Cross-cultural and Intercultural Humour
Chair: Kerry Mullan
Responses to Humour Bids in Intercultural Initial Interactions
Amir Sheikhan, UQ
Using Cross-cultural Humour Misunderstanding: Case Studies in the Foreign Language Classroom
John Rucynski and Caleb Prichard, Okayama
“Aeneas’ Dream" - If We Can Laugh About the Same Things, We Are Not So Different: A Comedy with Migrant Actors
Matteo Andreone, Elena Amore and Tommaso Vitali
Accademia Nazionale
“My wifi doesn’t feel well”: Humour Arising from Online Language Learning Classes
Scott Gardner and Teresa Stockwell, Okayama
Comments 17
Hello everyone,
I am delighted to be able to chair this panel of four fascinating presentations on the topic of cross-cultural and intercultural humour, which between them covered all my own fields of research and personal interests. As an interactional linguist, language teacher and learner, migrant now living in my fourth country, and as someone whose own sense of humour is regularly misunderstood (!), I resonated on multiple levels with the content.
What struck me across all of them was the really rich and varied datasets and contexts for the research, the range of methodological approaches employed, and yet how all of the researchers identify some very important questions. From paired initial interactions to the foreign language classroom (physical and virtual) to the drama of the stage, all the presentations demonstrate the fine line between failed and successful humour in cross/intercultural communication. It is important to note that failed humour is obviously not restricted to cross/intercultural humour, but of course the stakes can be higher when humour does fail in these situations.
This then leads to bigger questions around the limits of humour, the concept of crossing the line, balancing cultural sensitivity with humour, the importance of humour as a survival mechanism, and its power to heal and to bring people together.
Rather than asking you all the same question, I would like to ask you one each. Feel free to post your answer below (for others to read) and/or to bring it along to the Zoom discussion later if you are able to attend.
Amir: How much do you think your instances of “failed” humour were due to the intercultural nature of your interactions?
(Also, I can recommend Nancy Bell’s pre-2016 work on failed humour – she has a ten step model.)
John and Caleb: It is so good to see this kind of training/discussion in the language classroom. I would be really interested in some of your students’ responses to your second case study (which you didn’t have time to include here) if you have them to hand.
Matteo, Elena and Tommaso: your work is so important and valuable; thank you for sharing this project with us. How has this project changed your own understanding of intercultural humour?
(And will we be able to watch the documentary somewhere when completed?)
Scott and Teresa: I appreciate it is very difficult to measure any increase in English proficiency due to the humour here, but I was really interested by some of the students’ apparent increased confidence to use English in responding to the humorous situation. Can you say any more on this?
(I am also in awe that you had the foresight to get ethics and undertake research on what was happening last year, given the chaos!)
I look forward to discussing these presentations online later today with as many of you as possible.
1-2pm Perth
3-4pm AEST (Brisbane)
3.30pm Adelaide
4-5pm AEDT (Melbourne/Sydney/Canberra)
Zoom link https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83269611574 [Meeting ID: 832 6961 1574]
Kerry
Hi Kerry,
Thanks for your question and recommendation.
In this study, I focus on “responses” to humour and argue that dichotomising failed and successful humour would not answer my research question. The objective of my study is to see how humour (either failed or successful) is responded to.
Regarding the role of the intercultural context, findings show that how humour is responded to (disattending, minimally attending, minimally expanding or post expanding the humour) can be associated with the interactants’ co-construction of group membership, claims to in-group and out-group membership, and common ground. In an intercultural context, particularly in initial interactions, interlocutors do not initially share solid group memberships and hence humour is more likely to be disattended. However, when an in-group membership is co-constructed, humour is more likely to be attended to and expanded. In the same vein, an intercultural context in which interlocutors cannot presume common ground to the extent they can in a setting where interlocutors have a similar cultural background would hinder attending and expanding humour – in a separate paper which will be presented at IPrA 2021, Michael Haugh and I will be discussing epistemics as a means to scrutinise the role common ground in this context.
I hope I have answered your question and am looking forward to discussing more questions in the meeting this afternoon (afternoon for us here in Brisbane!)
Thanks Amir.
Nancy’s model deals with all sorts of “failed” humour, including responding/not responding, acknowledging that it’s very hard to know when humour has really failed or not. It’s a great read!
If we have time we can talk further about your first example this afternoon. I think SB really thought that FL was learning German and that’s where the misunderstanding came in, but perhaps I have misunderstood / fallen into the out-group trap here too! 😉
Thanks, Kerry!
Yes, Nacy’s work is seminal, especially the developments of her 2010 paper with Salvatore. I will have a more careful look to see how to use her model in my discussion.
I am excited to talk over the first example later today. I think a discussion of what they have said leading to this excerpt can also shed light on what is going on in this example.
Salam Amir,
I very much enjoyed listening to your study. I look forward to reading the paper and also the forthcoming paper (with Michael) on the epistemics (I’ve been working on them in another context).
I have a small suggestion for you when you are writing up the paper. The aim of your study, as you mentioned, is a typology of responses to humour in intercultural interactions.
