Talk in a play frame: More on laughter and intimacy

Talk in a play frame: More on laughter

and intimacy

Jennifer Coates

School of Arts, Roehampton University, Roehampton Lane, London SW15 5PH, United Kingdom

Received 16 March 2005; received in revised form 4 January 2006; accepted 5 May 2006

Abstract

Conversation is one of the key locuses of humour and it is now widely agreed that shared laughter

nurtures group solidarity. This paper will explore the links between laughter and intimacy in everyday

conversation. The paper will attempt to clarify the term ‘conversational humour’, focussing on informal

conversation among friends and on the conversational practices involved in humorous talk. I argue,

following Bateson, that conversational humour involves the establishment of a ‘play frame’. When a play

frame is established, speakers collaborate in the construction of talk in a way that resembles group

musical activity, particularly jazz. This way of talking is characterised by, among other things, over-

lapping speech, the co-construction of utterances, repetition, and a heightened use of metaphorical

language. I will argue that play and creativity are linked in significant ways, and that playful talk is

essentially collaborative.

# 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Humour; Laughter; Intimacy; Solidarity; Conversation; Collaborative talk; Play

1. Introduction

In this paper I shall examine humorous talk occurring in the informal conversation of friends. I

shall argue that humorous talk is a form of play, and that talk as play can only be achieved by

close collaboration between speakers. Collaboration between speakers constructs solidarity, and

thus a key function of playful talk is the creation and maintenance of group solidarity, of intimacy

between speakers. In this respect, I shall pursue the line begun by Jefferson et al. (1978) in their

paper ‘Notes on laughter in the pursuit of intimacy’. I shall examine some of the characteristics of

talk as play, drawing on a corpus of informal conversational data involving pairs or groups of

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friends, and will argue that talk as play shares features with music, particularly with jazz. The

complex, often polyphonic, textual patterns of playful talk index the complex, intricate and

intimate links between speakers.

2. Language and humour

After many years of relative neglect, humour is now the focus of attention in a

range of work being carried out by social psychologists, sociolinguists and conversation

analysts, and in a variety of contexts. These include the workplace (Holmes, 2000;

Holmes et al., 2001; Holmes and Marra, 2002; Mullaney, 2003); the classroom (Kehily and

Nayak, 1997; Davies, 2003); medical settings (DuPre, 1998; Astedt-Kurki et al., 2001;

Sullivan et al., 2003); TV discussion groups (Kotthoff, 2003); as well as informal settings such

as the home (Norrick, 1993a, 1993b, 2004; Gibbs, 2000; Hay, 2000; Everts, 2003; Coates, in

press).

In this paper, I shall focus on humour involving conversation among friends in informal

settings. Despite growing interest in talk and humour, there does not seem to be general

agreement on the meaning of the term ‘conversational humour’. Many researchers have used

what seems to me a rather narrow interpretation of this term, focusing on specific speech acts

such as telling a joke, making a pun, being sarcastic or ironic (see, for example, Chiaro, 1992;

Attardo, 1993; Norrick, 1993b; Gibbs, 2000).

It could be that this bias in emphasis is gender-related. Recent research exploring gender

variation in humour has established a clear pattern of difference among speakers, with men

preferring more formulaic joking and women sharing funny stories to create solidarity

(see Crawford and Gressley, 1991; Boxer and Cortes-Conde, 1997; Hay, 2000; Crawford,

2003). As Crawford (1995:149) remarks, ‘‘Women’s reputation for telling jokes badly

(forgetting punch lines, violating story sequencing rules, etc.) may reflect a male norm that

does not recognise the value of cooperative story-telling’’. So perhaps the foundational work

done by men (e.g. Mulkay, 1988; Attardo, 1993; Norrick, 1993a) grew out of their own

orientation to humour. On the other hand, significant contributions to the literature on humour

by female linguists, such as Tannen’s (1984) chapter (entitled ‘Irony and joking’) and Chiaro’s

(1991) book (entitled ‘The Language of Jokes’) suggest that a focus on joking rather than

humour in conversation is widely accepted as appropriate. Indeed, the first book-length

examination of conversational humour (Norrick, 1993a) is called ‘Conversational Joking’, not

‘Conversational Humour’.

While joking is clearly part of humour, it is surely the case that humour is a much broader,

more fuzzy-edged category than the term ‘joking’ implies. In British English, telling a joke is a

very specific speech act, that is, a short formulaic utterance, ending with a punch line, which

produces (or is meant to produce) laughter. Telling a joke, moreover, is an activity only rarely

associated with friendly conversation. This is not surprising, given that, ‘‘a joke . . . is likely to

disrupt a ‘normal’ or ‘serious’ conversation’’ (Chiaro, 1992:114). Moreover, ‘‘joke-capping

sessions’’ (where one speaker tells a joke and then a second speaker tells a joke and so on)

‘‘are not an everyday occurrence’’ (ibid:113).

Chiaro’s claims are supported by the evidence of my corpus of informal conversation

involving friends or family. In this corpus I have found no joke-capping sessions and only one

short passage that could be described as a joke-telling. There are some instances in the corpus

of the combative style which can be labelled ‘‘joking around’’. This is confined to the talk of

the youngest speakers (12–17 years) and is more frequently used by male speakers. This

J. Coates / Journal of Pragmatics 39 (2007) 29–4930

conforms to the patterns observed by other commentators (see, for example, Back, 1994;

Pilkington, 1998; Kehily and Nayak, 1997; Frosh et al. 2002). Frosh et al. (2002) claim that

combative humour is ‘‘central to the construction of masculine identities and hierarchies’’

(op.cit.:103) and that ‘‘joking seems to be a way of establishing intimacy between men and . . .excluding women’’ (op.cit.:232).1 ‘Joking around’ and ‘having a laugh’ are common on the

street and in school playgrounds, but not, it seems, so common in friendly informal adult

conversation.

