The Comedy of Miscommunication: A Pragmatic Analysis of “Chicken Shop Date” YouTube Interview Series

Grice’s Cooperative Principle (1975) helps listeners understand both explicit and implicit utterances, allowing them to evaluate a speaker’s cooperativeness in a conversation. Although the four Gricean maxims are designed to facilitate communication, they are sometimes deliberately flouted. While maxim flouting has been widely studied in political interviews, its use in entertainment contexts remains underexplored. This paper examines how conversational maxims from Grice’s Cooperative Principle (1975) are flouted in the popular YouTube series Chicken Shop Date. Using a qualitative content analysis, four interviews with Andrew Garfield, Sabrina Carpenter, Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, and Jennifer Lawrence were transcribed and analysed to identify the types of maxims flouted and explain them using Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Strategies. Findings show that the Maxim of Quality was most frequently flouted, often through humour, irony, and teasing, reflecting both positive and negative politeness strategies. The study contributes to research on pragmatics in unscripted entertainment media while also promoting the importance of media literacy for audiences.