ABSTRACT
We begin this chapter by acknowledging a contrarian stance. In the conversation analytic (henceforth CA) research tradition reviewed here, humor is not a used, or indeed a particularly useful, analytic category. Obviously “humor” is a folk category, and participants may occasionally use it to gloss an interactional event (for example, “that conversation was humorous”). However, for the project of CA (described in the section “Historical Perspective”) the term humor represents a typification (see Heritage, 1984, pp. 144–150) of events in interaction, an abstract category that is insufficiently specific for describing social actions and sequences or the visible orientations of the participants. Where employed in CA it is generally used as an initial, loose gloss of interactive sequences (Heinemann, 2009; Kaukomaa et al., 2013), which may be further elucidated by detailed analysis of recurrent patterns. For this reason, CA studies of conversational phenomena that one might associate with humor have proceeded more or less independently from pragmatics studies that embrace the concept of humor in interaction.
