Päivitetty 1.1.2002  –  Palautteet

Virittäjä-lehti  >  Hakemistot  >  Kirjoitukset ja tiivistelmät: 1995 (99)

Markku Haakana (University of Helsinki; markku.haakana@helsinki.fi)

On the category of the joke in conversation
CONTEXTUALIZATION, RECOGNITION AND SEQUENTIALITY

The article examines the category of the joke (Finnish vitsi) in everyday conversation. The method of study is ethnomethodological conversation analysis. The article approaches the category of the joke as a membership category (Sacks 1972), i.e. as a category that members of a culture themselves are orienting towards in talk-in-interaction. On the other hand, the article also aims to define 'joke' in a more systematic way in order to answer the following question: How does the researcher of humour and joking recognize sequences in which joking occurs?

The article thus concentrates on the question of recognizing jokes in conversation. From the point of view of the co-conversationalists themselves, the question is approached via the notion of contextualization (Gumperz 1982, 1992). Many ways of contextualizing a speaker's utterance as a joke are presented: especially laughing, smiling, and changes in the speaker's voice pattern. The semantic cues for signalling non-serious meaning are also discussed.

The question of recognition leads to the notion of the sequentiality of a joke. Because of its interest in conversationalists' own categorizations, conversation analysis focuses on the sequential analysis of talk-in-interaction: how people show their understanding of what has previously happened in conversation. Sacks (1972) has pointed out that the sequential implication of a joke is laughter: when there is a joke, laughter should follow. This is shown to be a problematic idea: not all laughter is inviting in character, and it also seems that not all kinds of joking necessarily require laughter in response. For instance, Drew (1987) has shown that teasing is most often responded to in a serious manner in conversation, although it has clearly been contextualized as a humorous contribution.

The aforementioned questions are studied in the light of some examples from Finnish everyday conversations between friends. The article starts with a short presentation of more classical definitions of a joke. These imply that the joke is a standardized narrative form of humour which functions by means of a certain mechanism, for instance by bringing incongruous categories together. The first examples (1, 2, also 4) show that speakers in conversation can explicitly categorize various kinds of humorous turns as a joke: both standardized humorous texts and spontaneous jokes. A very loose definition of a joke is then adopted: it can be more generally used to categorize anything that is contextualized as non-serious ‹ be it "just a joke" or something with serious implications as well. This category of the joke is then approached with the analytic tools of contextualization and sequentiality. Further examples show the multitude of functions and keyings that jokes in conversation can have.

In conclusion, the joke category is argued to be unitary not in semantic mechanism nor in function, but rather with respect to the ways in which jokes are contextualized. A huge variety of actions can be performed as a joke, and a joke may have many different kinds of responses. As members of a culture we recognize the conventionalized ways of doing something as a joke. The writer then argues that this makes it possible to offer almost anything as a joke. In the end, what is treated as a joke and what is not is a matter of participants' negotiation in the local level of conversation.