A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF HUMOR AS REFLECTED BY THE MAIN CHARACTERS IN PINK’S ACCEPTED MOVIE

This research aims to answer three objectives which are: (1) to identify the \nmaxims which are flouted by the main characters to create humor in Pink‟s \nAccepted movie; (2) to describe the forms of humor expressed by the main \ncharacters through maxim flouting in Pink‟s Accepted movie; and (3) to explain \nthe functions of humor expressed by the main characters through maxim flouting \nin Pink‟s Accepted movie. \nThis research employed the descriptive qualitative method. The data were \nin the form of utterances i.e. words, clauses, phrases, and sentences. The contexts \nof the data were dialogues. The source of the data was an American comedy \nmovie entitled Accepted. The data were collected by watching the movie, \nretrieving the movie transcript, checking the suitability between the movie and the \ntranscript, watching and re-watching the movie to find the relevant data, \nidentifying the dialogues in the movie which are in accordance with the research \nobjectives, and recording the data into the data sheet. Furthermore, the researcher \nemployed some steps in analyzing the data which are: classifying the flouting of \nmaxims of Cooperative Principle employed by the main characters to create \nhumor; analyzing the forms and functions of humor which appear through the \nflouting of maxims; identifying the errors in the data collection to gain appropriate \ndata; and drawing conclusions for the research questions. Finally, the data \nfindings were triangulated by two linguistics students. \nThere are three findings found in this research. The first finding reveals \nthat the main characters in Accepted movie employ all types of maxim flouting, \ni.e. flouting of maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of manner and \nmaxim of relation to create humorous utterances. Meanwhile, flouting of quality \nmaxim becomes the most frequent way to create humor. The second finding \nshows that there are two forms of humor found as the result of maxim flouting \ndone by the main characters in Accepted movie: jokes and spontaneous \nconversational humor. The third finding depicts that the four functions of humor, \ni.e social management, decommitment, mediation and defunctionalization, are \nemployed by the main characters in Accepted movie. Social management becomes \nthe most employed function since the dialogues were mostly occured in everyday \nsocial interaction.