BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

3 books, Dogmatix books etc. Asterix is so popular. He even has his own theme park and movies retrieved from http:www.oxfordbookstore.comdotcomoxford- archivesin_our_good_booksasterix_fun_facts.htm, accessed on September 2014. The Asterix comics are based on the history of the Gauls, and is generally set in 50 BC in a Gaulish French village in Armorica Brittany, which is trying to hold out against the invading Romans. Uderzo continued to produce Asterix books after Goscinny died in 1977, but they have not been as popular as the Goscinny is. The main characters in the Asterix books are Asterix, the hero; Obelix, Asterix’s friend; and Dogmatix, Obelix’s dog, and there have been approximately 400 other characters throughout the series. Asterix comics uses lots of puns, caricatures and other humour, as well as the phrase “These Romans are crazy”. Asterix comic book characters have their Gaul names end in ‘ix’, like Asterix, ‘us’ for the Roman’s names, eg. Pseudonymus , and towns that end in ‘um’, like Aquarium retrieved from http:www.oxfordbookstore.com- dotcomoxfordarchivesin_our_good_booksasterix_fun_facts.htm, accessed on September 2014. Humor in Asterix is typically European nation, often centering on puns, caricatures, and tongue-in-cheek stereotypes of contemporary European nations and French regions. Much of the humor in the initial Asterix books is French- specific, which has delayed the translation of the books into other languages due to the risk of losing the native essence of the stories. Some translations have actually added local humor: in the Italian translation, the Roman legionnaires are 4 made to speak in 20th century Roman slang. The recent publications share a more universal humor, both written and visual retrieved from http:www.oxfordbookstore.comdotcomoxfordarchivesin_our_good_booksast erix_fun_facts.htm, accessed on September 2014. In spite of this stereotyping and some alleged streaks of French chauvinism, it has been very well received by European and Francophone cultures around the world. Allegations of French chauvinism are in fact ironic considering that Uderzo is of Italian descent, and Goscinny was of Ukrainian-Polish Jewish descent retrieved from http:www.oxfordbookstore.comdotcomoxfordarchives- in_our_good_booksasterix_fun_facts.htm, accessed on September 2014. The language in comic is very simple. However, the pictures in it help the reader to understand the context better. It is not certain that language used in comics is different from other sources such as soap operas of jokes, since it is created with simple words and conversation which can be easily understood. However, there is often hidden meaning in those words and characters’ utterances which are interesting and challenging for the reader to interpret what is hidden. As the matter of fact, humor is not only meant for the sake of fun, but it can be used for serious linguistics investigation. Pragmatics deals with the interpretation of the speaker and contextual meaning. Through pragmatic analysis, people can examine what the speakers suppose to recognize the meaning of the sentence they speak to act accordingly. There are possibilities that misinterpretations in the conversation between the speaker and the hearer can produce a humor. For example, when it comes to the 5 correlation between implicature and humor, we have to know how the humor comes out. By violating some of the maxims, it may result in some unimaginable effects that could cause laughters. For example, if the first maxim of quality is flouted, there may appear a metaphor, a hyperbole and others. This paper analyzes the funny conversations between characters in Asterix comic which lead to laugh. The analysis will employ the elements of pragmatics such as speech acts and cooperative principles. Beside this upcoming research, they are many researchers have done a lot of works from different aspects to study humor. The present researcher can mention a research conducted by Yao Xiaosu in 2008 entitled Conversational Implicature Analysis of Humor in American Situation Comedy “Friends” conducted. In this study, Xiaosu analyzes the dialogue in the scene of situation comedy using cooperative principle by Grice. Xiaosu focuses on the visual-verbal humor in which laughter is the indicator of humor. Xiaosu also points out the difference between being polite and being humorous. The present researcher believes that there are more and more studies of humor and she wants to contribute as one of the researchers who conduct a study about humor. The second previous study is conducted by Fatoye Janet Abiola in 2011 entitled A Pragmatics Analysis of Selected Cartoons from Nigerian Dailies ‘The Guardian’, ‘The Punch’ and ‘The Nation’. In her research, she tries to find out how language can be used to describe and express ideas, emotions and feelings such as participants, context, message, presupposition, intention, reference, mutual contextual belief MCB, inference and implicature. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 6 Another similar study is also conducted by Eva Capkova in 2012. Her study entitles Pragmatics Principles and Humor in ‘The IT Crowd’. Her study is about the discussion and verbal humor in the sitcom which was presented using the perspective of Gricean principle of communication, cooperative principle and politeness principle proposed by Leech. All maxims and sub maxims of these principles were addressed so that they could be later examined in relation to humor. She also applies the cooperative and politeness principle to prove that violation and flouting of these principles can result in humorous instances. From those three studies, the first study analyzes a sitcom and focuses on the laughter as the indicator of humor. The second study analyses cartoon strips in newspaper and focuses on the language used to describe and express ideas, emotions and feelings. The third study analyzes a sitcom and focuses on verbal humor. However, this thesis investigates more about humor in a comic, not only from the conversation between the characters, but it also investigates the humor which is produced by the picture and the expression of the characters in the comic. This study employs cooperative principle theory by Grice and speech act theory by Searle.

B. FORMULATION OF THE PROBLEMS

The problems of this study are formulates as follows: 1. How does the speech act of the conversations in Asterix at the Olympic Games comic produce humor? 7 2. How does the maxim of the conversation in Asterix at the Olympic Games comic produce humor? 3. What are the non linguistics context of the comic which help producing humor?

C. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

This research is aimed to answer the questions formulated in the research questions. To consider the questions presented beforehand, there will be three research objectives as the responses of those questions. The first objective is to determine the speech act of the conversation which makes the conversation humorous. To achieve this objective, the researcher examines the conversation using speech act theory. . In accordance with the first objective, the second objective analyzes the kinds of violated or fluting maxim which produce humor. It describes why the conversation is humorous. The third objective is to find out the non linguistics aspect of the comic which help producing humor.

D. BENEFITS OF THE STUDY

By conducting this research, the researcher hopes that it will bring two benefits in the theoretical and practical fields. Theoretically, the researcher hopes that this research may give a contribution to English Language studies especially in pragmatic study of implicature. Hopefully, the findings of this research also can enhance knowledge on pragmatic especially implicature. It can give contribution PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 8 in the analysis of any kind of text, especially in comic strips. It involves the understanding of the implied meaning of the text. Practically, this research is expected to provide contribution to comic writers and their readers. It is important to comic writer to understand the implicature so that she can make a good joke. However, it is also important to the reader to understand the implicature so that they can understand the jokes. The jokes can be success only if the readers understand the implication of it. The researcher also hopes that this research can be beneficial for the students of English Department so that they can learn that the study of implicature can be applied to understand more about jokes.