This book investigates the forms and functions of storytelling in everyday conversation. Aimed at a more complete picture of oral narrative through analysis of a wider range of natural data, it develops a rhetoric of everyday storytelling through an integrated approach to both the internal structure and the contextual integration of narrative passages. The author explores disfluencies, formulaicity and repetition as teller strategies and listener cues alongside global phenomena such as retelling and narrative macrostructures. He also extends his analysis to narrative jokes from conversation and to narrative passages in drama.