The linguistic study of “Humor” has a rich and long history, and the systematic research on linguistic mechanisms of humor goes back to Raskin’s semantic theory of humor (1985). Besides the elements such as incongruity, ambiguity and exaggeration, flouting of Grice maxims (1975) of Cooperative Principle (CP) is one of the most reviewed techniques of producing humor, which has been the subject of various linguistics studies. In this research, we study the role of maxim flouting in producing so-called “pa-na-pa” (“so what” conversational style) jokes, which have been recently spread initially on the Internet and then in the society. We also depict the process in a three-part algorithm. This new generation of Iranian jokes is considerable not  only because of their linguistic but also because of its sociolinguistics characteristics in which there is no trace of insulting language toward social and ethnic minorities that itself shows a paradigm shift in Iranian jokes.  

Keywords: Linguistics, Cooperative principle, Maxim flouting, humor

Full-Text [PDF 228 kb]   (4906 Downloads)