Interactional humour and spontaneity in TV documentaries

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Lingua 197 (2017) 34--49 www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua Interactional humour and spontaneity in TV documentaries Jan Chovanec Department of English and American Studies, Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Arna Nováka 1, 60200 Brno, Czech Republic Received 8 February 2017; received in revised form 25 April 2017; accepted 26 April 2017 Available online 17 May 2017 Abstract This article investigates spontaneous humour-related phenomena in TV documentary, arguing that their presence helps to overcome the scripted nature of the genre. Focusing on the diegetic level of interaction between the presenter and other individuals present in the scene, the analysis traces how the interlocutors achieve mutual in-tune-ness that is necessary for setting up the play frame. It pays attention to several humour-related phenomena, including non-humorous laughter, joint joking and physical pranks. The findings indicate that while laughter can alleviate tension associated with face-threat or personal failure, other forms of humour emerge in the diegetic frame as part of the programme producers’ design to divert from the transactional mode of factual television to a more entertaining hybrid format based on a significant experiential component. As a result, TV viewers do not simply receive information but derive pleasure from the playful spontaneity performed for their benefit by the presenter and other interlocutors. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Interactional pragmatics; Humour; TV documentary; Broadcast talk; Authenticity; Laughter 1. Introduction The communication in many factual, non-fictional TV genres is predominantly transactional with only occasional shifts towards a more interpersonal engagement between the interlocutors. TV documentaries are among the types of factual broadcasting that are centrally focused on the presentation of factual information through the expository mode. It might seem that there is little potential for the presence of humour in a genre such as this, but in view of the general trend towards infotainment in the media, the opposite is actually true. In this paper, I address one specific format of the documentary characterised by its experiential dimension. This means that the presenter is involved in a discovery procedure or the performance of some tasks, and has to interact with other interlocutors -- typically experts. Various forms of interactional humour may appear in such programmes in order to increase the spontaneity of the interactions and to overcome the scriptedness of the programmes’ content. Based on data from the British TV documentary series How Britain Worked, the analysis in this article documents several occurrences of humour emerging between the presenter and various other individuals. This involves both unintentional humour and intentional humorous acts. Concerning unintentional humour-related phenomena, I analyze situations of laughter, including non-humorous laughter (Morreall, 1983), which may help the interlocutors overcome momentary problems and express positive emotions. As regards intentional humorous acts identified in the data, those take the form of non-verbal physical humour (e.g., the performance of pranks) and various forms of verbal humour involving conversational joking, banter and teasing. E-mail address: [email protected]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2017.04.007 0024-3841/© 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. J. Chovanec / Lingua 197 (2017) 34--49 35 As I argue in the discussion section of the paper, such humorous acts are characterised by several points. First, they are jointly constructed by both interlocutors after one of them -- typically the presenter -- initializes the play frame. Second, the brief joking episodes that the interlocutors engage in defocus from the main activity and attend to their interpersonal relations, building rapport and mutual bonding. Regardless of whether the humour is speaker-directed (as in selfdenigrating utterances) or other-directed (targeting the recipient or mocking a third party), this form of affiliative bonding through humour constitutes an act of onstage performance done for the benefit of the ultimate recipients, i.e. the TV audience. The presence of conversational humour and other humour-related phenomena in documentaries is interpreted as a strategic design of the production team to incorporate seemingly spontaneous talk in the programme and, thus, enhance the impression of authenticity. In TV documentaries, the incorporation of humour in offhand interactions is indicative of the hybridity of non-entertainment media formats where sophisticated factual content needs to be presented in an enjoyable manner without reclassifying the programme into a genre of open entertainment. This follows the trend observable across various media formats in the area of factual programming, where the simulation of liveness, immediacy and authenticity have become increasingly important. The casualness and spontaneity related to humour and laughter in TV documentaries attest to the current communicative ethos characterised by a heightened articulation of sociability in the broadcast media. 