Conversation analysis: humor in conversation I

Abstract

As the title indicates this is the first part of the discussion of humor in conversation. The focus is on Conversation Analysis (CA). The chapter starts with a discussion of CA methodology, which is quite different from that used in previous chapters, and then focuses on the analysis of laughter in conversation and on the definition of laughable. The foundational analysis of a canned joke telling by Harvey Sacks is presented and several issues related to CA analyses of humor are discussed, including that humor and laughter are not an adjacency pair, the non-humorous laughter is common, and that humor is not often a test of understanding and that the tellability of humor does not only come from its being funny, but may come also from its being a shared experience.