Esther Linares Bernabéu: The Pragmatics of Humour in Interactive Contexts

Linares-Bernabéu’s edited collection, The Pragmatics of Humour in Interactive Contexts, is a significant recent addition to humor scholarship. As the title suggests, the volume is concerned squarely with pragmatic issues around interactional humor. With this goal in mind, the collection further advances our understanding of these matters in a variety of different settings. A remarkable breadth of content is covered, with three thematically differentiated sections each focusing on a different pragmatic context of interactional humor. In doing so, the volume combines more traditional areas of humor study with modern ones, linking seemingly disparate areas into one coherent piece. As a result, the collection caters to a wide audience and significantly develops pragmatic humor scholarship.

After a brief introduction by Linares-Bernabéu, in which she situates the work in the field, the collection commences with the first section. Reflecting the digital zeitgeist, the chapters in this section investigate interactional humor in online settings. In the first chapter, Yus and Maíz-Arévalo explore humorous Covid memes prevalent during the peak of the pandemic. Using the classic incongruity-resolution theory of humor, the authors analyze a range of memes, taxonomizing them into different categories, depending on how the incongruity and subsequent resolution manifest. Memes are unique in the context of incongruity-resolution, as they contain an image, accompanied by text. Therefore, the taxonomy consequently differs from a typical verbal joke. First drawing on a distinction between frame-based and discourse-based incongruity, the authors discover that the image of a meme plays different roles in the recognition and resolution of incongruity. They analyze the memes along a four-part matrix, depending on whether they are discourse- or frame-based, and whether the image is necessary or unnecessary to resolve the incongruity. The authors also note how Covid memes differ from other memes, in that the former played a therapeutic role, helping people to cope through the uncertain times of Covid in 2020.

The next chapter similarly examines memes, but in a different context, namely those posted on Twitter in the political milieu of the 2019 General Election in Spain. Using the General Theory of Verbal Humor, the authors analyze both the memes themselves, and their responses. In this way, a single tweet can become the catalyst for a sequence of interactional humor, given that it receives responses which negotiate a humorous interchange. It transpired that the majority of responses oriented to the initial meme as humorous and showed appreciation for its humorous content. At a different level, the chapter adroitly demonstrates how the sequences of humor generated by the memes serve as sites for subversive humor, challenging political power by constructing it as incongruous in some way. One minor theoretical critique of the chapter is its equivocality in understanding the replies to memes as interactional, when the reply does not appear to respond to the initial meme in a sequential manner but evaluates its content.

Bischetti and Attardo contribute the next chapter. The authors examine interactional humor around an ironic tweet by Ricky Gervais, in which the comedian purports not to understand why he was not invited to host the Oscars in 2021. In the tweet, Gervais references a controversial Golden Globes appearance that he made in 2020, and ironically ruminates as to whether it was “something he said” which led to him not hosting the Oscars. Bischetti and Attardo consider responses to this tweet in the analysis, categorizing them into four broad categories: compliments, critiques, literal or figurative, and unrelated. These categories are measured quantitatively, with compliments emerging as the most frequent by a significant margin. The authors also offer a qualitative angle, selecting some tweets to analyze in more micro-level detail. Overall, this chapter furthers our understanding of the pragmatic mechanisms behind responses to irony in online platforms, particularly those with medium affordances such as Twitter.

Rounding off the first section is a fascinating contribution by Chovanec and Tsakona, which investigates the ever more relevant topic of ‘risky’ humor, in the context of comment threads on a YouTube video pondering the appropriacy of joking about the 2019 Notre Dame fire. The risky humor that the authors analyze cross-cuts two categories: disaster humor and religious humor. The humor is analyzed qualitatively, with the authors identifying a recurrent pattern in the humorous sequences. There is an initial humorous comment, which is then responded to. These responses comprise both thematically or structurally similar humorous comments, as well as metapragmatic comments, evaluating the appropriacy, or lack thereof, of humor in the overarching context.

Returning to the more traditional site of face-to-face interaction, the contributions in the second section center on more mundane, everyday interaction in face-to-face settings.

The first chapter by Sheikhan and Haugh is concerned with humor among intercultural interactants getting acquainted. The authors provide a significant theoretical contribution to further reconciling the conceptual gap between interactional and cognitive approaches to humor. Employing aspects of Blending Theory, combined with an interactional pragmatics analysis, this chapter analyses the way in which asymmetrical access to knowledge, deriving from different cultural backgrounds, can impact on sequences of humor. The analysis deftly elucidates the importance of epistemics in intercultural humor and, indeed, interactional humor more generally.

The next chapter delves into interactional humor in everyday Spanish interactions, and their connections to (im)politeness evaluations. The author, Ruiz-Gurillo, utilizes a production-evaluation model of (im)politeness in interactional humor, conducting a qualitative analysis of humorous sequences. From the analysis, she taxonomizes each sequence into two categories, depending on how the humor is evaluated: endogroup and confrontational. The former constitutes humor evaluated as polite or mockingly impolite, while the latter involves evaluations of mock politeness. This chapter provides an interesting discussion of the intersection between interactional humor and politeness, in an understudied linguistic context.

