5. Laughter as a “serious business”: Clients’ laughter in prenatal screening for Down’s syndrome

Abstract

This chapter examines the use of laughter in the context of prenatal screening (PS) for Down’s syndrome in Hong Kong. Scholars interested in humor typically approach laughter as a phenomenon that accompanies funny, amusing, and humorous situations. In our previous work on nurses’ laughter in PS (Zayts and Schnurr, 2011) we have shown that laughter may also be used to perform ‘serious business’, for example, it may be employed by nurses to help them facilitate clients’ decision-making process regarding testing for Down’s syndrome. This chapter focuses on the second part of the laughter sequences, in particular it examines what is interactionally achieved through the reciprocation of the nurses’ laughter by their clients. Drawing on 34 video-recorded consultations between nurses and pregnant women, and using conversation analysis, we show that the reciprocated laughter in these sequences can be affiliative and serve to establish rapport between the participants. It can also be disaffilitative, particularly in interactional contexts when participants engage in negotiating their epistemic and deontic statuses and authority. The negotiation of epistemic statuses is observed in consultations with more experienced and knowledgeable clients who use laughter to terminate the topic of ‘inquiring about their knowledge’. The negotiation of deontic authority happens in decision-making phases of these consultations and through laughter the clients affirm their right and sufficient knowledge to make a decision.