“You're lying to Jesus!”: Humor and play in a discussion about homelessness
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L. David Ritchie
Abstract
This study applies recent theories about humor to a sample of talk among a group of young adults about the issues and problems associated with homelessness. In this conversation, participants demonstrate a pattern of joking and language play that expresses a complex and ambivalent set of attitudes and feelings toward homelessness and toward the homeless as both outcasts and refugees from conventional society. Humor is used both to express complex responses to homelessness and as a tool for managing the tone and direction of the conversation. The results demonstrate how the identification of patterns of joking and wordplay can provide insights into how people accomplish task-oriented objectives as well as relational and interactive objectives in everyday talk.
© 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- “Double-speak” at the White House: A corpus-assisted study of bisociation in conversational laughter-talk
- The use of humor in the foreign language classroom: Funny and effective?
- Do women seek humorousness in men because it signals intelligence? A cross-cultural test
- The Chinese ambivalence to humor: Views from undergraduates in Hong Kong and China
- “You're lying to Jesus!”: Humor and play in a discussion about homelessness
- Laughing all the way to freedom?: Contemporary stand-up comedy and democracy in South Africa
- Book reviews
Articles in the same Issue
- “Double-speak” at the White House: A corpus-assisted study of bisociation in conversational laughter-talk
- The use of humor in the foreign language classroom: Funny and effective?
- Do women seek humorousness in men because it signals intelligence? A cross-cultural test
- The Chinese ambivalence to humor: Views from undergraduates in Hong Kong and China
- “You're lying to Jesus!”: Humor and play in a discussion about homelessness
- Laughing all the way to freedom?: Contemporary stand-up comedy and democracy in South Africa
- Book reviews