The third chapter of the section deals with all-male interactional humor in Spanish conversations. The author, Alvarado Ortega, focuses on how face concerns manifest in interactional humor. Drawing on Brown and Levinson’s politeness framework, in tandem with Spencer-Oatey’s Rapport Management Theory, the author identifies three classes of humor: affiliative, self-humor and competitive. In warranting these classes, the author analyses a breadth of examples, identifying how humor support strategies orient to the face needs of the participants. However, this breadth of extracts arguably works against her, as each analysis is slightly light on detail.

Padilla Cruz provides the concluding contribution to the second section. He investigates interactional humor in service encounter settings, focusing on openings and closings as sites of humor employed in phatic communion. Padilla Cruz undertakes both quantitative and qualitative analyses, the former employed to compare the number of humorous tokens at the beginnings and close of the service encounters, and the latter to illustrate the particular humorous practices that the participants employed. This study is of particular interest given the relevance of humor in institutional settings, which has been well-documented. However, perhaps problematically, the author did not record the participants, opting instead to conduct the analysis based on field notes made during the encounters. Because of this, close, detailed analysis cannot be undertaken, which arguably brings some of the author’s conclusions into doubt.

The third section centers on interactional humor in fictional settings and contains the volume’s final two chapters.

The first chapter of the section contains Linares-Bernabéu’s contribution, in which she investigates stand-up comedy. Focusing on female comedians, the author centers comedian-audience interchanges, particularly kairos, which is understood as the interaction, or lack thereof, between the comedian and the audience when such an opportunity presents itself. These interactions frequently manifest as laughter in response to something that the comedian says, but sometimes there is more active participation, via the audience being asked to play a certain part. Indeed, in one example kairos emerged via an interruption from an audience member, in response to which the comedian jocularly threatened the interrupter. Through kairos, the comedians negotiate different facets of their identities, such as gender and professional identities. In such a unique context, this chapter gives an absorbing discussion of the cross-contextual negotiation of identity through humor.

The final chapter of the collection uniquely explores humorous narratives, as told by school children. Taking a comparative approach, Timofeeva-Timofeev analyses the way narratives are constructed by children aged 8, 10, and 12, linking the differences witnessed between these age groups to degree of maturation. The data is especially interesting in this chapter, as it provides a window into the minds of children of various ages of development, allowing us to trace this development across time. However, the extent to which these narratives can be construed as humorous was, at times, unclear. Indeed, while the narratives exhibited incongruity, the author herself acknowledges that not all incongruity can be classed as humorous. Moreover, it is unclear in which manner the humorous narratives presented in this chapter can be considered to take place in an interactive context, given that they are isolated instances of a humorous text. Therefore, this chapter’s connection with the theme of the volume is arguably nebulous.

The collection’s most significant contribution is perhaps twofold. For one, it contains expert treatments of more recently emerging arenas of interactional humor, applying existing frameworks and theories to newer areas. For instance, Yus and Maíz-Arévalo’s chapter examines Covid memes through the lens of one of the most widely employed humor theories: incongruity-resolution. In addition, Bischetti and Attardo’s chapter analyses humorous irony, a well-researched topic in pragmatics, in a novel setting, namely Twitter posts. Furthermore, Ruiz-Gurillo applies existing approaches to interactional humor and (im)politeness to a new linguistic context, namely Spanish conversation.

Secondly, the volume provides fresh takes on more traditional contexts of interactional humor. For example, Sheikhan and Haugh’s contribution provides further work towards reconciling interactional and cognitive approaches to humor, which has been a significant pursuit over the last decade. Furthermore, in the well-researched area of internet humor, particularly that of social media, Yus and Maíz-Arévalo investigate a novel phenomenon, that of Covid memes. Reflecting the recent surge in Covid-related research, this chapter expertly delves into how online humor functioned in the unprecedented times of Covid-19.

The chapters in the volume also complement one another eloquently, particularly when looking at chapters across different sections. For instance, the humorous memes examined by Yus and Maíz-Arévalo naturally depend on epistemic access to the events depicted by each meme, especially the nature of the Covid-19 situation in Spain at the time. This links in with Sheikhan and Haugh’s discussion of epistemics in conversational humor, and how epistemic access to certain events and referents is typically necessary for the co-construction of humor. Moreover, Linares-Bernabéu’s discussion of gender is thematically similar to Alvarado Ortega’s analysis. Indeed, given that the two chapters examine very different contexts, they provide insight to different dimensions of gender negotiation through humor.

On the whole, this collection is an impressive achievement and a valuable addition to the extensive pragmatic literature on interactional humor. Linares-Bernabéu has assembled several chapters which exhibit an accomplished rapprochement of more traditional contexts and sites of study, with newer, rapidly evolving areas. The minor drawbacks of some of the chapters notwithstanding, the collection is a significant contribution, and will be essential reading for those who wish to delve deeper into the complexities of humor in interactional contexts, especially those working in humor studies, particularly in pragmatic and discourse contexts.