Abstract: Humour is a multi-disciplinary field of research. People have been working on humour in many fields like philosophy, psychology, sociology, literature, and linguistics. Within the linguistic field, humour can be evaluated from syntactic, pragmatic and semantic points of view. This paper work represents an attempt to show that research in pragmatic theory can contribute to our understanding of humour. The speech act theory has been selected, an exposition of which is followed by an account of how the theory can be applied to humour. Some research into humour has already been carried out using the speech act model. This is briefly described and evaluated. However, both the application of the theory to humour and its evaluation in this paper are mine.