The present article is part of a larger cross-cultural research project on speaker-hearer smiling behavior in humorous and non-humorous conversations in American English and French. The American corpus consists of eight computer-mediated interactions between English native speakers, and the French one consists of four face-to-face interactions between French native speakers. The goal of the study is twofold: first, we analyze the link between smiling and humor, focusing on the degree of synchronicity of smiling and the intensity of smiling during humorous and non-humorous segments; second, we investigate the various targets mobilized in conversational humor. The results obtained comparing the two data-sets show a correlation between the presence of humor, an increased smiling intensity, and an increase in the synchronized smiling behaviors displayed by participants. However, the two corpora also differ in terms of the displayed smiling behaviors: French participants display more non-synchronic smiling when humor is absent and more synchronic smiling when humor is present. Regarding the various targets of humor (Speaker, Recipient, Other person, Situation, Speaker+Recipient), while their distribution is different – it is more evenly distributed in the French data – the way in which these are mobilized in order to become humorous is quite similar.

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In this paper we use Conversation Analysis (CA) to investigate conversational humor in talk-in-interaction. We attempt to better understand how the latter is produced and co-constructed by participants in accounting for the devices used by participants in their sequential environment. The framework of CA enables us to take into account the various means available to speakers to communicate, orient to the others, etc. From our data, reported speech, confirmation request/ answer, and repetitions appear as the main discursive devices to create humor (presented as the result of the appearance of the incongruity). We focused on prosodic cues that are strongly involved in these devices and then contribute to the humorous tonality of the talk. Finally, the co-construction of conversational humor is mainly described through the notion of orientation and prosodic orientation.

This article reports on research on failed humor in French conversation. The aim is to investigate disalignment and (dis)affiliation as a type of interactional failure. For this purpose, 1,345 instances of humor were identified within a corpus of eight interactions in French. Among them, 259 were instances of failed humor, 158 of which were produced by the recipient, i.e., the participant who had taken the turn to produce humor. These 158 instances were analyzed using a method combining Conversation Analysis and corpus-based approaches. Conversation is seen as intrinsically dynamic: participants constantly shift between serious and humorous frames, different activities and different roles within them. In this light, each instance of failed humor was analyzed in relation to the frame and the type of activity within which it was embedded. All of the instances were found to be either disaligned and affiliated or disaligned and disaffiliated. Viewing conversation through its dynamism thus brings to light the ways in which disalignment and (dis)affiliation are a type of interactional failure. The analysis of three examples of disaligned and (dis)affiliated humor illustrates this type of interactional failure.

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