CLA1914: Humor and Laughter in Interaction

In this course we will investigate humor and laughter in their “natural habitat,” everyday talk, and analyze how language shapes and is shaped by social interaction. We will discuss basic features of humor including jokes, anecdotes, word play, and irony. Then we will study how we laugh and why we laugh. We will investigate how humor and laughter are used in spontaneous conversation for self- disclosure, irony, multimodal and intertextual humor, masculinity, demarcation, etc. We will examine conversations among friends and family, co-workers, and bilingual school children and cross-cultural couples. We will primarily focus on English conversations but the readings will relate to a variety of languages, including English, ELF (English as a Lingua Franca), Japanese, Spanish, and German.

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