The Multimodal Performance of Conversational Humor

Elisa Gironzetti

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027210999 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027257857 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

This volume is the first monograph exploring the functions of visual cues in humor, advocating for the development of a non-linguocentric theory of humor performance. It analyzes a corpus of dyadic, face-to-face interactions in Spanish and English to study the relationship between humor, smiling, and gaze, and shows how, by focusing on these elements, it is possible to shed light on the “unsaid” of conversations.
In the book, the humorous framing of an utterance is shown to be negotiated and co-constructed dialogically and multimodally, through changes and patterns of smiling synchronicity, smiling intensity, and eye movements. The study also analyzes the multimodal features of failed humor and proposes a new categorization from a dialogic perspective.
Because of its interdisciplinary approach, which includes facial expression analysis and eye tracking, this book is relevant to humor researchers as well as scholars in social and behavioral sciences interested in multimodality and embodied cognition.

[Figurative Thought and Language, 13] 2022. xix, 235 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.13

Table of Contents

List of figures | pp. xi–xiv

List of tables | pp. xv–xvi

Preface | pp. xvii–xx

Chapter 1. Approaching the multimodal study of conversational humor | pp. 1–30

Chapter 2. Performing conversational humor multimodally – an overview | pp. 31–54

Chapter 3. Individual smiling behavior | pp. 55–86

Chapter 4. Smiling patterns and dialogical smiling synergy | pp. 87–114

Chapter 5. Eye movements | pp. 115–144

Chapter 6. Failed conversational humor | pp. 145–168

Chapter 7. Conclusions: Looking backwards and looking forward | pp. 169–184

References | pp. 185–214

Appendices

Appendix A. Research protocol | pp. 215–218

Appendix B. Individual smiling intensity by Dyad | pp. 219–222

Appendix C. Demographic questionnaire | pp. 223–224

Appendix D. Jokes in English and Spanish | pp. 225–226

Index | pp. 227–235

“This book is an important contribution to studies of humor, eye-tracking, embodied communication, and multimodality in its broadest aspect, filling to some extent the existing gap in these studies and opening the way to new lines of research within the broad field of the relationship between conversation and humor.”

Anastasia Khaylinaa, University of Alicante, in Journal of Pragmatics 203 (2023).

“I would strongly recommend this volume not only to scholars in humour studies, but also to scholars in other fields given the broadening of perspectives it might trigger. It is a very accessible book also to non-experts or students since throughout the book every tackled topic is introduced by a comprehensive and, at the same time, concise and pleasant-to-read review, methodologies are carefully explained and results clearly interpreted. I really enjoyed reading this work and I thank the author for this, since it has already been an incredibly useful resource also for my own work not necessarily related to smiling, gaze or humour.”

Chiara Mazzocconi, Aix-Marseille University, in The European Journal of Humour Research 11 (1).

Cited by (6)

Cited by six other publications

Order by:

de Vries, Clarissa, Fien Andries & Katharina Meissl

2024. Mocking enactments: a case study of multimodal stance-stacking. Frontiers in Psychology 15

Attardo, Salvatore

2023. Tracking the Ironical Eye: Eye Tracking Studies on Irony and Sarcasm. In The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought, ► pp. 140 ff.

Bell, Nancy D.

2023. Humor and Irony. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, ► pp. 1 ff.

Ruiz Gurillo, Leonor

2023. La pragmática de un etiquetaje pragmático para la plataforma observahumor.com. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 96 ► pp. 1 ff.

Ruiz-Gurillo, Leonor

2024. Mock impoliteness in Spanish: evidence from the VALESCO.HUMOR corpus. HUMOR 37:1 ► pp. 23 ff.

[no author supplied]

2023. Irony in Linguistic Communication. In The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought, ► pp. 129 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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