Communicative strategies in interactional male humour

Abstract

This paper will present an analysis of male interactional humour in Spanish conversation. Humour can appear in such conversations as a strategy to show (im)politeness between participants in the interaction. Focussing in particular on politeness strategies, we will seek to identify the different types of humour that arise in conversations between men. To this end, we will draw on Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness ([1978] 1987: 213), which lists a number of strategies that aim to produce politeness and, at the same time, calculates the estimated risk of losing face that arises from an individual’s conversational behaviour. In the analysis we will also consider Spencer-Oatey’s (2000, 2007) proposal of a set of factors that can affect rapport management strategies. Our aim is to show that humour as expressed between men in conversational utterances, involves conversational strategies that are used to elicit respect for both listener and speaker, or to save the negative and positive face of these, according to politeness criteria. To this end, the VALESCO.HUMOR corpus is used, which comprises 148 ironic-humorous sequences extracted from 67 colloquial conversations.