Social Interaction

Formal Properties of Humor

Researchers have identified certain formal categories of humor that occur in interaction between people. For instance, Neal Norrick identifies four categories of conversational humor: jokes, personal anecdotes, wordplay, and irony. Norrick’s purpose is theoretical: to distinguish relatively clear examples of these categories and identify differences among them in terms of their humor mechanisms, internal structure, and integration into discourse. A limitation of such categories, however, is that they do not uniquely distinguish particular humorous utterances. In practice, the situation is more complex than these prototypical “clear examples” might suggest. Norrick himself notes that categories blend in conversation, with joke punch lines becoming wisecracks, witty repartees growing into anecdotes, and so on.

Other work has focused on the internal structure of certain types of humor. In important early research, conversation analyst Harvey Sacks analyzes a dirty joke in narrative form, told by a teenage boy to friends, and presented as having been told to the boy by his 12-year-old sister. Sacks identifies a three-part sequential organization in the narrative joke: a “preface,” a “telling,” and a “response” sequence, and focuses in detail on how each sequence is developed. He discusses further how the sequential organization of the joke packages information in a way that is relevant to the interests of its original teller and intended recipients (i.e., circulating among a 12-year-old girl and her friends).

Many more recent studies have focused on how humor is structured—produced and responded to—within a particular interaction. The following dialogue is from Ronald Carter’s study of a 5-million-word corpus of spoken interaction [Page 706]in which several examples of language play were identified:

Members of a family are preparing food for a party:

C: Foreign body in here. What is it?

B: It’s raisins and [inaudible]

C: Er oh it’s rice with raisins is it?

D: No no no. It’s not supposed to be [laughter] erm

C: There must be a raisin for it being in there. [laughter]

(Adapted from Carter, 2004, p. 93; B, C, and D refer to speakers)

The pun here (“there must be a raisin ...”) emerges during the course of a conversation while preparing food. It plays on a previous mention of the word raisin. It is a fleeting performance, responded to by laughter from the audience. Such playful talk is sometimes identified as “conversational joking” or “situational humor,” in contrast to the more conventional joke format evident in “joke telling.” How such humorous talk is structured collaboratively has been analyzed by various scholars, such as Diana Boxer and Florencia Cortés-Conde, Jennifer Coates, and Norrick, sometimes adopting Gregory Bateson’s notion of play frame, the idea that conversationalists can frame and signal their talk as playful and hence not serious. Because such conversational humor is usually spontaneous, its production requires on-the-spot coordination between speakers. Coates adopts a musical metaphor to explain this, comparing the way conversationalists collaborate in a play frame to the coordination required by jazz players.

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