The Creation of Humor in Ronny Chieng: Asian Comedian Destroys America!

Abstract

Communication is carried out to exchange information and requires the fulfillment of the cooperative principles so that the goals of communication can be achieved. However, in the context of comedy or humor, violations of cooperative principles are actually explored optimally. Violations of maxims and use of language are managed in such a way so that humor, which is similar to joke, can be created. Nowadays, a comedy performance full of humor that is quite popular in society is stand-up comedy. One of the Asian comics who is well known and has the opportunity to present stand-up comedy materials across the continents is Ronny Chieng. In the Netflix stand-up comedy show "Ronny Chieng: Asian Comedian Destroys America!", Chieng expressed humorous materials about not only the United States but also Asian society. The purpose of this research is to analyze what types of maxim violated in the stand-up comedy performance and how these maxim violations contribute to creating humor. This research uses a qualitative descriptive method in the form of interpreting patterns and meanings in the data, categorizing types of maxim violation and their function to create humor found in the stand-up comedy performance. From the analysis of the maxim violations based on Grice’s theory, Chieng uses quality maxim violation (38.62%) more than other maxim violations as he often gives too much information than needed. A lot of humor is conveyed in the form of verbal irony (49.21%) because many of Chieng’s statements are the opposite of what he truly means.