The conversations I’ve collected, then, are not characterised by joke-telling or by jokey

repartee, but this does not mean there is no humour. On the contrary, laughter occurs in nearly all

the conversations in the corpus. It emerges as the result of humorous stories, or of bantering or

teasing among participants, or when speakers pick up a point and play with it creatively.

Everyday conversation exhibits spontaneous outbursts of verbal play. These differ from jokes in

that a joke is a ready-made unit, learned and repeated by a speaker to amuse an audience. Jokes do

not emerge spontaneously in conversation but stand apart from the flow of talk and interrupt its

progress. The kind of humorous talk I shall focus on in this paper, by contrast, emerges

organically from the ongoing talk and involves the participation of all present. Crucially, it

requires conversational participants to adopt ‘‘an interactive pact’’ (McCarthy and Carter,

2004:172).

Unlike a joke, which can be understood away from the context in which it was performed,

spontaneous conversational humour relies on shared knowledge and in-group norms, which

can make it opaque to outsiders. Everts (2003), for example, discusses a family conversation

where the utterance ‘‘He’s from Virginia’’ is repeated in varying forms throughout

the conversation and is unambiguously humorous. A ‘‘locally emergent expression’’

(Tannen, 1990:45) such as this may acquire ‘‘a degree of fixity or formulaically [sic] as it is

repeated throughout the conversation, but does not outlive the conversation out of which it

emerges’’ (Everts, 2003:388).

Where conversational co-participants collaborate in humorous talk, they can be seen as

playing together. Their shared laughter arises from this play and is a manifestation of intimacy,

with the voice of the group taking precedence over the voice of the individual speaker. The notion

of play is at the heart of what I mean by ‘humour’. Everts comments that when she was coding

utterances in her conversational data as serious or humorous, she kept in mind ‘‘the broader

interpretation of humour as ‘play’ ’’ (Everts, 2003:379). It is this ‘‘broader interpretation’’ of

humour that will be adopted in this paper.

3. Talk as play

The idea of talk as play draws on Bateson’s (1953) idea of a play frame. Bateson argues

that we frame our actions as ‘serious’ or as ‘play’. Conversational participants can frame

their talk as humorous by signalling ‘This is play’. The notion of a ‘play frame’ captures

an essential feature of humour – that it is not serious – and at the same time avoids being

specific about the kinds of talk that can occur in a play frame: potentially anything can be

funny.

For a play frame to be established in talk, conversational participants must collaborate with

each other. As Holmes and Hay (1997:131) observe: ‘‘Successful humour is a joint construction

J. Coates / Journal of Pragmatics 39 (2007) 29–49 31

1 Boys interviewed by Stephen Frosh and his associates saw humour as something exclusively masculine: they implied

that ‘girls were not sufficiently robust to engage in jokey banter’ (Frosh et al., 2002:103).

involving a complex interaction between the person intending a humorous remark and those with

the potential of responding’’. Collaboration is an essential part of playful talk, since

conversational participants have to recognise that a play frame has been invoked and then have to

choose to maintain it. Because conversational humour is a joint activity, involving all participants

at talk, many commentators see its chief function as being the creation and maintenance of

solidarity (see, for example, Norrick, 1993a, 1993b; Hay, 1995; Crawford, 1995; Boxer and

Cortes-Conde, 1997; Holmes and Hay, 1997). The creation of solidarity is an inevitable

consequence of the joint construction of a play frame, since interactants who collaborate in

humorous talk, ‘‘necessarily display how finely tuned they are to each other’’ (Davies,

2003:1362).

Research to pinpoint the contextual cues which signal a play frame has discussed both

speaker intention and audience response. Since textual analysis cannot access speaker

intention, analysts have tended to focus on audience response, including verbal responses such

as agreement, mirroring, or parody. In particular, analysts have focussed on laughter as a key

response. Jefferson (1979, 1984, 1985) carried out meticulous analysis of where laughter

occurs in talk, using a Conversational Analytic approach. More recently, Holmes and

colleagues working on the Language in the Workplace Project (Victoria University,

Wellington, NZ) have paid attention to laughter because of its frequency and salience in their

conversational data. However, they do not restrict themselves to laughter. Other contextual

clues they consider are the preceding discourse, speaker’s tone of voice, sudden changes in

pitch or rhythm, and paralinguistic clues such as the use of a laughing or smiling voice

(Holmes and Hay, 1997:132).

Humour often lies in the gap between what is said and what is meant. When a play frame is

invoked, we have the choice of joining in the play and responding to what is said, or of reverting

to the serious mode. Kotthoff (2003) compared ironic humour in TV discussions with ironic

humour in dinner-time conversations and found that, in the TV discussions she analysed, the

speakers preferred to return to the serious mode, whereas ‘‘[i]n informal situations among

friends, the preferred strategy is to continue in the humorous key and respond to the said’’

(Kotthoff, 2003:1408). In other words, in relaxed friendly talk, speakers collaborate in talking

about one thing while meaning something else, thus maintaining a play frame. As McCarthy and

Carter (2004:161) say, in a discussion of hyperbole, ‘‘it fundamentally depends on a joint

acceptance of a distortion of reality’’. One of the strengths of humour is that it allows us to

explore, in new ways, what we know, and even, by using other words, to explore things which are

difficult or taboo.

