Kim Badin Humorous Impoliteness in The Big Bang Theory and Sherlock: Conveying Humour with Offensive Language -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BADIN Kim. Humorous Impoliteness in The Big Bang Theory and Sherlock: Conveying Humour with Offensive Language, sous la direction de Lucile Bordet et Denis Jamet . - Lyon: Université Jean Moulin (Lyon 3), 2016. Mémoire soutenu le 01/06/2016. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Document diffusé sous le contrat Creative Commons « Paternité – pas d’utilisation commerciale - pas de modification » : vous êtes libre de le reproduire, de le distribuer et de le communiquer au public à condition d’en mentionner le nom de l’auteur et de ne pas le modifier, le transformer, l’adapter ni l’utiliser à des fins commerciales. Mémoire de Master 2 Etudes Anglophones Faculté des langues Kim BADIN Humorous Impoliteness in The Big Bang Theory and Sherlock: Conveying Humour with Offensive Language Mémoire dirigé par : Lucile BORDET Denis JAMET Année universitaire 2015-2016 Humorous Impoliteness in The Big Bang Theory and Sherlock: Conveying Humour with Offensive Language Kim BADIN Acknowledgements I would like to express my thanks to Lucile Bordet and Denis Jamet for their time and useful remarks and to Caroline Vaslin, Yoan Sechi and Pierre Mazzolini for proofreading some passages. Contents General introduction ......................................................................................................... 6 Part I: Theories of humour ............................................................................................ 10 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 11 1. What is humour? .......................................................................................................... 11 1.1 Humours ................................................................................................................. 12 1.2 How humour developed ......................................................................................... 13 1.3 Different types of humour ...................................................................................... 14 2. Henri Bergson and the mechanical theory ................................................................... 18 2.1 Bergson’s laws of laughter .................................................................................... 18 2.2 General theory and comedy of forms and gestures/movements ............................ 20 2.3 Situation and language-based comedy ................................................................... 22 2.4 Comedy of character .............................................................................................. 26 3. Incongruity theories ..................................................................................................... 28 3.1 Beattie, Kant and Schopenhauer ............................................................................ 28 3.2 Incongruity or incongruities? ................................................................................. 30 4. Other theories ............................................................................................................... 31 4.1 The superiority theory ............................................................................................ 31 4.2 The release theory .................................................................................................. 32 4.3 The Benign Violation Theory (BVT) .................................................................... 33 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 35 Part II: Theories of impoliteness ................................................................................. 36 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 37 1. Politeness theories ........................................................................................................ 37 1.1 Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory (1987) ................................................... 38 1.1.1 Positive and negative face ............................................................................... 38 1.1.2 Face-Threatening Acts (FTAs) ....................................................................... 39 1.1.3 The sociological variables .............................................................................. 39 1.1.4 Realisations of politeness strategies in language ............................................ 41 1.2 Watts’s theory of (im)politeness ............................................................................ 45 1.2.1 (im)politeness1 and (im)politeness2 ................................................................ 45 1.2.2 Politic behaviour and polite behaviour ........................................................... 46 1.2.3 Bourdieu’s habitus and Watts’s ‘emergent networks’ .................................... 47 2. Impoliteness as politeness’s ‘parasite’ (Culpeper 1996) ............................................. 49 2.1 Inherent impoliteness vs. mock impoliteness ........................................................ 49 2.2 Why are we impolite? ............................................................................................ 50 2.3 Brown and Levinson’s reversed model ................................................................. 51 3. Understanding impoliteness (Culpeper 2011) ............................................................. 53 3.1 Face, social norms and sociality rights .................................................................. 54 3.1.1 Quality face, relational face and social identity face ...................................... 54 3.1.2 Impoliteness and social norms ........................................................................ 56 3.1.3 Sociality rights: Equity and Association rights ............................................... 57 3.2 Impoliteness and intentionality .............................................................................. 58 3.3 Impoliteness and emotions..................................................................................... 59 3.4 Impoliteness and power ......................................................................................... 60 3.5 Entertaining impoliteness and creativity ................................................................ 61 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 64 Part III: General corpus study of humorous impoliteness .................................... 65 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 66 1. Presentation of the corpus ............................................................................................ 66 1.1 The Big Bang Theory ............................................................................................. 66 1.2 Sherlock ................................................................................................................. 68 1.3 A few extra notes about the corpus ........................................................................ 70 2. Conventionalised formulaic impoliteness .................................................................... 71 2.1 Culpeper’s impoliteness formulae (2011) .............................................................. 71 2.2 Examples ................................................................................................................ 74 3. Non-conventionalised impoliteness: Implicational impoliteness ................................ 78 3.1 Form-driven impoliteness ...................................................................................... 78 3.1.1 Flouting Grice’s maxims of conversation ....................................................... 78 3.1.2 Mimicry/Imitation ........................................................................................... 81 3.2 Convention-driven impoliteness ............................................................................ 82 3.2.1 Internal mismatch ........................................................................................... 83 3.2.2 External mismatch .......................................................................................... 87 3.3 Nonpoliteness and underpoliteness ........................................................................ 89 4. Dysphemistic directness .............................................................................................. 93 4.1 Taboos and dysphemisms ...................................................................................... 93 4.2 Examples ................................................................................................................ 95 4.2.1 Death ............................................................................................................... 95 4.2.2 Menstruation ................................................................................................... 96 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................