{"title":"‘Joking aside’ The power of rejections in humour","authors":"Hanna Söderlund","doi":"10.1177/17504813231155740","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Response is an effective tool for exercising power in humour, since it can make a person seem funny. In the same way, the lack of response can make a person seem unfunny. In this article I argue that failed jokes make a female skiing pundit on TV seem humourless and that this is due to the other interlocutors refraining from giving adequate responses. The material is from a sports programme about cross-country skiing on Swedish Television. The aim of the case study is to find out how power is exercised discursively in humour that fails and to discuss possible implications the rejections may have on notions of gender. The theoretical framework used is a feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis in combination with an analysis of internal and external control mechanisms. The discursive practice of repeated rejections of the female pundit may have consequences for her possibilities in seeming humorous.","PeriodicalId":46726,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1000,"publicationDate":"2023-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Discourse & Communication","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813231155740","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Response is an effective tool for exercising power in humour, since it can make a person seem funny. In the same way, the lack of response can make a person seem unfunny. In this article I argue that failed jokes make a female skiing pundit on TV seem humourless and that this is due to the other interlocutors refraining from giving adequate responses. The material is from a sports programme about cross-country skiing on Swedish Television. The aim of the case study is to find out how power is exercised discursively in humour that fails and to discuss possible implications the rejections may have on notions of gender. The theoretical framework used is a feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis in combination with an analysis of internal and external control mechanisms. The discursive practice of repeated rejections of the female pundit may have consequences for her possibilities in seeming humorous.
期刊介绍:
Discourse & Communication is an international, peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles that pay specific attention to the qualitative, discourse analytical approach to issues in communication research. Besides the classical social scientific methods in communication research, such as content analysis and frame analysis, a more explicit study of the structures of discourse (text, talk, images or multimedia messages) allows unprecedented empirical insights into the many phenomena of communication. Since contemporary discourse study is not limited to the account of "texts" or "conversation" alone, but has extended its field to the study of the cognitive, interactional, social, cultural.