There is growing evidence that talk-as-play is qualititatively different from serious talk. Such

evidence can be gleaned from the metaphors researchers draw on to represent talk in a play frame.

Sully (1902 quoted in Norrick, 1993a:141) talks about the ‘choral’ nature of playful talk. Davies

(2003), working with second language learners, claims that conversational humour is a

collaborative activity, and that ‘‘the verbal art of this specialised joint activity most closely

resembles jazz in the world of music’’ (Davies, 2003:1368). Sawyer (2001:19) also draws on jazz

as a metaphor, and I have described the collaborative talk of women friends in terms of a ‘‘jam

session’’ (Coates, 1996:117–118). These metaphors make parallels between talk and music.

Similarly, parallels between spoken language use and poetry have not escaped the scrutiny of

linguists (see in particular Tannen, 1990). But in the case of talk-as-play, what seems to be most

salient is the collaborative, all-in-together nature of the talk. Humorous talk often involves

speakers constructing text as a joint endeavour, just as jazz musicians co-construct music as they

improvise on a theme.


It is not only in informal contexts involving intimates or close friends that talk-as-play is

found. It is always possible for a speaker to introduce a play frame, and research looking at

workplace contexts, for example, has uncovered a surprising amount of playful talk (see, for

example, Holmes, 2000; Holmes et al., 2001; Mullaney, 2003). All of us, as competent

speakers, can switch talk from serious to playful modes. Where talk occurs in a formal

context, interactants may switch to a play frame from time to time to defuse tension or to

provide light relief from a boring agenda, for example. But in informal contexts where

interactants know each other well, talk may switch repeatedly between serious and

non-serious frames, and conversational participants will collaborate with each other to bring

about the switches. The unpredictability of this kind of talk is part of what makes it fun for

participants—anyone can trigger a switch at any time. In this paper, I shall focus on informal

talk among friends, because this talk has the potential for frequent and often extended talk in

a play frame.

4. Some examples of talk in a play frame

In this section, I shall examine three examples of humorous talk. In each example, one of the

speakers switches from a serious to a play frame, a switch which is recognised by the speaker’s

co-participants, who proceed to co-construct talk in the play frame. In this section I shall only

comment briefly on the extracts: detailed analysis of the language features which characterise

this humorous talk will be carried out in section 5.

The three examples are taken from three very different conversations: first, a conversation

involving three women friends in their 30s, over supper at a house in Surrey, England;

second, a conversation involving three young women friends, in their early 20s, all students

in Melbourne, Australia; third, a younger group of three young men friends, aged about

19, in South London.2 These extracts have been chosen in part to demonstrate that humorous

talk is not the preserve of one particular group but is a normal aspect of friendly everyday

talk.

The first example shows how conversational participants can draw on what has been talked

about in a serious frame earlier in conversation. Sue tells her two friends that she has brought the

school rabbit home for the weekend. They talk briefly about the rabbit before the conversation

moves on through other topics to a discussion of marriage and relationships. Sue tells a story

about a couple she knows where the wife has forbidden the husband to play his guitar, or even to

have a guitar in the house. This raises issues about obedience and appropriate behaviour in

relationships, and after some more serious talk about the husband’s wild youth and near-

alcoholism, Sue re-introduces the rabbit theme. The example below represents a very small part

of the discussion of the obedient husband. (The extract has been transcribed using stave

notation.)3


2 I am extremely grateful to all those who have allowed their conversations to be recorded and analysed as part of my

research. Names have been changed to provide anonymity. I would also like to thank Mary-Ellen Jordan who collected the

Melbourne data and who has collaborated with me in analysing it (see Coates and Jordan, 1997).3 This means that all participants’ contributions are to be read simultaneously, like instruments in a musical stave.

Any word, or portion of a word, appearing vertically above or below any other word, is to be read as occurring at the

same time as that word. This system allows the reader to see how the utterances of the different participants relate to

each other.

At the beginning of this extract, the three friends ponder on the obedient husband’s life. Liz’s

utterance oh bless him he doesn’t have much of a life triggers Sue’s laughter as she responds he

doesn’t really. The switch to a play frame is achieved by the mocking, quasi-maternal tone which


Liz adopts in relation to the obedient husband. Sue then introduces a new dimension with her

simile: he’s like the rabbit, and warms to her theme, continuing I think I should bring him

home for weekends. Liz joins in with the suggestion that the bossy wife should get the

husband/rabbit a run in the garden, while Anna suggests the two ‘rabbits’ could meet. Liz

fantasises that the husband/rabbit would be happy with a few lettuce leaves and adopts an

ingratiating voice to mimic the husband thanking his wife for the lettuce. This is a very good

example of Kotthoff’s (2003) claim that the co-construction of humour relies on participants

responding to what is said (playing with the theme of rabbits, of bringing pets home for the

weekend, of making runs in the garden), rather than to what is meant (wives and husbands

should have a more equal relationship and should not order each other round). The repetition

of the rabbit theme makes the talk of these friends textually cohesive. By reverting to the

rabbit theme and using ‘rabbit’ as a metaphor for obedient husband, these friends are able to

play with the parallels that this throws up and to say some pretty devastating things about the

couple and their relationship.

