50 that she would hunt him down with knives, which was really unlikely to happen.
This humorous speech which contained exaggeration evoked laughter from the hearer.
9. Wit
According to Shade 1996, wit is one form of verbal humour that intelligently connected two incongruous ideas, resulting in quick and out of the
cuff statement p.5. The researcher collected 13 samples of wit within the transcript and took two samples to be presented in table 4.9.
Table 4.9 Verbal Humour Sample: Wit
No Minute in
Radio Drama Dialogue
17 00.06.35
Carolyn : I dont have an airline. I have one jet. You
cannot put one jet in a line. If MJN is anything, it is an air dot.
41 00.17.47
Arthur :
Why does the air on the top have to keep up the air at the bottom? Why dont they
just … split up?
Douglas :For the sake of the kids?
Note: For complete list of wit, see appendix F. Humour number 17 showed how Carolyn intelligently connected two
incongruous ideas quickly. She successfully connected two different ideas, line and dot things connected to drawing and line in the word “airline”. She gave an
absurd analogy on airline by connecting it to line and dot. This analogy of two incongruous ideas created laughter from the audience.
Similar to the previous humour, connecting two incongruous ideas was also seen in humour number 41. In this humour, Douglas successfully connected
two different ideas which were the air in airplane wings that had to split up and PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
51 marriage.
He deliberately answered Arthur‟s question about why the air on the top should keep up with the air in the bottom instead of splitting up by saying that
they had to keep up because of the kid‟s sake. This absurd answer created a
humorous situation. From the discussion, it could be summarized that there were 67 verbal
humours collected within the object of the study. They fell into 9 categories, out of the 12 categorization proposed by Shade 1996: pun, riddle, joke, satire, farce,
irony, sarcasm, tall tale, and wit. The other three categories, limerick, parody, and anecdote had zero value.
Out of the nine categories, satire became the most frequent verbal humour that appeared within the object of the study with 20 satires collected out of 67
verbal humours 29.9. The second highest rank of appearance was irony 22.4, followed by wit 19.4, sarcasm 16.4, and joke 6.0. Each of the
last four categories, pun 1.5, riddle 1.5, farce 1.5, and tall tale 1.5, appeared only once throughout the object of the research.
B. Linguistic Analysis of Verbal Humour Found in BBC Radio Drama
Series Cabin Pressure: Abu Dhabi
This part is to answer research question number two. It focuses on how verbal humour found in BBC Radio Drama Series Cabin Pressure: Abu Dhabi is
analysed using General Theory of Verbal Humour GTVH. The discussion of the analysis is presented in this part as well.
General Theory of Verbal Humour, known as GTVH proposed by Attardo 1994, is used as the main theory to analyse the object of the research. The verbal