So on that basis, the three items on your conclusion slides are very accurate. However, based on what you presented, only the third item was substantiated to me. To prove the first and the second items (on the conclusion slide), I think you need to discuss earlier why these responses in this context are different from any other (monocultural). It comes to my mind that responses to humour in every context would share these features, wouldn’t they? I think this needs a bit elaboration. Otherwise, your conclusions would seem like a general typology of humourous responses in initial interactions and the issue with membership sentiment that you mentioned. In other words, would you not reach roughly the same conclusions if you had studied native English speakers at, let’s say, UQ?
Mokhlesam,
Reza
Salam Reza,
Thanks very much for your comment.
I think I need to be more careful with how I frame my discussion. While the context of my study is intercultural, I won’t argue that these types of responses and their functions are exclusive to this context. Rather, I have tried to explore the underexplored context of intercultural initial interactions where, as in other contexts, humour serves different functions and responses to these humour bid have shown to range from disattending to post expanding the humour – I believe this typology can, of course, be used to study responses to humour in other contexts (e.g. intracultural). What is salient in this context, and might make it different from an intracultural context, is how humour is accomplished. This has shown to be associated with co-construction of group membership and epistemics in the conversation, what can be argued to be different in intercultural and intracultural contexts.
Hope to see you this afternoon.
Eradat!
Thank you, Kerry, as always.
“I was really interested by some of the students’ apparent increased confidence to use English in responding to the humorous situation. Can you say any more on this?”
It did seem to us that, when humorous events occurred during class, some of the students were willing to take more risks and respond in English–at least with the teacher present. It is almost as if the humor event pulled us out of the classroom temporarily, and their interactions–again, with the teacher, at least–became authentic dialogues, like we had just witnessed something together while walking down the street. They suddenly had a real desire to communicate something in the target language. Until we have a chance to study Teresa’s recordings of students interacting without the teacher present, though, we can’t really say if that sort of thing happened when teachers were not there.
We do think, however, that the overall unity-building that occurred from experiencing humorous events together in the strange, clunky environment of Zoom had a general effect of lowering tension and making students more willing to talk to each other. The accidental humor seemed to stoke conversation, and the lightened mood may have led to more spontaneous and planned humor…and, hopefully, a little bit more target language.
This is hardly an answer, but we hope with more no-teacher-present data and longitudinal research we can say something more about this.
Thanks Scott – I agree that the online platform brought students and teachers together somehow. There was a definite feeling of “we’re all in this together”. One of my students commented on how informal it made the classes – the fact that they could see into where their teachers lived was a real leveller (plus pets/partners/children /parents etc walking in the background).
Really look forward to your no-teacher data (AHSN 2022?). 🙂
Scott and Teresa,
I thought it was really good how you focused on the learners in this project. It seems like most research about humor in language teaching is looking at what the teacher is bringing in to the classroom. However, the benefits of humor in the language classroom can be just as much, or even greater, when it involves student to student humor. So many of our learners already have anxiety about English classes, so when you throw in the extra anxiety of classes on the strange new world of Zoom, that can make humor even more powerful for lessening anxiety and humanizing the classes. Good work!
Thanks for your comment, John.
I like to think that teaching L2 humor appreciation in the classroom can be a lot more fruitful once students are comfortable knowing that THEIR humor is also appreciated.
E te Kaiwhakaako Mullan, ka nui te mihi ki a koe mo o paatai pai.
The realization of a comedy show with migrant actors as protagonists (some of whom have just arrived in Italy) allowed us to experience a “humor of the world”, that is, a kind of humour that could facilitate human relationship beyond the differences of language, religion, mentality and culture.
In fact, from the very beginning, one of the main objectives of the project was to seek a basic, instinctive, almost primal humor. Indeed, even before trying to generate a common humorous language, useful for making an audience laugh, we worked to create an environment suitable for the spontaneous development of humor. An environment in which every communication obstacle could be transformed into a channel of connection, understanding, harmony and exchange, every fragility into a resource and every difference into a richness.
Working with those who have painfully experienced the tragedy (therefore comedy), even before creating and interpreting it, importing it from other worlds and other cultures, has allowed us to formulate some interesting considerations with regarding humoua= r as a communication tool and intercultural sharing. Considerations that we make available to anyone who wants to deepen their research in this direction.
a) In the absence of cognitive sharing, of a similar language and culture, humor can also be based only on emotional harmony. For example, in observing some scenes of famous post-war Italian comedians, the protagonists of the workshops identified with them simply because they recognized the same emotional characteristics they have experienced several times.
b) Since laughing at the same things is very complicated (sometimes in the same family, everyone laughs for different things), humor could be useful as a signal: whenever we could laugh at something together, we could say that we had reached the highest degree in sharing.
c) In the case of migrants who comes from poor parts of the world, many of whom fled hunger and war, humor has served us to allow them to observe their own difficulties and inadequacies with emotional detachment. During the first meetings, for them it was difficult, if not incomprehensible, to exercise self-irony, given their basic insecurity. Later, self-irony (and irony) have become for them more and more tools of self-esteem and security.
d) Using comedy to tell a situation that Italians were used to hearing, always and alone, in dramatic and pietistic terms allowed the public to humanize the protagonists of the story and to welcome them as friends. The certainty that arose from the observation of this fact made us understand that if you laugh with someone, you can no longer hate them, fear them, not even ignore them.
e) Using humorous language to address the public allowed the protagonists to make fun both of themselves and the Italian people, with their strengths and weaknesses, without them feeling offended in any way.