2. Analysing humour in interaction Interactional humour in the genre of the TV documentary is located at the intersection of various situational and contextual characteristics, which partly reflect and determine the various types of interactions and styles available to the interlocutors in a given case. They involve, among others, whether the interaction is scripted or not, whether it is performed in public and/or possibly mediated, and whether it classifies as an instance of a fictional genre or not. Based on previous studies of interactional humour, we may identify the following three broad communicative situations that revolve around the concepts of scriptedness, fictionalization and mediatization: (i) unscripted authentic conversation, (ii) scripted fictional discourse, and (iii) non-fictional mediatised dialogue (which can be scripted, partly scripted or non-scripted). While the concept of ‘interactional humour’ is sometimes used as an umbrella term to refer to all of them (for an overview of the field, see Tsakona and Chovanec, 2017), it is useful to tease these dimensions apart in order to appreciate some points of difference and some points of contact, as well as to establish the position of the genre of the TV documentary with respect to the existing research strands on interactional humour. The first of these areas, spontaneous everyday conversation, is without any doubt among the most extensively researched fields in the area of the pragmatics of humour (Norrick, 1996, 2003; Dynel, 2009; Norrick and Chiaro, 2009; Sinkeviciute and Dynel, 2017). Some of the now classic research in the conversation analytical framework has addressed issues such as laughter (Jefferson, 1983, 2004), turn-organizational principles underlying laughter (Glenn, 1989), impoliteness (Kotthoff, 1996), gender differences (Hay, 2001), identity display (Boxer and Cortés-Conde, 1997), mitigation of conflict (Norrick and Spitz, 2008), bonding (Schnurr, 2009; Schnurr and Chan, 2011), disaffiliation and mockery (Haugh, 2010), and even humour among TV viewers (Gerhardt, 2009) and failed humour (Bell, 2015). In the past few years, scholars have been paying increasing attention to interactional humour in the second area -scripted communication. Research has been carried out on quite diverse topics, e.g., humour and laughter in sitcoms and TV series (Dynel, 2011a,b; Messerli, 2016), metaphor, irony (Dynel, 2013), audience participation (Cain, 2013), irony in real and fictional discourse (Kapogianni, 2014), and problems concerning translation of sitcoms (Chiaro, 2005; Arampatzis, 2012). The unstated premise connecting the studies in this area is that they are based on fully scripted texts and situated character behaviour (de Jongste, 2016). Typically, the humour is to be appreciated on the level of the audience, with the characters seemingly unaware of the humorous nature of their performance. A border-line between the second and the third areas consists of such inherently humorous genres as the stand-up comedy (Rutter, 2000; Lockyer and Myers, 2011; Laineste, 2012; Chłopicki, 2012). This involves the conscious production of humour by an on-stage comedian. Many of the performances are more or less scripted and rely for their effect on the artists’ direct performance sometimes involving the audience and even hecklers (Brock, 2015). While the stand-up cannot be considered as ‘spontaneous’ (certainly not in comparison with everyday face-to-face conversation), it is a genre where the open role-play of the comedian is counterbalanced by immediacy, personal contact and (limited) interaction with the audience. The third dimension of interactional humour involves face-to-face communication that occurs in public and mediated contexts. Concerning broadcast data, some of the humour-related research in this area has dealt with the management of laughter in live political interviews (Eriksson, 2009), humour in political talk shows (Ekström, 2011), irony in news interviews (Weizman, 2013), and the frontstage/backstage contrast in sports commentators’ talk on TV (Chovanec, 2016a). This orientation partly overlaps with some non-mediated public genres (e.g., Tsakona, 2009; Archakis and Tsakona, 2011) that 36 J. Chovanec / Lingua 197 (2017) 34--49 likewise involve various forms of conversational humour such as teasing, banter, physical acts of humour, etc. A typical characteristic of these communicative contexts consists of their primary purpose: they tend to have a strong transactional function. Because of this, humour has a rather marginal and incidental presence in them, even though it can be included in the programme design or in the communicative micro-goals of the participants (e.g. who may wish to appear funny, sociable, entertaining, etc.). This dimension of interactional humour combines some elements from the other two areas: the dialogic, non-fictional