Experts studying verbal humor often use Grice’s maxims to understand why certain words or phrases are amusing.

H. Paul Grice suggested effective communications are complete, accurate, relevant, and clear.

When a statement or question lacks any of these qualities, however, vulnerabilities are also highlighted.

Verbal humor is a common subcategory in the pantheon of laughter stimuli; it joins behaviors including slapstick, pranks, and various forms of performance humor. Over the decades, scholars have followed numerous paths to understand why people find certain words or phrases amusing, and one of these is based on Grice’s four maxims. H. Paul Grice made the case that effective verbal communication possesses four basic properties—quantity, quality, relation, and manner—each category is described by one or more “maxims.” (Grice, 1975.)

Briefly, quantity refers to making one’s input no less informative than required, but not more than necessary to avoid inefficiency. Quality relates to one’s input being truthful and supported by evidence. Relation (relevance) requires one’s contribution to be on topic until the subject has organically changed. Good manner ensures one’s speech is clear, orderly, and avoids ambiguity.

Some humor scholars have used these Gricean maxims to explain why verbal humor results in laughter (Dia, 2023; Novebry and Rosa, 2019). Exchanges between two or more individuals in which these rules are violated represent a breach of one’s expectations. This, in turn, makes the episode consistent with the incongruity theory, one of the top four or five “traditional”........

© Psychology Today