The next example comes from a conversation between three friends, all students at Melbourne

University. At this point in the conversation, Amanda tells her two friends (Jody and Clare) that

the mother of a friend of theirs is proposing to marry the man she has been having an affair with

for a month. All three friends are horrified at the news, but they use humour to good effect to

express their critical view of heterosexual marriage, of the particular man talked about and by

implication men in general, and to have a laugh about an earlier joke about Clare, sex and the

computer.


Jody’s words whatever they do together in stave 2 are initially received with only a minimal

response from Amanda. But Jody chooses to re-focus attention on the idea of ‘whatever they do

together’ by adding I hate to think. This reframes the phrase: whatever they do together is now

marked as both humorous and sexual. Clare’s recognition that a play frame has been introduced is

marked by her laughing protest, while Amanda maintains the frame with the joke it’s probably


heterosexual, a joke which inverts the normal pattern of heterosexual unmarked/homosexual

marked.

Amanda’s joke is picked up with relish by the other two speakers: Jody launches into a series of

utterances which talk about the man’s mobile phone, with heavy sexual innuendo. Clare responds to

Amanda’s comment in kind, with the utterance well we KNOW what they do then DON’T we in a

mock-patronizing reference to the act of sexual penetration—the implication here is ‘boring!’

and/or ‘predictable’. At the same time, she cohesively ties in Jody’s reference to mobile phones by

saying, in effect, that what we imagine them doing involves a mobile phone in some unspeakable

way. This reading is confirmed by Amanda’ subsequent teasing remark to Clare: you’re the techno

sex guru, Clare, you can hardly talk, in which the reference to techno-sex can be understood only if

Clare’s utterance has something to do with techno-sex. The mobile phone joke recurs throughout

their talk, and the play frame is maintained throughout the succeeding conversation, with the young

women constantly sending up the normative discourse of Romantic Love.4

The last extract comes from a conversation in which three young men are discussing whether

miracles are possible (all three are involved in their local church). In this example, Des reinterprets a

Bible story with help from Jack and Hav—Jack and Hav’s contributions are in italics. (This example

is a narrative, with one speaker taking the role of narrator; it involves less overlap than the preceding

examples. It has been transcribed according to narrative conventions.)5

(3) MIRACLES1 But supposing that he raised someone from the dead?

2 [. . .]3 It was a little girl [yeah]

4 and she was dead

5 he got to the house too late

6 when she was dead,

7 I can’t remember all the-

8 And. he- he said- he said something ((to her))

9 ‘‘Get up, ((xx)) stupid cow’’

10 and she got up,

11 she was alive.

12 But. when you think about how shit medicine was in those days

[mhm]

13 I mean who says she was dead? [yeah I know]

14 she could have been in a coma [yeah]

15 and he could have like triggered something off

16 she could have been lying

17 she could have been lying

18 she could have been really pretending

19 **very very well**

20 **she could have been like-**

21 ‘‘Right ((I’m gonna sort that out))’’ <CLAPS HANDS> <LAUGHTER>


4 The entire transcript of this humorous chunk of conversation can be found in the Appendix to Coates and Jordan

(1997).5 The story is presented in numbered lines, each line corresponding to one of the narrator’s breath-groups or intonation

units, typically a grammatical phrase or clause (Chafe, 1980).

22 ‘‘I can’t -I can’t keep this up much longer, <SIMULATES GIRL’S HIGH VOICE><LAUGHTER>

23 fucking stupid bearded cunt, <LOUD LAUGHTER>24 go on, fuck off,’’ <LAUGHTER>25 for fuck’s sake, the bastard. <QUIETER>26 ‘‘Get up’’ <SERIOUS VOICE> <LAUGHTER>27 ‘‘Thank God for that, <REVERTS TO GIRL’S VOICE> <LAUGHTER>28 oh, Jesus Christ <LAUGHTER> that was hard.’’ <LAUGHTER>29 Right, where’s my fiver. <NORMAL VOICE> <LAUGHTER>30 But I mean let’s face it,

31 medicine was crap. [yeah]

[words between double asterisks were spoken at the same time]

This story is typical of many in the all-male conversations I’ve collected, particularly those of

younger men. Talk in such conversations switches constantly between serious and non-serious

frames, and the men involved collaborate with each other to bring about the switches. This example

is in two parts: the first (serious) part is a re-telling of a Bible story about a miracle; the second (non-

serious) part involves a dramatised re-interpretation of the story. Hav attempts to switch to a non-

serious frame early on with his contribution Get up, ((xx)) stupid cow (line 9), but Des ignores Hav

and completes his initial re-telling of the story. There is then a transitional section (lines 12–20)

constructed by two speakers, Des and Jack, before the switch to a play frame is fully accomplished.

This is an interesting stretch of talk in which the speakers play with ideas which become

increasingly fantastic. It is only at line 20, when Hav again uses simulated dialogue: ‘‘Right

((I’m gonna sort that out))’’ that the humorous version of the story finally takes off. This time, Des

accepts the play frame and tells the story again entirely in reported speech. Hav’s earlier words

allow Des the economy of simply saying Get up in a more serious voice (line 26) to bring off the

animation of Jesus in the story. Once Des begins his comic re-telling of the story in dialogue, Hav

lets him have the floor, and he and Jack become speechless with laughter. Des’s joking demand for

payment (right where’s my fiver?) recognises that he has succeeded in amusing his friends. But note

that his switch back to a serious frame in the next line (But I mean let’s face it, medicine was crap

. . .) is achieved through the co-operation of Jack and Hav: they stop laughing and the minimal

response yeah at this point signals their acceptance of the switch back to a serious frame.

