people expend energy that is normally used to keep forbidden impulses. Laughter is an expression of the relief felt when the pressure is released.
The last is incongruity theory. Incongruity is usually defined as a conflict between what is expected and what actually occurs. According to Berger in
Anatomy, all humor involves some kind of a difference between what is expected and what is got. Schonpenhaur in Grotewell 2008:191 states that incongruity is
a mismatch when hearer expects to get an answer based on the understanding of common knowledge about certain things; however, the answer is contradictive or
even out of expectation. Three theories of humor can be applied in terms of language because
language and humor are inseparable. The best theory to explain the relation between language and humor is incongruity theory where linguist and humor
theorist have the same understanding: humor exists when there is incongruity in language. According to Jensen 2009:4, incongruity theory is one of the most
relevant in relation to language. Incongruity is regarded as something out of context. In doing conversation, people tend to fulfill some requirements, namely
cooperative principles, to achieve effective communication. Hence, when their response is out ouf context by being not cooperative, humor occurs.
As a conclusion, humor is created through language incongruity. Language incongruity appears when people break cooperative principles. The
aspect of language incongruity is analyzed in cooperative principles under pragmatics.
2. Pragmatics
Pragmatics is defined as the study of language in context Birner, 2012: 2. Hence, pragmatics is concerned with what speaker means in a given context
and how context influences what is said. Pragmatics Yule, 1996: 3 is also defined as the study of how more gets communicated than is said. Leech in Mey
1994: 5 states that speaker often means more than what she says. So, pragmatics deals with how speaker uses language, what speaker means and how
hearer interprets the words. Pragmatics has some fields in its study, i.e. deixis, speech acts,
conversational implicature, and cooperative principles. Deixis refers to ‘pointing via language’ Yule, 1998: 9. Birner 2012: 42
adds that the term deixis denotes the phenomena of using a linguistic expression to point some contexts available. Thus, deixis is clearly a form of referring that is
tied to the speaker’s context. Speech acts are based on the assumption that a word can perform an
action as well Yule, 1998: 48. Speech acts can perform acts such as making statements, making promise, or giving commands Yule, 1998: 53-54.
Conversational implicature is something meant, implied, or suggested deeper from what is said Yule, 1998: 35. Conversational implicature deals with
sentence uttered by speaker that can be understood by interpreting the meaning based on the context.
Cooperative principles is first coined by Grice 1975. Speaker attempts to be cooperative in conversation Briner, 2012: 21. Similar to Briner, Yule argues
that people involved in a conversation will cooperate with each other 1996:36- 37. Related to the focus study, cooperative principles is claimed to be able to
explain language in humor. Raskin 1985: 272-273 states that a basic assumption which underlies the following remarks is that a large number of humor involves
breaking one or more of Grice’s maxims. Hence, cooperative principles will be discussed further.
3. Cooperative principles
Cooperative principles requires speaker to contribute the conversation such as required, at the stage it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the
talk exchange in which speaker and hearer are engaged Yule, 1998: 37. According to cooperative principles, both speaker and hearer converse with the
willingness to deliver and interpret a message. The speaker and hearer cooperate to communicate efficiently.
Hence, to achieve effective communication, speaker and hearer have to fulfill cooperative principles which consists of four maxims: quality, quantity,
relation, and manner. There are two possibilities of conducting the maxims: the one is doing an observance of maxim and the other is doing a non-observance of