These considerations are the result of a double observation, the first of the migrant actors, protagonists of the training and entertainment workers, the second of the Italian audience who attended the shows.
Thanks for this detailed response Matteo, it really is such a wonderful and worthy project. I can only imagine how valuable the migrant actors found it too.
The online discussion will start in one hour at 4pm Melbourne time (6am in Italy), so we will understand if that is too early for you to join us! If you were brave enough to wake up so early, we would love to see you, but if not, we will encourage people to contact you directly, or on here, with any further comments or feedback.
Professor Mullan,
Thank you for your question. It was regrettable to not have time to include student reactions to such a controversial case. While many students did find the cartoons to be inappropriate, most did not feel that an official apology was necessary. The biggest reason was in considering the target of the humor–when you consider the cartoons more closely, it is clear they are not ridiculing victims of the disaster. On the other hand, most students did agree with Gilbert Gottfried being fired as the spokesman for Aflac after tweeting jokes about the disaster. As with freedom of speech arguments, many students argued that people are free to make the kind of jokes they want, but they also have to face the consequences. With Gottfried, there is also the issue of timing. He made this jokes almost immediately after the 3/11 disaster, as he also did with 9/11. This is just speculation, but timing also could have influenced student opinions about the French cartoons. After all, we were discussing this issue in 2019, so several years had passed since both the disaster and the publication of the cartoons.
One more thing I would like to add about these case studies is the importance of looking at different perspectives and considering exceptions. While these case studies offer great opportunity for discussion, there is also the risk of overgeneralizing the cases and taking them to mean, for example, “OK, Americans joke this way and Japanese joke this way.” Some details to add to this:
-With the Murton sarcasm case, a funny follow up was an interview with Japanese teammate Kyuji Fujikawa, who had also pitched for several seasons in the United States. When asked about the incident, Fujikawa also blamed the sports media looking for a story, then coyly added, “By the way, I hate Nohmi too.” 🙂
-While Americans may use sarcasm more than Japanese people, sarcasm certainly exists in Japanese. Below is an interesting video from a Japanese YouTuber:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpnzpEDshVY (“Japanese People Don’t Use Sarcasm” by That Japanese Man Yuta; note: the title is sarcastic!)
-Although this presentation considers cultural humor norms, we always have to consider other factors such as generation, individual humor styles, etc. As just one example of this, when I mentioned the French newspaper, a French student in the class kind of grimaced and noted, “Oh, that’s the kind of paper that my father reads.”
-Although it has also been argued that biting social satire is rare in modern Japan, people may only be looking at mainstream (a.k.a. conservative) media. One recommended article I wanted to mention in the presentation is Post 3-11 Japanese political cartooning with satirical bite: Non-newspaper cartoons and their potential (Stewart, 2016).
Thanks John, and I agree – it’s really important to avoid essentialism and generalisation, especially where humour is concerned. I love your example where the student said “Oh, that’s the kind of paper that my father reads.”! This really made me think of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the cartoon controversy (and how they continue to be provocative), and yet only a very small percentage of French people read and/or appreciate the paper.
It’s really important to highlight all the complexities, and great that your students are fully aware of that.
Greetings and thanks to all of you for enthralling presentations — I’ve learned a lot from watching and look forward to more discussion in an hour or so. Just one comment on Matteo and company’s project — sincere thanks for taking teh trouble to present all this in English so we illiterati who don’t follow Italian could understand. Your finding about humour rendering it impossible or at least less likely for antagonism to be expressed between those who laughed together reminds me of Norbert Elias’s short essay on the ethnographic origins of humour, “Wer lachen, kann nicht beissen” (S’he who laughs cannot bite). While this is available in English, our AHSN colleague Dr Peter Gerdes has translated it into English. If anyone would be interested in Peter’s (unpublished) translation, please email me on jessmd@bigpond.net.au. Later scholars have disagreed on with Elias on the origins of smiling and laughter, but his essay still makes interesting reading. A more nuanced view is in Alexander Kozintsev’s book, “The Mirror of Laughter” (Routledge, 2010)
Thank you Jessica, for your suggestions. I was not familiar with Norbert Elias’ “Wer lachen, kann nicht beissen” and, although you can confirm that his theories on the origin of humor were later replaced, I would be very interested in reading the English version.
Of course, in our case, the observation of humor as a natural “antidote” to human oppositional aggression and as a tool that facilitates connection and understanding between individuals was not intended to theorize its origin but to empirically demonstrate its effectiveness.
We actually noticed that the humorous game was effective in first establishing a connection and understanding between individuals, then an exchange of ideas and emotions, and finally a shared search for new ideas and new common emotions.
Thank you again.
Thanks to everyone for such engaging discussions here. It was a pleasure to chair this panel, as it is to talk to many of you online every day. Thanks for all the time you are putting into these exchanges.