5. The linguistic and para-linguistic features of talk in a play frame

I have argued that playful talk is qualititatively different from other kinds of talk and that it can

often be described in terms of music, particularly jazz. In this section I shall examine five features

of talk in a play frame, features which seem to be intrinsically involved in what it means to ‘play’

conversationally. The features are: overlapping speech, the co-construction of utterances,

repetition, laughter, and metaphor. These five features are often co-present in a given stretch of

talk: for example, overlapping speech often involves repetition, co-constructed utterances often

involve two people speaking at the same time and repeating elements from the preceding

discourse, and laughter often overlaps with ongoing talk.

5.1. Overlapping speech

A play frame can only be established if all conversational participants collaborate in

sustaining it. This requires that talk is jointly constructed in a much stronger sense than


that intended by Grice’s notion of cooperation (Grice, 1975). Collaboratively constructed talk,

in this strong sense (see Edelsky, 1993; Coates, 1996, 1997a; Coates and Sutton Spence,

2001), starts from the premise that the conversational floor is potentially open to all

participants simultaneously. This is very different from a one-at-a-time floor, where

(as its name suggests) the floor is inhabited by only one speaker at any one time. Norrick

(2004, following Goffman) talks about collaboratively constructed talk of this kind as ‘a team

performance’.

Overlapping speech is the inevitable outcome of joint ownership of the conversational floor. But

far from leading to conversational breakdown, overlapping speech in a collaborative floor entails

a richer multi-layered texture to talk, where speakers demonstrate their shared perspective

on whatever is being talked about and display ‘‘how finely tuned they are to each other’’

(Davies, 2003:1362).

The first extract is a very good illustration of the kind of overlapping speech that is common in

humorous talk among friends. These three friends have been playing for some time with the story

of the obedient husband, and when Sue triggers a new play frame, they all collaborate in

sustaining it. Their contributions to talk are made simultaneously: each of them develops the

rabbit theme in their own way, yet they are clearly attending to each other at the same time, as the

repetition of words and meaning demonstrates. The example begins with all three speakers

overlapping, and repeating each other’s words. Liz says he doesn’t have much of a life and then

Anna and Sue speak simultaneously:

[Anna: he doesn’t by the sounds of it

[Sue: he doesn’t really <LAUGHS>

By saying the same thing at the same time, or by echoing what has just been said, interactants

bind their utterances together and in this case prepare the ground for Sue’s he’s like the rabbit,

which follows straight on. Staves 3, 4 and 5 all consist of more than one speaker speaking at the

same time as another speaker. In staves 3–4, for example, Sue and Liz overlap:

and then Liz and Anna overlap:

The effect of this complex pattern of overlapping is to give the impression of everyone speaking

at once, but in a coherent, not chaotic, way. It is this kind of playful talk that has been likened to a

jam session (Coates, 1996:117–118) or more generally to jazz (Davies, 2003:1368; Sawyer,

2001:19), because speakers’ voices interweave like instruments improvising on a theme.


The transcript of Example 2 shows that there is a great deal of overlapping talk in this extract.

A very simple example occurs in stave 8 where Amanda’s cyber sex overlaps with Jody’s virtual

sex. Again, we see that where overlap occurs, we also find repeating patterns (here, of words and

ideas). This means that interactants are not having to pay attention to two or three disparate

utterances simultaneously, but to two or occasionally three highly cohesive utterances.

A more extended example of overlap comes in stave 3: Jody says he’s got a bloody mobile

phone and then adds he wears it round his waist; simultaneously Clare laughs and comments

well we KNOW what they do then DON’T we? In overlapping talk like this, involving whole

clauses, participants rely on given information (Jody has established that she is focusing on

mobile phones) to attend simultaneously to Jody’s continued joking and Clare’s elaboration of

Jody’s joke. There is no evidence from any of the humorous talk I have collected that

participants cannot follow what is going on: on the contrary, the evidence of subsequent talk is

that speakers relish ‘choral’ talk of this kind and are stimulated to make further humorous

contributions.

In extract 3, we again find overlapping talk, again coinciding with repetition. Here is the chunk

of talk where two speakers talk simultaneously, this time re-organised in stave format:

In stave 2, we can see how Des starts a fourth contribution to the list of she could have been

utterances at the same time as Jack extends his utterance with an adverbial, which enriches

the syntactic pattern they have established between them. At this moment, Hav seizes the

opportunity of Des’s ambiguous like to switch into a pretend voice and to use direct speech


(be like is now a very common quotative for young speakers—but Des might have been using like

as a hedge while he searched for a new verb).

Overlapping talk is more common in all-female talk than in all-male talk. The evidence of my

database is that men in all-male groups prefer a one-at-a time pattern of turn-taking (for further

discussion, see Coates, 1994, 1997b). In most groupings, male speakers avoid overlapping with

another speaker, except where the other speaker is a female partner. Where overlap as part of the

collaborative construction of talk functions as a display of heterosexual coupledom, men can

produce talk as polyphonic as anything shown in the extracts above. But the pressures of

hegemonic masculinity mean that male speakers must at all times avoid being perceived as gay.

