This article asserts that the ethnopragmatic approach permits humour researchers both to access the “insider perspectives” of native speakers and to repel conceptual Anglocentrism. It starts with a semantic research into the word ‘laugh’, a plausible lexical universal and a crucial anchor point for humour studies. It then shows how the two main modes of ethnopragmatic analysis, semantic explication and cultural scripts, can be applied to selected topics in conversational humour inquiry. Semantic explications are proposed for three English specific “humour concepts”: ‘funny’, ‘amusing’, and ‘humour’. Cultural scripts are presented for “jocular abuse”, “deadpan jocular irony” and “jocular deception” in Australian English. The semantic explications and cultural scripts are composed employing simple, cross-translatable words.