Psychology Today | 29.04.2026 22:48
Verbal humor is a common subcategory in the pantheon of laughter stimuli; it joins behaviors including slapstick, pranks, and various forms of performance humor. Over the decades, scholars have followed numerous paths to understand why people find certain words or phrases amusing, and one of these is based on Grice’s four maxims. H. Paul Grice made the case that effective verbal communication possesses four basic properties—quantity, quality, relation, and manner—each category is described by one or more “maxims.” (Grice, 1975.)