Presumably, conversational duetting, in particular overlapping talk, signals intimacy in a way

which risks such a perception, unless the conversational partner is an actual (heterosexual

female) partner (Coates, 2006).

5.2. Co-constructed utterances

The previous example – where one speaker (Hav) continues an utterance begun by another

speaker (Des) – illustrates how speakers co-construct utterances. Co-construction can involve a

second speaker adding just a single word or an entire clause to an utterance, but in all cases of

co-constructed utterances, what is achieved is two speakers speaking as if with a single voice. The

next two examples are very simple; they are given here to illustrate the concept of co-construction

(both examples involve Anna, Sue and Liz, from a different point in their conversation):

In their playful talk about rabbits (and obedient husbands), Sue, Liz and Anna co-construct talk

drawing on a rhetorical question structure. Liz, in stave 4, asks a question beginning with the

words I wonder why she doesn’t . . . and Anna completes this utterance with the words introduce

them. At the same time, Liz completes her own utterance with the words get him a run in the

garden. This syntactic pattern proves very productive: eventually all three friends use it to

develop the fantasy about the husband/rabbit through adding a second part to the utterance

(which is not repeated):


LIZ: I wonder why she doesn’t get him a run in the garden [stave 4]

ANNA: introduce them [stave 4]

ANNA: introduce them [stave 5]

SUE: bring him home at weekends [stave 5]

SUE: (and) let him go out in the garden [stave 6]

LIZ: give him a few lettuce leaves [stave 6]

It is arguably the case that Sue is not adding a second part to Liz’s utterance, but is adding a new

second part to her own earlier utterance I think I should [bring him home] [stave 3]. In either case,

we see speakers constructing utterances where production is shared between speakers, or where

production involves cohesive repetition.

A further example of co-construction comes from the Melbourne data: in the conversation

which follows example (2), Jody, Clare and Amanda continue their playful demolition of the man

who is going to marry their friend’s mother. They ridicule his liking for strudels, in particular, his

willingness to drive miles to buy strudels.

Amanda and Clare’s jointly achieved utterance in stave two here is a very simple example of co-

construction: Amanda begins the clause and Clare completes it. But at the same time, Amanda

and Clare are collaborating in reinforcing Jody’s initial claim you wouldn’t drive from Palm Cove

to Bondi, with Amanda repeating the verb drive and Clare repeating the pattern ( from) X to Y

(where X and Y are place names).

Again, there is evidence that co-constructed utterances are a more normal feature of all-female

talk than of all-male talk. As discussed above, only when duetting with a woman partner do men

seem happy to deploy collaborative patterns like this which so strongly index mutual knowledge

and awareness.

5.3. Repetition

As discussion of overlapping talk and co-constructed utterance reveals, repetition is a striking

feature of talk in a play frame (see also Norrick, 1993b, 1994). Repetition may occur at many

levels: lexical, semantic, syntactic, thematic.

In the case of lexical repetition, it seems that once a play frame is in place, we find ‘locally

emergent expressions’ (Tannen, 1990:45) which become charged with humorous meaning, so

rabbits in the first example becomes charged, as do the words associated with this lexical field

such as run, garden and lettuce. Entire phrases in the first extract (example 4) are also repeated,


with identical, or near-identical words: bring him home at/for weekends (staves 4 and 5); get him a

run in the garden/let him go out in a run (staves 4 and 6). It is important to remember that these

words and phrases repeat words and phrases used earlier in the conversation during the Rabbit topic.

In the second extract (Example 2), the establishment of a play frame means that a term like

mobile phone can become highly charged, to the extent that it takes on a multiplicity of meanings,

mostly sexual, yet these are never pinned down. The power of the word resides precisely in the

lack of clarity as to its meaning in this chunk of talk: innuendo works by forcing the listener to

‘fill the gaps’. Amanda’s question would you want to bloody use this man’s mobile phone? at the

end of the extract is the climax of a series of rhetorical questions and is funny because the three

friends are now tuned to interpreting mobile phone in a non-literal way. The word sex is also

repeated in various combinations: heterosexual; techno-sex; cyber-sex; virtual sex.

In the last of the three extracts, the use of particular words is crucial to the participants’

understanding of the second telling of the story; in particular, the phrasal verb get up (lines 9, 10,

26) provides important lexical cohesion between the two parts. In all three examples, the

repetition of words and phrases creates lexical cohesion.

Syntactic cohesion is also a feature of talk in a play frame. At the end of the second example,

the utterance would you want to bloody use this man’s mobile phone? only has such an impact

because of its positioning in a series of rhetorical questions:

would you want to marry this man?

would you want to be in the same room as this man?

would you want to bloody use this man’s mobile phone?

Part of the humour here lies in the fact that the speakers produce these questions as if each one

presents a worse scenario than the last, whereas each one actually refers to a more trivial situation

(on a ‘normal’ reading of mobile phone). The accumulated force of these three questions is to

underline the first—in other words, to revert to the main theme of the conversation, which is their

feeling that the friend’s mother should not marry this man.

