2 Overview.2
2.1 Overview of Relevance Theory2
2.2 Overview of Friends.4
3 Interpretation of Humor in Friends from the Perspective of Relevance Theory.5
3.1 Relevance Theoretic Account of Mechanism of Humor Generation in Friends………….…5
3.2 Relevance Theoretic Account of Influencing Factors of Intensity of Humorous Effect in Friends10
4 Conclusion15
Bibliography16
 1 Introduction
Humor is a universal human phenomenon and very impressive in many aspects of life. It is just like a special human communication which always the most welcome one. Humor is from a multidisciplinary perspective, including areas such as linguistics, rhetoric, philosophy, aesthetics, and sociological studies of people, but is little theoretical research from cognitive pragmatics.
Friends is a very famous sitcom, its main feature is its humor. It is a comedy sitcom, or to say, visual communication patterns of a language originally designed for radio, but usually appear on television today. Typically regular feature comedy format, or inside a humorous story about the common scenarios, such as the home or workplace. Humor comedy has its own characteristics.
Therefore, this article will prove the best resort to humor the greatest relevance to understand the transition associated with language, logic, communication association achieve relevance theory. This paper also summarizes the application of humor in the words of Friends. My paper will be pided into three parts, the theory outlined in the context of the theory of relevance theory friend and humorous analysis. I draw the following conclusions: relevance theory provides a useful sitcom humor in words. It is recommended in real life, humor, sitcom, sitcom cultural differences, language humor should be in future studies.
 
2 Overview
Humor is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. People of all ages and cultures respond to humor. Most people are able to experience humor—to be amused, to smile or laugh at something funny—and thus are considered to have a sense of humor. The hypothetical person lacking a sense of humor would likely find the behavior induced by humor to be inexplicable, strange, or even irrational. Though ultimately decided by personal taste, the extent to which a person finds something humorous depends on a host of variables, including geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education, intelligence and context. By contrast, more sophisticated forms of humor such as satire require an understanding of its social meaning and context, and thus tend to appeal to more mature audiences.
2.1 Overview of Relevance Theory
Relevance theory is a proposal by Dan Sperber (1942) and Deirdre Wilson (1938) that seeks to explain the second method of communication: one that takes into account implicit inferences. It argues that the hearer/reader/audience will search for meaning in any given communication situation and having found meaning that fits their expectation of relevance, will stop processing. Relevance theory may be seen as an attempt to work out in detail one of Grice’s (1913) central claims: that an essential feature of most human communication, both verbal and non-verbal, is the expression and recognition of intentions.
Relevance is the concept of one topic being connected to another topic in the way that makes it useful to consider the first topic when considering the second. The concept of relevance is studied in many different fields, including cognitive sciences, logic, and library and information science. Most fundamentally, however, it is studied in epistemology. Different theories of knowledge have different implications for what is considered relevant and these fundamental views have implications for all other fields as well.
There are two ways to conceive of how thoughts are communicated from one person to another. The first way is through the use of strict coding and decoding. In this approach the speaker/author encodes their thoughts and transmits them to their audience. The audience receives the encoded message and decodes it to arrive at the meaning the speaker/author intended. The second way of conceiving how thoughts are communicated is by the author/speaker only conveying as much information as is needed in any given context, so that the audience can recover their intended meaning from what was said/written as well as from the context and implications. In this conceptual model, the author takes into account the context of the communication and the mutual cognitive environment between the author and the audience. They then say just enough to communicate what they intend - relying on the audience to fill in the details that they did not explicitly communicate. (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) 关联理论分析《老友记》中的言语幽默行为(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_37749.html