos
critiques previous pragmatic analyses that assume humour violates the rules of non-
humorous discourse and requires special interpretive principles. The study suggests that

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 incongruity, as a cognitive device, leads hearers to perform inferences based on
metarepresentations, producing varying humorous effects. The thesis also considers the
relevance-theoretic implications for figurative language, particularly in metaphor and irony.

3. Methodology
The methodology of this research would include corpus collection and
corresponding analyses. The data would be taken from the Miranda, a sitcom partly
famous for its humor and welcomed by people from many countries. The analyses would
be going on according to the flouting of each maxim. And the theory of cooperative
principle by Grice (1975) and techniques of humour by Berger (2017) would be applied
to explain why the specific examples of verbal humor can produce humor. Both
qualitative and quantitative methods are used in the study. In this section, data collection
and data analysis will be followed by data interpretation.
3.1 Data Collection and Data Analysis
Miranda TV series aired from 2009 to 2015 and includes 3 seasons with episodes
of about 30 minutes. The data are collected by means of downloading. As a first step, the
researcher watches the original sitcom (Season 1, 2, 3) and downloads the scripts of the
sitcom from www.Springfieldspringfield.Co.Uk. Data are collected through observation,
initially of the occurrences of humour in scripts.
Firstly, the dialogues that flouted the conversational maxims are gathered for data
collection and data interpretation. Then, the types of conversational maxim being flouted
are identified and the techniques of humour which cause the flouting of the maxims are
analyzed. Finally, the humor in Miranda will also be analyzed in relation to its broader
cultural, social, and situational context, considering how societal norms, expectations, and
character dynamics contribute to the comedic effect.
Expected Outcomes and Implication
This research is significant for several reasons. First, it contributes to the growing
field of pragmatic analysis of humor, which explores how linguistic and contextual
elements interact to create meaning. Second, it sheds light on the unique features of
British sitcom humor, offering insights into how cultural nuances influence comedic
interpretation. Finally, the findings have practical implications for language teaching and
cross-cultural communication, as humor often poses challenges for language learners due
to its reliance on shared knowledge and contextual understanding.

References
Attardo, Salvatore. 1994. Linguistic Theories of Humor. Boston: De Gruyter Mouton
Berger, A.A.2017. An Anatomy of Humour. New York: Routledge
Bignell, Jonathan. 2010. “Television and the popular: viewing from the British perspec-tive”. Journal
of Literary Theory. https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt.2010.012.
Grice, H.P. 1989 (1975). Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, M.A: Harvard University Press.

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Hart, Miranda. 2014. The best of Miranda: favourite episodes plus added treats - such fun! London:
Hodder & Stoughton.

Krikmann, Arvo. 2006. “Contemporary Linguistic Theories of Humour”. Folklore: Elec tronic
Journal of Folklore, no. 33: 27-58, doi:10.7592/FEJF2006.33.kriku.
Raskin, Viktor. 1985. Semantic mechanisms of humor. Boston MA: D. Reidel.
Ross, Alison. 1998. The Language of Humour. London and New York: Routledge.
Wilson, D. and Sperber, D. 2002. Truthfulness and relevance. Mind 111: 583–632.
Wilson, D. and Sperber, D.2004. Relevance theory. In Horn and Ward (eds.), pp. 607–32.