Humor in intercultural interaction: A source for misunderstanding or a common ground builder? A multimodal analysis

Abstract

The present paper explores three situations of conversational humor in which not only gesture and prosody but also code-switching play a role in the process of co-construction of humor among participants in an intercultural interaction. Despite the long tradition of studying humor in interaction, there has been little research so far which includes gesture – especially manual gesture – from an embodiment perspective and concurrently draws attention to the intercultural impact of humor, including moments of code-switching. By looking at multi-party interactions between German and Brazilian speakers from a multimodal perspective, we will show how different semiotic resources such as gaze, posture, head and hand gesture, as well as prosody and code-switching are displayed in order to construct humor. Our aim is to reveal the interplay and complexity of the communicative resources in the co-construction of humor by presenting three examples with different degrees of successful humor: While the conversational humor is only understood by the German co-participants in the first example, in the second example, the humor is co-constructed successfully by the German and Brazilian participants. Yet the last example reveals that the humor is understood by everybody but taken up differently what could also be related to the institutional context in which the sequence is embedded.

The MuSe 2022 Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge

“…Since humour is embedded in linguistic and contextual factors, a cross-cultural study can help to understand commonalities and differences in humour usage. Recently, studies are diving into the multimodal intricacies of humour in different countries, such as differences in displayed smiling behaviours of American and French persons [50] or amongst others, gesture and prosody for humour construction in German-Brazilian interactions [36]. However, to the best of our knowledge, automated multimodal cross-cultural humour detection, which sheds light on the transferability of humour, has not been done, yet.…”

Dissecting the types and functions of religious humor in Nasreddin Hoja short-stories

“…Common ground establishment is the subsequent social management function where a speaker can use the hearer's reaction to humor to establish attention, understanding, and degree of involvement. In intercultural interaction, Ladilova and Schröder (2022) further claim that this aspect is central to avoiding misunderstandings in the communication of something they formerly disagreed with.…”

Humorous Aspects of Truck Container Signs in Indonesia

“…Humor is culturally dependent because it often relies on shared experiences, values, and linguistic nuances specific to a particular culture (Ladilova et al, U., 2022;Afriani, 2020;Bryant & Bainnridge, 2022). The cultural context greatly influences what people find funny; a community's unique social, historical, and linguistic elements shape humor.…”