How English-learners joke with native speakers: an interactional sociolinguistic perspective on humor as collaborative discourse across cultures

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Abstract An approach to humor grounded in interactional sociolinguistics starts not with reified abstractions such as ‘humor’, ‘wit’, or ‘irony’ but rather with the situated interpretation of joking as a speech activity. Using videotaped data of crosscultural conversation groups, and employing a close linguistic analysis based in Gumperz's theory of conversational inference, this paper documents the ability of beginning language learners to collaborate in the construction of conversational joking discourse with native English speakers. The claim is made that communication is achieved indirectly within these jointly-constructed joking episodes through displaying understanding by playing within the frame set out by the other. Such fine-tuning of understanding is the core of why the ability to participate in such joking is important in the development of rapport. Illustrative joking episodes represent differences along several dimensions: the exploitation of limited sociolinguistic resources, with examples of primary reliance on the nonverbal and lexical, on the prosodic, and on the pragmatic; the interactional roles of the native English speaker and learner(s), with examples of different patterns of initiation and collaboration; and the focus of the joking within the general theme of the learners’ perspective on the language learning experience, in effect, the culture of the language learner, with examples highlighting the apparently arbitrary nature of idiomatic expressions, the difficulty of coping with interaction in the new language, and the general powerlessness of the language learner in a world of native speakers.