Linguistic Analysis of Wordplay in Friends

This graduate thesis delves into the linguistics of humor and wordplay in the popular TV show Friends, through the lens of Relevance Theory and the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH). By combining a corpus linguistics approach and discourse analysis, the research meticulously sifts through transcripts of 14 episodes of Friends to chart the frequency and variety of linguistic means of achieving humorous effects. Humor in Friends is deftly woven with puns, double entendres, rhetorical devices, lexical and phonological ambiguities, as well as other types of wordplay, necessitating a shared cultural and linguistic understanding for it to have full effect. The thesis aims to show how different characters’ personality traits are enhanced using different types of wordplay.