Facial gestures and laughter as a resource for negotiating humor in conversation
Résumé
This chapter focuses on interactional humor in dyadic face-to-face conversations in French. Adopting an expanded version of the Smiling Intensity Scale (Gironzetti et al. 2016; Gironzetti, Attardo, and Pickering 2016), this chapter focuses on participants’ facial gestures (i.e., neutral facial expressions and smiles) and laughter in the 11 interactions of the “Cheese!” corpus. The aim of this article is to investigate the way both the speaker’s and the recipient’s multimodal behaviors are used as a resource for producing, reacting to, and negotiating humorous utterances. Using a mixed approach, the aim of this chapter is twofold: (1) to provide a statistical analysis based on the whole corpus which highlights general trends about the way neutral facial expressions, smiles, and laughter are displayed in humorous segments; (2) to provide a deeper understanding of the multimodal achievement of humor in conversation through a sequential analysis of three examples. With these complementary quantitative and qualitative approaches, we will show that while a quantitative analysis can illustrate the way humor is accompanied by nonverbal behaviors, only a sequential analysis allows us to consider them as a resource used by participants to produce, react to, and negotiate humor.