Juggling identities in interviews: The metapragmatics of ‘doing humour’

Abstract

This paper focuses on the question of identity in relation to jocular interactional practices. The metapragmatic analysis is based on qualitative interview data where native speakers of Australian and British English were shown a number of videos with potentially jocular verbal behaviours. The main objective of this paper is to observe what role jocular verbal behaviours play in claims to identity as well as in the attribution of identity to others via their interactional behaviour. The results suggest that in the analysed data identity related to jocular verbal practices primarily manifests itself in three different, though sometimes overlapping, ways: via (1) perceiving oneself as part of a cultural context where particular preferences are shared by the majority of people (what is referred to here as ‘collective identity’); (2) arguing that one's evaluations and reactions to jocularity depend on personal characteristics (‘individual identity’); and (3) suggesting that the understanding of and reactions to humour are limited to a particular situation and the interactants involved (‘situated identity’).