When laughter is not enough. Responding to teasing and self-denigrating humour at work

Abstract

This paper focuses on response strategies to humour as listener activities. Drawing on authentic discourse data collected in two workplaces, one in Hong Kong and one in New Zealand, we explore the complex and versatile listener activity of responding to two particularly ambiguous and thus interesting types of humour: teasing and self-denigrating humour. Using the framework of rapport management ( Spencer-Oatey, 2000) we look at how these types of humour are responded to in relationships that are unequal in terms of power: we explore some of the ways in which subordinates in our workplace data deal with the potentially face-threatening situation that emerges when their superiors use self-denigrating humour or teasing. A particular focus is on listeners’ strategies to resolve this tension and to manage sociality rights as well as to do face-work (by considering interlocutors’ quality and identity face). Our analysis indicates that by employing and often combining various different response strategies, listeners achieve a range of functions simultaneously: they signal recipiency, respond to the hierarchical relationship between interlocutors, and they attend to their own as well as their superiors’ face needs. However, members of the different workplaces differ substantially in their choice of response strategies. We argue that analyses of response strategies in asymmetrical relationships and rapport management strategies in general need to take into consideration both the wider socio-cultural context in which they occur as well as the specific norms and practices that characterise interlocutors’ communities of practice (CofPs).