This book examines the diverse forms of conversational humor with the help of examples drawn from casual interactions among Russian speakers. It argues that neither an exclusively discourse-analytic perspective on the phenomenon nor an exclusively cognitive one can adequately account for conversational joking. Instead, the work advocates reconciling these two perspectives in order to describe such humor as a form of cognitive and communicative creativity, by means of which interlocutors convey additional meanings and imply further interpretive frames. Accordingly, in order to analyze cognition in interaction, it introduces a discourse-semantic framework which complements mental spaces and blending theory with ideas from discourse analysis. On the one hand, this enables both the emergent and interactive character and the surface features of conversational joking to be addressed. On the other, it incorporates into the analysis those normally backgrounded cognitive processes responsible for the additional meanings emerging from, and communicated by jocular utterances.

Reza Arab, Griffith University, Australia, in The European Journal of Humor Research 11 (4), 2023.:
Understanding Conversational Joking by Nadine Thielemann offers a comprehensive overview of major theories and approaches to conversational humour and attempts at leveraging a variety of approaches, some of which have often been overlooked in humour studies. The extent of the review of the literature, as well as the examination of discourse examples from a variety of angles, provides a valuable source for humour scholars, particularly graduate students of humour studies. The eclectic approach of the book may not be entirely novel, but there are new, perceptive points of view offered in the book (e.g., adding interpretive sociolinguistics to conversation analysis) or some previous concepts are improved in definition, such as the very insightful discussion about norms, normalcy, frames, cognitive contrast, etc.