Interactional humor: Multimodal design and negotiation is a meticulous and comprehensive collection of eleven studies examining humor across a variety of interactional contexts, including oral and written communication, face-to-face and computer mediated conversation, and naturally occurring and scripted interactions. It also covers interactions between diverse participant types, from child-adult interactions to human-robot exchanges. The chapters are well integrated, addressing shared questions, but at the same time the readers can read selectively, and in a nonlinear fashion, without losing the main message.
The studies in this volume vary in their methodological approaches, offering both quantitative statistical analysis and qualitative analysis of humorous segments. This diversity provides a balanced understanding, reporting not only general tendencies but also the finer details of how humor unfolds in a sequential context. Several chapters also discuss the methodological challenges involved in the analysis of humor, highlighting the importance of line-by-line, sequential analysis to obtain an in-depth understanding of the way humor is developed. The font, extracts, and figures used in each chapter are clear, well-formatted, and pleasing to the eye, adding to the overall readability of the book.
A central theme conveyed throughout the volume is that humor is an interactionally achieved action, negotiated through various multimodal recourses. This finding is shown to exist universally across different types of interaction. For instance, using a longitudinal corpus of adult-children interaction recorded at home, Aliyah Morgenstern, Christelle Dodane, & Marie Leroy-Collombel demonstrate that children can not only align with humor produced by adult through laughter, even when they do not understand the semantics, but also produce successful humor using a series of multimodal cues, for example, gaze, facial expressions, and prosody. Furthermore, the chapter by Jia Qiu, Xinren Chen, & Michael Haugh provides intriguing instances of instant messaging interaction where emojis are employed to initiate, intensify, and respond to humor, showing that multimodal resources are an indispensable element in written humor as well.
Another striking finding is that a range of nonverbal behaviours can serve as a tool to design and initiate humor. In her chapter, Sabina Tabacaru discusses various facial expressions, particularly raised eyebrows, and how they ‘guide the hearer to interpret the utterance as humorous’ using examples from scripted interactions in TV shows. This phenomenon also appears in spontaneous interaction, as data analysed by Béatrice Priego-Valverde & Stéphane Rauzy demonstrate that speakers can switch rapidly from smiling to neutral face and then to laughter during the production of a humorous instance to mimic another person. Moreover, Clarissa de Vries, Bert Oben, & Geert Brône further support this idea by describing how speakers employ shifts of eye gaze to facilitate humorous enactment in a teasing sequence. All of the evidence points to the fact that facial expressions including smiles and laughter are not simply responses to humor but part of humor production.
In sum, this book is a thoughtful and well-structured volume that offers valuable insights into the multimodal design of humor. Its careful balance of empirical analysis, theoretical discussion, and methodological considerations makes it an informative read for scholars in interactional linguistics, discourse analysis, and humor studies.
