With today's increased international mobility, Moody's timely volume explores humor for a nuanced understanding of the identities of gaijin (foreigner, Americans herein) in intercultural interaction. Drawing on his observations of American-Japanese interaction, he investigates how humor is adapted and employed in conversations within workplaces, service transactions, and foreign-language housing environments, using an ethnomethodological approach to unveil how humor unfolds in spontaneous spoken interaction, and participants’ situated understanding of their identities and social relationships within these intercultural exchanges.
In the introduction, Moody critiques an essentialist, pre-empirical approach that treats culture and cultural boundaries as pre-defined. Instead, he advocates for empirical investigation into how participants engage with and express culture through humor by making it relevant through their talk and actions. He argues for an insider view on how participants represent their cultural identities and how they establish affinity against perceived cultural divides, aiming for ‘participants’ own understandings of culture’ (5). To achieve this, he outlines three discourse-analytic frameworks from ethnomethodology for analysis: interactional sociolinguistics (IS), conversation analysis (CA), and membership categorization analysis (MCA).
Chapters 2 and 3 lay the groundwork for analysis. Chapter 2 presents an overview of conversational humor, explaining its affiliative and disaffiliative interpersonal functions (e.g. bonding, distancing). The humor examined is essentially ‘what participants present to be funny or amusing or playful’ (14) in conversations. Offering rationale for this study, chapter 3 discusses the ideologies surrounding gaijin and nihonjin (Japanese), highlighting the perceived differences between them. It examines how stereotypes and beliefs about gaijin and nihonjin can be leveraged to create humor for benefits (e.g. empowerment) and challenges (e.g. marginalization) in social settings.
Three analysis chapters unpack the humor-identity interface. Using IS, chapter 4 reveals that humor emerges when Americans and Japanese represent their linguistic and cultural identities through language use and by referencing perceived cultural differences, while marginalized identities are employed by Americans to humorously convey complaints or social critiques. Through CA, chapter 5 identifies turn-by-turn progression and purposes of participants’ gaijin humor and identity representation in diverse actions. Moody pinpoints that deploying ostensible cultural differences may facilitate ‘collaboratively achieving successful transactional and social actions’ (123). With MCA appending a categorial perspective to IS and CA, chapter 6 illustrates that humor arises from category incongruencies and perceived cultural differences, through the manipulation of local and cultural categories within turns and sequences, and via syntactic formulations in conversations.
Overall, this book underscores how humor helps build interpersonal relationships across perceived cultural divides, addressing the theme of belonging. In the conclusion (chapter 7), Moody suggests that belonging necessitates balancing ‘between adjusting to local cultural expectations while contributing individually to social interactions and relationships’ (172), highlighting the tension between individuality and desire for belonging to a social group, each characterized by unique cultural norms. By analyzing humor's role in navigating intercultural identities and interpersonal relationships from participants’ perspectives, this volume is indispensable for scholars of humor, intercultural communication, and identity research, offering rich insights into how humor shapes social relationships across cultures. It encourages continuous attention to interculturality and increased global contact.
