Humor

as an enduring research topic

the earliest research on which can be back to the era of Platon and Aristotle in Ancient Greece. Since then scholars from different areas use different methods to study humor

summed up many theories on humor from various perspectives

such as linguistics

rhetoric and aesthetics

philosophy and sociology. This paper starting from the violation of the cooperative principle and politeness principle point of view

to study the humor in modern American sitcoms

aims to reveal the intrinsic mechanism of humor

to help people better understand and appreciate the American sitcom. Ten to twenty-one episodes in the third season of “The Big Bang Theory” have been selected as the corpus in this study. Through the analysis of the violation of the cooperative principle and the politeness principle of conversation

the essay finds that a great deal of humor in American sitcom is produced by violating the CP and PP and a series of rules of them. This finding contributes to a certain extent to the generation and interpretation of humor in American sitcoms

which helps Chinese audiences to better appreciate American situation comedies.