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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.