Sharp wit, northern grit and verbal sparring in Happy Valley

Building on Simpson’s (2004, p. 7) argument that the ‘gateway’ to interpreting a text is to view it as contextual discourse and address, amongst other things, how it operates pragmatically, in this chapter Christiana Gregoriou applies a range of classic models in pragmatic analysis, including conversational cooperation, speech act and politeness theories, to scenes from the television series Happy Valley. The Yorkshire-set series is also analysed through concepts related to schematic characterisation and dialect to demonstrate how stylistic analysis can shed light on the ways in which British humour is linked to various kinds of social and linguistic conflict. Gregoriou’s analysis uncovers and highlights the operation of prejudiced social schemata related to class, gender, age and dialect use.