nature of the exchanges between participants on the one hand (shared with spontaneous conversation), and the duality of the communicative frame on the other (shared with other genres of telecinematic discourse; cf. Scannell, 1991; Fetzer, 2006). The characteristic feature of these interactions is that the speakers are performing their identities in the public space, i.e., they are engaged in frontstage behaviour (Goffman, 1981). In this way, they are constructing their mediated selves (Wood, 2010; Thornborrow, 2015). The combination of non-fictional discourse and the performance of public identities makes this field particularly rich for analysing various forms of ‘doing being’ (cf. Sacks, 1984) or producing ‘fresh talk’ (Goffman, 1981), which -- significantly -- also includes the public performance of one's ordinariness and, thus, one's authenticity as well as sociability (Tolson, 2001; Montgomery, 2001; Thornborrow, 2001; Bonner, 2003; Ytreberg, 2004). Importantly, this publically performed interactional humour is not exclusive to the spoken mode; it is present in written genres as well, e.g., in various online forms of conversation and in social media communication (North, 2007; Chovanec, 2011, 2012; Laineste, 2013; Tsakona and Chovanec, 2017). Non-fictional genres of broadcast talk that do not have entertainment as their main aim thus provide an interesting ground for the investigation of the emergence of humour. This is particularly the case in view of the absence of the humorous intent on the macro-level of the entire programme and its assertion on the micro-level of the interaction between interlocutors, without implying non-seriousness or entertainment. TV documentaries are a case in point: they are typical examples of factual broadcasting (Hill, 2005, 2007) but with the general trend towards infotainment across the media, they increasingly use some elements of entertainment (Van Zoonen, 2005). Seemingly spontaneous and lively utterances (Lunt, 2004) and exchanges between the interlocutors thus provide a welcome space where humorous forms can be given some free reign. It should be stated, however, that although humour and laughter are associated with play or playfulness (Bateson, 1972; Glenn, 2003; Partington, 2006; Kozić, 2012; Holt, 2016; Bell, 2017), the presence of humorous intent does not automatically re-categorize a communicative act as ‘non-serious’. This is because humour -- which is connected with a speaker's intention to achieve a humorous effect -- can take various forms and is a component of many ‘serious’ acts of communication as well. Sometimes, for instance, speakers avail themselves of the protection of the ‘playful’ and hence the presumably ‘non-serious’ mode, e.g. through various metacomments informing the other of the humorous status of prior or subsequent utterances. 3. Material for analysis The data analysed in this paper come from the British TV series How Britain Worked, produced by Channel 4 and aired in 2012. The six-part series is conceived around the central role of the main protagonist, the presenter Guy Martin, who participates in several reconstruction projects of 19th century technology. In this quest, he documents and explains the engineering of the Industrial Revolution. This is a presenter-dominated programme (Bonner, 2010: 33), though the presenter is not a professional. Each programme involves the presenter in interaction with several experts (Chovanec, 2016b). Guy Martin claims that the programmes are not scripted and that he improvises, relying on prompts and questions from the camera crew members (Urry, 2014). Apparently, the spontaneity with which he performs his role may be among the reasons for his popularity as a TV presenter. The programme consists of two levels of narration that are closely intertwined (Chovanec, in press). They include the extradiegetic voiceover (narrated by the English actor Bernard Hill) and the diegetic narrator Guy Martin, who either talks directly to the camera or engages in dialogic talk with other interlocutors. My approach to the data is inductive, being based on the identification of various humorous phenomena throughout the programme and their subsequent detailed qualitative analysis. The data discussed in this article comes from three segments, with five examples selected from two of them in order to show how the interaction between the interlocutors on the diegetic level develops by involving various forms of humour and humour-related acts of behaviour. Methodologically, the qualitative analysis is based on close textual reading of the data in the tradition of the conversation analytical approach to broadcast talk data (Tolson, 2006; Hutchby, 2006; Montgomery, 2007; Thornborrow, 2015), combined with a general socio-pragmatic perspective that interprets the data in view of the interlocutors’ communicative goals, public identities (Archakis and Tsakona, 2005; Schnurr and Holmes, 2009) and face concerns (Priego-Valverde, 2009). Through this combination, the analysis relates to much current work in the interdisciplinary field of pragmatically-oriented humour studies