In the third example, Des’s question I mean who says she was dead? sparks a series of

utterances, all using the same syntactic pattern: Subject + could have + V:

she could have been in a coma

and he could have like triggered something off

she could have been lying

she could have been lying

she could have been really pretending very very well

The syntactic repetition here signals an increasingly playful mode of talking, with hypotheses

becoming more and more fanciful. Repetition allows the talk to move from a serious to a play

frame in a very coherent and smooth way; at the same time, the repetition by different speakers of

the same syntactic patterns binds the three speakers’ contributions together. In playful talk,

individual voices are less important than the jointly constructed talk. This is why humour is so

effective as a means of creating solidarity.

Repetition at the semantic level means that speakers say things with the same or similar

meanings, but using different words. A good example is the phrase whatever they do together

which is played with in various ways in the second example. Because of the semantic emptiness

of do, it is possible for every following verb to be infected by the sexual meanings suggested by


this phrase. So a superficially innocuous comment like he’s got a bloody mobile phone (stave 4)

takes on particular semantic overtones, specifically sexual ones. This is reinforced by Clare’s

subsequent comment well we KNOW what they do then, which refers back directly to whatever

they do together.

Another example of semantic repetition comes in the framing set up in Extract (3). In line 12,

Des makes the claim But when you think about how shit medicine was in those days. This comes

just before his question I mean who says she was dead? which triggers the series of statements

which switch the talk into a play frame. This claim is then balanced at the end of the extract by a

semantically similar utterance: But I mean let’s face it, medicine was crap (line 31). This comes

at the end of Des’s performance and marks the return to a serious frame. The core of these two

utterances is:

medicine was shit (line 12)

medicine was crap (line 31)

These parallelisms make the talk coherent and bind speaker’s turns together.

5.4. Laughter

In their seminal (1978) paper, Jefferson et al. argue that for conversational participants,

laughter ‘has the status of an official conversational activity’ (op.cit.:156). This is an important

claim, which moves us away from the idea that laughter is just an accompaniment to talk: it is

talk. They also observe that, when conversational participants collaborate in humorous talk, they

achieve a display of ‘not merely laughing at the same time, but laughing in the same way’ (174).

These insightful observations (together with the paper’s title) suggest that laughter and intimacy

are significantly linked.6

Laughter allows participants in playful talk to signal their continued involvement in what is

being said, and their continued presence in the collaborative floor. If we assume that a

collaborative floor is at all times open to all speakers, then clearly speakers need strategies to

signal that they are participating, even when they do not actually produce an utterance. Laughter

fits this requirement perfectly. It allows people to signal their presence frequently, while not

committing them to speak all the time. At the same time, laughter is the chief culturally

recognised way that we acknowledge humour in talk. While analysts cannot rely on laughter as a

sign of (successful) humour (laughter may signal surprise or embarrassment, for example), it is

certainly an important contextual cue. Not surprisingly, all three extracts show frequent laughter

from all participants.

In playful talk, laughter may involve the current speaker laughing at their own humour, as in

the following examples (from extracts 1 and 2, respectively):

(i) SUE: I wonder why she doesn’t get him a RUN in the garden <GIGGLING>(ii) AMANDA: I mean the man has a mobile phone <LAUGHING>

Laughter very often occurs when co-participants respond to something funny uttered by the

current speaker, as in the following example:


6 Frustratingly, these observations are applied in the paper only to the laughter associated with ‘improper’ talk (for

example, talk about swimming naked).

Note that Anna’s laughter overlaps with the final chunk of Liz’s turn; Anna responds to Liz’s

riff about lettuce leaves at a point when Liz might have stopped. But she chooses to embellish

her point by acting out the rabbit/husband’s thanks to his owner/wife. It is evidence of the

coherence of playful talk that Anna’s laughter works both as a response to the first part of Liz’s

utterance and as an accompaniment to the final part. In the third extract, Hav and Jack laugh in

response to every narrative line produced by Des (lines 21–27 inclusive), to the extent that he

feels justified in (humorously) demanding payment for his bravura performance (Right, where’s

my fiver).

Laughter often occurs at the moment when a play frame is invoked: for example, Sue laughs as

she introduces the notion of the obedient husband being like a rabbit, and Jack and Hav laugh

when Des begins his dramatised version of the miracle story. Laughter, then, is an important

contextual cue in establishing a play frame.

Sometimes all participants in talk laugh simultaneously, as when all three young women

laugh after Jody’s quip this side of Clare hasn’t come out yet in the second extract. This pattern

(of all participants laughing at once) seems to correlate in many cases with the end of a play

frame, as we see at the end of ‘Miracles’ (extract 3), where group laughter at the end of the

dramatized story and again after Des has demanded payment for his performance (lines 28–29)

signals a recognition that the play frame has potentially come to a close. Alternatively, group

laughter can signal the end of a sub-section of humorous talk: in extract (2), there are three

occasions when all three speakers laugh at the same time (in staves 7, 9 and 13). In each case, this

group laughter coincides with the end of a strand of the extended talk about the man with the

mobile phone.

These examples suggest that laughter has several roles in playful talk. It signals amusement

and appreciation when something humorous is said. It signals the presence in a collaborative floor

of co-participants who are not the main speaker but who by laughing can show their involvement

in the ongoing talk. It also marks the ongoing talk as solidary in that collaboratively constructed

humour relies on in-group knowledge and familiarity. Finally, it plays an important role in

structuring playful talk, both in marking speakers’ recognition of the establishment of a play

frame and in marking its close.

