Laughter in Interaction (review)

Humor and laughter have been studied from multiple points of view. My own approach is cognitive (e.g. my article ‘Humor and the search for relevance’, Journal of Pragmatics 35.1295–331, 2003), and within this approach, humor is not considered a property of texts or utterances (e.g. jokes), but rather involves specific interpretive paths favored by the retrieval from context of assumptions related to the communicator’s communicative strategies. Therefore, humor has to do with the audience’s mental operations leading to humorous effects.

Glenn’s book, by contrast, relies on an interactional, conversation-analytic point of view to explain the role of laughter in dialogues between people, and explicitly rejects cognition-based explanations, since he aims at ‘understanding laughter as communication by regarding what it is doing socially rather than how it may be linked to some stimulus or inner state’ (28). Laughter, then, is a typical by-product of conversation, a human physiological reaction that affects the way conversational sequences are structured, and that has to be analyzed in the context of human interaction.

Ch. 1 (‘Towards a social interactional approach to laughter’, 7–34) is a review of the literature on the subject. Despite the author’s interest in interactional explanations of laughter, the chapter does include several paragraphs on the psychology and physiology of laughter, as well as evolutionary and social comments on the subject.

Ch. 2 (‘Conversation analysis and the study of laughter’, 35–52) introduces the theoretical framework used by G in his study: so-called ‘conversation analysis’, a pragmatic approach that typically aims at dissecting, as it were, conversations, providing their recurrent patterns and social connotations, and which has followers both in America (e.g. Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff) and England (e.g. the Birmingham School). Already in this chapter, the main focus of analysis is introduced: the role of laughter in how interlocutors structure their own conversational turns.

Ch. 3 (‘Laughing together’, 53–84) is the main focus of analysis in the book. G provides the reader with how ‘laughter-connoted conversations’ are structured and how typical interactional strategies (invitation, acceptance, repair, etc.) are used for controlling how laughter arises and is interactionally assessed. This chapter also includes a section on the differences between two-party and multi-party conversations regarding laughter.

Ch. 4 (‘Who laughs first’, 85–111) deals with who ‘holds the floor’ in conversations involving laughter. Initially, either the current speaker or someone else may provide the first laugh in a shared laughter sequence (86), but the actual conversational structure can be very complicated, for example, in multi-party conversations, which makes the schema of humorous conversations far more complicated.

Ch. 5 (‘Laughing at and laughing with: Negotiating participant alignments’, 112–21) is centered on the analysis of the difference between affiliative laughter and disaffiliative laughter.

Finally, Ch. 6 (‘Laughing along, resisting: Constituting relationship and identity’, 122–61) is a dense account of the research done on topics such as teasing, improprieties, errors arising from shared laughter, laughter related to gender, and so on.

G’s book provides us with a good analysis of laughter and its role and influence in conversations, with many oral examples efficiently transcribed and with a clear conversation-analytic methodology.