Volume 15, Issue 4 - Special Issue: Conversational humor: Forms, functions and practices across cultures

In this paper we focus primarily on the second dimension of the model designed for the comparative cross-cultural analysis of conversational humor outlined in (Béal, Christine & Kerry Mullan. 2013. Issues in conversational humour from a cross-cultural perspective: Comparing French and Australian corpora. In Bert Peeters, Kerry Mullan & Christine Béal (eds.), Cross-culturally Speaking, Speaking Cross-culturally . 107–139. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.), namely the linguistic devices and discursive strategies used by speakers to create humor in social interaction. Using a range of illustrative examples we will show that although a number of similar strategies occur in both the French and Australian English data (play on words, personification, implicit references, borrowing words from other languages), there are also marked differences in terms of preferential choices between French and Australian speakers when it comes to the mechanisms that make a particular utterance or exchange a humorous one. In particular, the French speakers in our data displayed a greater tendency to play with the language itself, while the Australians showed a preference for incongruity and absurdity, and collaborative scenarios with escalation. A number of comparative examples of failed humor are also examined. It will be seen that the responsibility for the failure in all cases lies less with the speaker and more with the hearer; i.e. the problem is not actually with the linguistic device employed, but with the hearer’s non-appreciation of the humor or lack of humor support.

Terms like to joke (and joking ) and to tease (and teasing ) have a curious double life in contrastive and interactional pragmatics and related fields. Occasionally they are studied as metapragmatic terms of ordinary English, along with related expressions such as kidding . More commonly they are used as scientific or technical categories, both for research into English and for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison. Related English adjectives, such as jocular and mock , are also much-used in a growing lexicon of compound terms, such as jocular abuse , mock abuse, jocular mockery , and the like. Against this background, the present paper has three main aims. In the first part, it is argued that the meanings of the verbs to joke and to tease (and related nouns) are much more English-specific than is commonly recognized. They are not precisely cross-translatable even into European languages such as French and German. Adopting such terms as baseline categories for cross-cultural comparison therefore risks introducing an Anglocentric bias into our theoretical vocabulary. Nor can the problem be easily solved, it is argued, by attributing technical meanings to the terms. Detailed analysis of the everyday meanings of words like joking and teasing , on the other hand, can yield insights into the ethnopragmatics of Anglo conversational humor. This task is undertaken in the second part of the paper. The important English verb to kid and the common conversational formulas just kidding and only joking are also examined. The semantic methodology used is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, which depends on paraphrase into simple, cross-translatable words. Building on the NSM analyses, the third part of the paper considers whether it is possible to construct a typological framework for conversational humor based on cross-translatable terminology.

This paper explores sort humor ‘black humor’, a key concept in Danish conversational humor. Sort forms part of a larger class of Danish synesthetic humor metaphors that includes other categories such as tør ‘dry’, syg ‘sick’, and fed ‘fat’. Taking an ethnopragmatic perspective on humor discourse, it is argued that such constructs function as a local catalogue for socially recognized laughing practices. The aim of the paper is to provide a semantic explication for sort humor and explore the discursive practices associated with the concept. From a comparative perspective, it is demonstrated that the Danish conceptualization of “blackness” differs from that of l’humour noir , a category of French surrealism, and English black humor with its off-limit topics such as death and handicap. In Danish discourse, sort humor has come to stand for a practice of collaborative jocular non-sense making. It is further argued that the main function of sort humor is to establish or enhance a feeling of “groupy togetherness”.

Studies of conversational humor in intercultural settings have focused largely on illustrating how participants can successfully draw on humor to build rapport. However, it is nevertheless clear that attempts at humor can also go awry in settings in which participants come from different cultural backgrounds. In this paper, we focus on the responses of American and Australian participants to playful or light-hearted comments on, or responses to, another speaker’s just prior serious talk, which are designed to initiate a non-serious side sequence, or what we term “jocular quips”. Drawing from a comparative analysis of thirty recordings of initial interactions involving participants from ostensibly the same (AmAm; AusAus) and different (AmAus) backgrounds, we report our finding that affiliative responses to jocular quips are more prevalent in the “intracultural” dyads (AmAm, AusAus), while non-affiliative responses are more frequent in the “intercultural” dyads (AmAus). We suggest this is due to troubles in accomplishing particularistic co-membership and shared critical, mocking attitudes that are attributed to, or directed at that category. We conclude that Americans and Australians are not “divided by a common language” as such, but rather that affiliating with jocular quips in initial interactions is contingent on the locally situated accomplishment of particular membership categories and predicates associated with these categories.

The present article is part of a larger cross-cultural research project on speaker-hearer smiling behavior in humorous and non-humorous conversations in American English and French. The American corpus consists of eight computer-mediated interactions between English native speakers, and the French one consists of four face-to-face interactions between French native speakers. The goal of the study is twofold: first, we analyze the link between smiling and humor, focusing on the degree of synchronicity of smiling and the intensity of smiling during humorous and non-humorous segments; second, we investigate the various targets mobilized in conversational humor. The results obtained comparing the two data-sets show a correlation between the presence of humor, an increased smiling intensity, and an increase in the synchronized smiling behaviors displayed by participants. However, the two corpora also differ in terms of the displayed smiling behaviors: French participants display more non-synchronic smiling when humor is absent and more synchronic smiling when humor is present. Regarding the various targets of humor (Speaker, Recipient, Other person, Situation, Speaker+Recipient), while their distribution is different – it is more evenly distributed in the French data – the way in which these are mobilized in order to become humorous is quite similar.