5.5. Metaphor

Finally, I shall look at the role of metaphor. One of the strategies drawn on by participants in

playful talk to create solidarity and to subvert dominant discourses is the use of metaphor

(see Gibbs, 2000; McCarthy and Carter, 2004). Metaphor can be defined as a linguistic device

whereby one thing is described as if it were another. ‘‘Its function is to create novel meanings that

inspire and disturb by changing our perspective on reality’’ (Eynon, 2001:353). Talk in a play

frame frequently involves metaphor; it frequently involves exploitation of the gap between what

is said and what is meant (Kotthoff, 2003). It has been suggested that metaphor ‘‘is the principal

device available to us . . . for arriving at a fresh conception of a familiar phenomenon’’

(Hanne, 1999:44). In everyday talk, especially everyday talk among friends, what is talked about


is familiar, not erudite. By entering a play frame, speakers can take a fresh look at the everyday

and the familiar. Not only does this deepen our understanding of life and of the world around us, it

also gives us amusement.

While a single pun or a comic aside may amuse briefly, here my focus is on sustained playful

talk. Examples (1) and (2) demonstrate how metaphorical language functions in extended talk in

a play frame. In example (1), the rabbit metaphor is introduced by Sue with her simile: he’s like

the rabbit (stave 2). From this point until stave 8, Sue and her two friends cooperate in sustaining

the rabbit metaphor. During these seven staves, the co-participants never use the word ‘husband’,

but talk only of the rabbit and of things to do with rabbits such as runs in gardens and lettuce

leaves. Their frequent laughter displays their amusement, amusement which arises from their

awareness of the gap between their talk about rabbits and the underlying meaning expressed by

this metaphor. (Succinctly, a rabbit is perceived as a small, vulnerable, fluffy creature while a

husband is normatively supposed to be a strong, protective human male. The clash between these

two sets of meanings makes these three women laugh, but it also allows them to express their

uneasiness with the story of this deviant husband, deviant because he kowtows to his controlling

wife.)

In example (2), the use of metaphor is more allusive. The topic whatever they do together

(stave 1) hints at sexual meanings, so that words used subsequently hint at metaphorical rather

than literal meanings. The phrase mobile phone is used with phallic overtones throughout the

extract. Even the statement he’s an architect (stave 10) acquires sexual overtones, as does Jody’s

subsequent claim (omitted from transcript above) he’s got a spa [jacuzzi] in his office (playing on

the fact that the main feature of a jacuzzi is that water spurts out in an ejaculatory way).

In both examples, the use of metaphorical language leads to an intensification of the humour,

with each use of metaphor increasing the humorous impact of the talk. I have looked here at

specific uses of metaphor, but in a more general sense, talk in a play frame involves a move away

from the literal; as Gibbs (2000:25) says of irony, playful talk can be regarded as ‘‘a special kind

of figurative language’’.

6. Conclusions: humour and intimacy

In this paper, my aim has been to demonstrate what speakers can do with playful talk, what the

possibilities of a play frame are. The fact that women in same-sex friendship groups seem more

likely to exploit these possibilities than men is a separate issue, which I have addressed in another

paper (Coates, in press). The three examples discussed in this paper demonstrate that talk in a

play frame can justifiably be called ‘‘a specialised joint activity’’ (Davies, 2003:1368). A play

frame can only be sustained if all conversational participants collaborate in sustaining it. This

inevitably makes such talk solidary, since co-participants collaborate not only in sustaining a

particular topic but also in sustaining a particular way of talking. Successful collaboration

arises from shared understandings and shared perspectives, and is a strong demonstration

of in-tune-ness. All three examples discussed illustrate this: in every case, all participants are

involved, and all share in the maintenance of the play frame and demonstrate how well tuned they

are to each other. As I’ve shown, this way of talking may involve overlapping speech, the co-

construction of utterances, repetition, and a heightened use of metaphorical language. It is this

cluster of linguistic features which has led commentators to describe playful talk in terms of

music and particularly jazz.

Playful talk is fun: friends meet and talk because, consciously or not, this is a form of play they

prize highly. As Boxer and Cortes-Conde (1997:293) have pointed out, ‘‘we all enjoy a good


laugh’’. Laughter makes us feel good and it also demonstrates our togetherness with our fellow

speakers. By exploring the linguistic and paralinguistic features of playful talk, my aim has been

to improve our understanding of conversational humour, our understanding of talk in a play

frame, and our understanding of the links between laughter and intimacy.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank those who have read earlier drafts of this paper and whose comments

have helped me to improve it—Jenny Cheshire, Margaret Gottschalk, ‘tope Omoniyi, Frances

Rock, Joanna Thornborrow. In particular, I would also like to thank one of the anonymous

referees whose comments for the journal led me to make significant revisions. Finally, I would

like to thank Delia Chiaro for her encouragement while I was revising the paper during my time

as Visiting Professor at the University of Bologna.

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Jennifer Coates is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Roehampton University. Her published work

includes Women, Men and Language (originally published in 1986, third ed., 2004); Women Talk. Conversation Between

Women Friends (1996), Language and Gender: A Reader (1998), Men Talk: Stories in the Making of Masculinities (2003)

and The Sociolinguistics of Narrative (edited with Joanna Thornborrow, 2005). She has given lectures at universities all

over the world and has held Visiting Professorships in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Germany, Switzerland, Spain

and Italy. She was made a Fellow of the English Association in 2002.


Talk in a play frame: More on laughter and intimacy

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