'I'm Going to Remember This Audition for a Long, Long Time!': Simon Cowell's Compliments on Spectacular Performances on America's Got Talent and Britain's Got Talent

Most studies on talent competition shows (e.g., Culpeper & Holmes, 2013; Garces-Conejos Blitvich et al., 2013; Tang, 2016) do not delve into the role of judges giving positive comments to contestants. This paper investigates Simon Cowell's compliments given to Golden Buzzer winners on America's Got Talent (henceforth AGT) and Britain's Got Talent (henceforth BGT) between 2016 and 2020. Apart from the studies on compliments being scarce, the existing coding schemes are not fine-grained. This paper improves the coding schemes. Moreover, previous studies on compliments (e.g., Chen & Rau, 2015; Lin, 2020) compared judges' pragmatic variations cross-culturally, but none of them compared the pragmatic variations of an individual judge. This paper then explores Cowell's pragmatic variations while serving as a judge on AGT and BGT over the last five years. Data was collected from Golden-Buzzer winning auditions uploaded on YouTube. Cowell's compliments were transcribed and later analyzed according to the modified coding schemes. Results show that there were some pragmatic variations in Cowell's use of compliments. He used a greater number of explicit compliment strategies and more explicit compliment sub-strategies on AGT. Such pragmatic variations, however, are small, and there are marked similarities.