What lies beyond and within humour: A relevance-theoretic approach to propositional meanings in the sitcom Modern Family

Advancing the proposal that conversationalists frequently engage in humorous communication to convey propositional meanings, the paper aims to employ pragmatic inferential mechanisms specified in a relevance-theoretic framework in order to explicate the viewer’s recovery of additional cognitive effects in sitcom discourse. On this observation, it is assumed that processing of humorous utterances may result in the recipient’s being amused and/ or in making more insightful observations concerning goals a speaker wishes to attain. For example, an interactant would like to communicate a potentially impolite meaning, which is mitigated by means of humour. The corpus is drawn from the American situation comedy Modern Family (2009-2020), created by Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd. The focus in the paper is on how the viewer can grasp meanings that are (un)intentionally communicated by the production crew while s/he is sitting comfortably in the armchair. The main thrust of the present paper is twofold. First, extra cognitive effects can be best described in terms of propositional meanings they communicate, which in turn necessitates a relevance-theoretic notion of weak communication. Second, I postulate that accessing humorous effects is just the first step in order to fully understand a conversational episode in the sitcom, granted that viewers may be eager to spend more processing effort in exchange for extra cognitive rewards. It is frequently the case that the recipient’s mental representations are strengthened or challenged by the production crew’s (cultural) representations. More specifically, it will be demonstrated that the functions of conveying and/ or challenging of social norms, disclosing character-specific information and providing cultural references aim to strengthen or challenge the viewer’s personal beliefs.