Exploring George Carlin’s Construction and Forms of Death-Themed Humor Script in “It’s Bad for Ya” Stand-Up Comedy Show : A Study of Pragmatics

Abstract

This study deals with the exploration of the construction and delivering style of George Carlin‟s stand-up comedy show entitled “It’s Bad for Ya!” especially in the death-themed part. There are two theories that are used in this research. They are Grice‟s cooperative principles (1975) to see how Carlin constructed the humor in his jokes and Berger‟s rhetorical devices of humor (1997) to know the way he delivered his jokes to the audience that could be accepted and laughed even though it was a taboo thing. This research was conducted using qualitative method since the data were in the form of utterances and case study as its strategy research because this research was just focus on death-themed script in Carlin‟s stand-up comedy show. Meanwhile, the data were the humorous utterances which talk about death in the script of “It’s Bad for Ya!”. There were 24 jokes that were obtained by transcribing the utterances from the video that had characteristics of violation of Cooperative Principles. The result of this research shows that there are four subtopics in Carlin‟s stand-up comedy show in death-theme. They are things related to death, people‟s sympathy on death, people‟s emotional thought on death, and people‟s belief on death. Carlin dominantly violated the maxim of relation when discussing about the things related to death. The jokes which talked about people‟s sympathy and emotional thought on death were dominantly constructed by violating the maxim of quality. He tended to use violation of manner when talking about people‟s belief on death. Subsequently, there have been found 4 forms of 15 rhetorical devices of humor in this research. They are sarcasm, exaggeration, facetiousness, and irony. He totally disagreed with people‟s perspective on death. He used humor as the media to show his thoughts about taboo especially death. In the first.