Organization of the panel “Shaping Humour in Interaction” at IPRA 2023

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Organization of the panel “Shaping Humour in Interaction” at IPRA 2023

The 18th edition of the International Pragmatics Congress (IPrA) took place in Brussels, Belgium, from July 9 to 14, 2023, at the Free University of Brussels (ULB). The panel “Shaping Humour in Interaction,” chaired by Dr. Leonor Ruiz Gurillo and Dr. Esther Linares Bernabéu, featured 12 presentations spread across 4 sessions on Monday, July 10.

Panel Summary:

Humor is a multifaceted phenomenon based on human attributes such as perception, cognition, and emotions. It is a daily reality that occurs in various contexts, capturing the interest of scholars from diverse disciplines. Studies on humor have been conducted in fields as varied as linguistics, sociology, psychology, education, or medicine, to name a few.

There is a growing interest in humorous discourse from a linguistic and interactive perspective, yielding fascinating results (see Norrick and Chiaro, 2009; Chovanec and Tsakona, 2018; Yus, 2018; Mullan and Béal, 2018; Haugh and Weinglass, 2018; Sinkeviciute, 2019; Attardo, 2020; Mullan et al., 2020; Chang and Haugh, 2020; Ruiz-Gurillo, 2021; Gironzetti, 2022). This panel focuses on the role of humor in different interactive settings. Contributions will analyze humor from a pragmatic approach by examining different interactive genres, showing that humor is an intrinsically human phenomenon based on ambiguity that transcends various lines and borders, including gender, age, or ethnicity.

By focusing on the form of humor in interaction, various types of genres can be distinguished, considering humorous realizations (Tsakona, 2017). For example, there are communicative contexts where humor is expected (such as jokes, stand-up comedy, memes), and participants are in a humorous mode. Similarly, there are other situations where humor acts as a discursive strategy (such as conversations, WhatsApp, Twitter), and interlocutors sustain and co-construct humor over multiple turns, both in online and offline environments. Finally, it is also interesting to analyze how humor is negotiated in genres where comedy is not expected (such as blogs, online forums).