“That kind of pants?!”: designedly ambiguous deadpan delivery of a possibly nonserious turn in multiparty Japanese conversation

Eric Hauser; Toshiaki Furukawa

doi:10.1515/humor-2025-0019

Article

“That kind of pants?!”: designedly ambiguous deadpan delivery of a possibly nonserious turn in multiparty Japanese conversation

Eric Hauser
Eric Hauser is Associate Professor of English at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, Japan. His research focuses on interaction in English and Japanese, in both mundane and institutional settings, and including participants who are second language users. He has recent publications in Pragmatics and Society, Pragmatics, and Social Interaction.
and Toshiaki Furukawa
Toshiaki Furukawa, PhD in Linguistics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, is a Professor at Waseda University. His research centers on discourse analysis in multilingual contexts, with a focus on Hawaiian Studies and indigenous language media.

Published/Copyright: August 26, 2025

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From the journal HUMOR

Abstract

Work on conversational humor often focuses on the use of laughter, smiling, and other contextualization cues used to frame an utterance or turn as nonserious. However, a possibly nonserious turn can also be delivered in a deadpan manner, with few or no such contextualization cues. Deadpan delivery of a possibly nonserious turn results in ambiguous framing of the turn for its recipients. In this paper, we use multimodal conversation analysis to analyze a single case from multiparty Japanese conversation in which a possibly nonserious turn is delivered in a deadpan manner and its recipients attempt, through the use of other-initiated repair, to resolve the ambiguity. We show how the producer of the possibly nonserious turn manipulates the repair work in order to generate humor. We also show how the possibly nonserious turn, and responses to it, can be seen as a type of collaborative conversational humor in Japanese, which can be referred to as manzai-like humor. This paper thus contributes to two relatively under-researched areas of conversational humor: 1) deadpan delivery of a possibly nonserious turn, including the ambiguous framing inherent in such delivery and how recipients attempt to repair this ambiguity, and 2) collaborative manzai-like humor in Japanese conversation.

Keywords: ambiguity in framing; deadpan delivery; Japanese conversational humor; manzai-like humor; repair in conversational humor

Corresponding author: Eric Hauser, University of Electro-Communications, Building E1-614, 1-5-1 Chofugaoka, Chofu-shi, Tokyo 182-8585, Japan, E-mail: hauser@uec.ac.jp

About the authors

Eric Hauser

Eric Hauser is Associate Professor of English at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, Japan. His research focuses on interaction in English and Japanese, in both mundane and institutional settings, and including participants who are second language users. He has recent publications in Pragmatics and Society, Pragmatics, and Social Interaction.

Toshiaki Furukawa

Toshiaki Furukawa, PhD in Linguistics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, is a Professor at Waseda University. His research centers on discourse analysis in multilingual contexts, with a focus on Hawaiian Studies and indigenous language media.

Appendix A

CA conventions used in the transcripts

Conventions are based on Jefferson (2004).

.: Falling intonation
?: Rising intonation
_: Flat intonation
:: Elongation, multiple colons for longer elongation
wor-: Hyphen for cut-off word
word: Relatively greater stress
(word): Transcriber’s best guess at transcription of a word or words
((comment)): Double parentheses for transcriber’s comment
>word<: Relatively rapid talk between symbols
↑ ↓: Pitch reset, up or down, depending on arrow direction
ºwordº: Relatively quiet talk between symbols
[: Start of overlapping talk
=: Latching together of words or sounds, by same or different speaker; or, same-turn talk by one speaker separated across lines of transcript
h hh: Outbreaths, multiple letters for longer outbreaths, possibly laughter
.h .hh: Inbreaths, multiple letters for longer inbreaths, possibly laughter
(h): Laugh token within a word
(.): Pause of less than 0.2 s
(0.5): Paused timed to closest tenth of a second

Appendix B

Symbols used in morpheme-by-morpheme gloss

All symbols are based on Greer et al. (2017) (GI&T), except where noted.

AS: Aspect marker (not in GI&T)
CND: Conditional
COMP: Complementizer (not in GI&T)
CP: Copula
DIM: Diminutive (not in GI&T)
IP: Interactional particle
LK: Linking particle
O: Object marker
PP: Postposition (not in GI&T)
Q: Question marker
RT: Receipt token

Appendix C

Abbreviations used in descriptions of embodied conduct

BH: Both hands
GZ: Gaze
RH: Right hand

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Received: 2022-08-29

Accepted: 2025-07-19

Published Online: 2025-08-26

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https://doi.org/10.1515/humor-2025-0019

Keywords for this article

ambiguity in framing; deadpan delivery; Japanese conversational humor; manzai-like humor; repair in conversational humor