Elsevier

Lingua

Volume 197, October 2017, Pages 50-67
Lingua

“It's just a bit of cultural […] lost in translation”: Australian and British intracultural and intercultural metapragmatic evaluations of jocularity

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2017.03.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • This paper analyses a jocular comment and its intracultural and intercultural evaluations.

  • The study combines reality television discourse and qualitative interview data.

  • In Australian and British cultural contexts jocularity is much appreciated.

  • The Australian interviewees make culture-specific distinctions in the use of humour.

  • The British primarily concentrate on jocularity-related benefits in interaction.

Abstract

This paper explores evaluations of attempts at humour and reactions to them by participants and non-participants in a jocular interaction. There are two levels of analysis: (1) the instigator's jocular comment and the target's reaction to it, taken from the reality television gameshow Big Brother Australia 2012, and (2) the Australian and British interviewees’ (non-participants’) intracultural (inside one's own cultural context) and intercultural (from another cultural context) evaluations of the comment and the reaction to it. It is true that jocularity in both cultural contexts is highly appreciated and tends to produce a laughing (or at least not a confrontational) reaction, which shows one's ability to laugh at oneself and not take oneself too seriously. However, there are particular differences in intracultural and intercultural evaluations. For instance, while it was noticed that the Australian interviewees tend to make culture-specific remarks about how different their own and British understanding of humour is, the British interviewees try to avoid cultural or collective references and rather focus on jocularity-related benefits in interaction.

Section snippets

Introduction: a note on intracultural and intercultural research into humour

In the last several decades, a large number of analyses of such jocular verbal behaviours as teasing, mockery or banter in various cultural contexts have testified to an important role that jocularity plays in interactional practices. Much research into humour in interaction has been carried out in such settings as family and friends’ discourse (e.g. Alberts et al., 1996, Eisenberg, 1986, Boxer and Cortés-Conde, 1997, Hay, 2000, Holmes and Marra, 2002, Priego-Valverde, 2006, Haugh and

Data: interviews and reality television discourse

The data for this analysis comes from qualitative interviews carried out in Australia and the UK. The interviewees were recruited via random and snowball (chain) sampling and are all native speakers of Australian (16 interviewees) or British English (19 interviewees), either living in Australia or in the UK at the moment of interviewing, or having migrated to one of those countries from their homeland, i.e. Australia or the UK. The uniqueness of these interviews is that they were designed so

Jocular verbal behaviours in Australian and British cultural contexts

Jocular verbal behaviours such as teasing, banter, jocular mockery or jocular abuse have been extensively analysed in the last few decades (e.g. Straehle, 1993, Boxer and Cortés-Conde, 1997, Keltner et al., 1998, Keltner et al., 2001, Lampert and Ervin-Tripp, 2006, Lytra, 2007, Schnurr, 2009, Haugh, 2010, Haugh, 2014, Sinkeviciute, 2013). Although some studies have revealed that the targets are more likely to reject teases and feel insulted rather than to accept them (e.g. Drew, 1987,

Attempts at humour in Australian English: the participants’ level

The following extract from the reality television gameshow Big Brother Australia 2012 illustrates how jocular verbal behaviour, precisely jocular abuse or banter – a widespread verbal practice in different varieties of English (Haugh and Bousfield, 2012:1100) – functions as a means to lighten up a negative situation (in a seemingly friendly environment) and how differently it can be interpreted by speakers of Australian and British English. In [10], Bradley has just found out that he is

Attempts at humour in Australian English: the non-participants’ level

As we saw in section 4, jocular episode [10] presents a multi-party interaction that primarily involves two speakers of Australian English, George (the instigator) and Bradley (the target). What is also important is that the third-party, Layla, is British and it is possible to observe her serious reaction to what George is claiming and how it is different from the jocular banter between the two Australian male housemates. Although it would be too precipitous to claim that these different

Conclusions

This paper aimed to contribute to the areas of intracultural and intercultural research into humour, particularly in the cases when the same language is spoken in different cultural contexts. The analysis explored a jocular multi-party interaction with Australian and British participants from the Australian Big Brother house and observed how the interviewees (referred to as non-participants) from both cultural contexts evaluated that interaction.

Jocular verbal practices that have been analysed

Acknowledgements

Part of the data collection for this analysis was supported by a travel grant for a research stay in Australia from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO – V4.301.14N). I would to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

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