Behind The Humor: Implicatures in Stand-Up Comedy Mens Rea

Abstract

Stand-up comedy serves not only as entertainment but also as an indirect means of conveying sensitive sociopolitical criticism to the public. This study examines how maxim flouting generates conversational implicatures to convey humor and sociopolitical criticism in the stand-up comedy show Mens Rea. It aims to identify the forms of maxim flouting and conversational implicature found in the show. The study is expected to contribute to the development of pragmatic studies, particularly in understanding the use of conversational implicature in humorous discourse as a medium for conveying sociopolitical criticism. A qualitative descriptive approach was adopted, with utterances that flouted the maxims serving as the primary data source. Data collection was conducted through observation and documentation, by recording Mens Rea’s stand-up comedy shows on Netflix. The recordings were transcribed into text to facilitate data analysis.  Data analysis was conducted using descriptive qualitative methods to identify and interpret flouts of maxims, which reveal the implicit meanings of these utterances, guided by Grice’s (1975) theoretical framework. This study concludes that there are flouts of the maxims of relevance, quantity, and quality. Furthermore, there were both generalized and particularized conversational implicatures, indicating that the interpretation of humor is highly dependent on contextual knowledge of Indonesia's social and political conditions. This underscores that Mens Rea’s stand-up comedy goes beyond mere entertainment, serving as a medium for indirect sociopolitical criticism delivered through humor by flouting the cooperative principle of communication, thereby generating implicit meaning.