Dialogical humour in evening service encounters in the hospitality industry in Seville, Spain

Given that humour greatly impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty, this paper explores the dialogical forms of humour occurring in evening service encounters. It reports on a study focusing on interactions between baristas and customers. The latter belong to two groups: university students in their late teens and twenties, and regulars over forty years old. The establishments selected for the study are small cafes and small tapas bars in Seville. The study is based on unobtrusive observation and field notes, as humour authenticity depends on naturalness and spontaneity. Although the interlocutors engaged in the encounters made use of dialogical forms of humour in order to achieve similar interactional goals, the results of the study reveal variation in terms of the quantity and categories of comical tokens. A series of individual and external factors explain this variation.