Forms of Humour Created through Maxim Flouting in Churchill Show Comedy Performances

Abstract

Verbal humour has presented itself as a complicated phenomenon to linguists over the years due to its inherently dissociative properties. Sometimes the very essence of humour lies in defying the rules of language usage. Language usage in verbal humour is embedded in the jokes that the comedians perform and are the mechanisms involved in maxim flouting. In the process of maxim flouting conversational implicatures arise and when it is inconsistent with what we expect, humour generates. Out of the generated humour additional information is embedded. The study examined the forms of humour that emerge as a result of stand-up comedians flouting the conversational maxims in Churchill Show in Kenya. The study relied on the Gricean cooperative principle and the principles of Relevance theory to explain the maxims flouted by stand-up comedians. The study adopted a descriptive qualitative research. The primary data of study comprised purposively selected utterances from stand-up comedy performances from 2011 to 2019 in Churchill Show. 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. The findings revealed that comedians in Churchill Show create different forms of humour by taking advantage of rhetorical techniques such as hyperbole, satire, irony, stereotyping and self-deprecation. It is recommended that future research should investigate the most flouted maxim by comedians in Churchill Show can be carried out. Additionally, another study can be conducted on rhetoric strategies that stand-up comedians employ in Churchill Show and which of the strategies are the most exploited.