of data originating in telecinematic contexts (Sinkeviciute, 2014; Dynel, 2015; Brock, 2015; Messerli, 2016). J. Chovanec / Lingua 197 (2017) 34--49 37 3.1. Negotiation of mutual in-tune-ness This section discusses three related phenomena, all taken from the same scene, which demonstrate how a joking relationship gradually develops between interlocutors in the documentary programme. First, I deal with an utterance that may set up a play frame yet is resisted by the other interlocutor. The second extract demonstrates how speakers achieve ‘in-tune-ness’ (Coates, 2007) when a potentially critical utterance is responded to in the second turn by means of laughter, and thus acknowledged as an affiliative verbal act (Haugh, 2010). Finally, I show how the speakers’ mutual affiliation gives rise to their conversational joking behaviour that we see emerging later on in their interaction. The mutual alignment of the speakers, which is a precondition for the appearance of their joking behaviour, is crucial for creating the impression of the speakers’ authenticity. Thus, the negotiation of in-tune-ness becomes a strategic component of the programme's design. 3.1.1. Initiating the play frame The genre of the TV documentary is quite varied. Probably the most prototypical representative is the nature (or history) documentary that sets out to educate rather than entertain the audience, but there are many hybrid formats. Some of them, for instance, merge the documentary function with aspects of reality TV; as a result, they are geared in their design towards the amusement of the audience. However, the default expectation about factual documentary programmes of the canonical type is that they are unlikely to contain situations of humour. However, this expectation can be different when documentaries encompass some dialogic interaction between individuals shown on the screen. In those cases, the interaction may include some joking exchanges or other forms of humour. However, due to the typically transactional and fact-based nature of the genre of the documentary, there may arise the need to indicate the shift to a different mode and establish the play frame. This kind of signalling to the other interlocutor that some humour-related acts are possible establishes the humorous key or frame of the utterance (Hay, 2001; Norrick, 2003; Coates, 2007; Kotthoff, 2007). In this way, any jocular and humorous elements in the interaction are contextualised as a momentary departure from the strictly bona fide mode of communication (Raskin, 1985). In TV documentaries, it is typically the prerogative of the presenter -- as the participant with the central communicative role in the programme -- to indicate to the other interlocutor that jocular interaction is either permissible or about to happen. However, the presenter and the other individuals featured in the documentaries cannot rely on their previous interactional histories since they typically lack any previous joking relationship (Fine and de Soucey, 2005). The indication of the play frame thus has to be produced ‘on the go’. Within the programme, this indication has a dual orientation: it is tendered towards the other interlocutor and preserved during editing in post-production for the benefit of the TV viewers. Extract 1 illustrates a moment when the presenter produces an utterance that can be taken to constitute an offer to open up a play frame, but the attempt is resisted by the other interlocutor. Extract 1. Failure to accept a play frame invitation (Episode 2; 26.01--26.29; Introducing the wheelwright). The extract opens with a scene showing the presenter Guy Martin (GM) talking to the wheelwright Greg Rowland (GR). At the beginning of the scene, their talk is overlaid by the voiceover that provides the introduction to the activity and specifies the identity of the expert who appears on the screen for the first time (‘Wheelwright Greg Rowland (.) will show Guy how it's done’; lines 4--5). Because of the voiceover, the viewers cannot hear what the two speakers are actually talking about. The sound track accesses their voice at a point that is evidently half-way through their mutual interaction, without attempting to disguise this fact or frame their utterances as commencing a new interactional episode. Quite on the contrary: the presenter's utterance opens with the pragmatic marker so, which affirms the continuity of their talk that is evident in the visual track but absent from the sound track. The marker has a summarising function, anaphorically referring to the preceding verbal context that is patently inaccessible to TV viewers (‘So you know your onions when it comes to wheels’; 38 J. Chovanec / Lingua 197 (2017) 34--49 lines 7--8). In this way, the marker establishes not only discourse coherence but also the speaker's understanding of the content of their previous talk (Bolden, 2009). However, the pragmatic marker ‘so’ is also involved in the potential construction of humour in the interaction. This is related to its basic function of allowing the presenter to reformulate selected content from the previous talk of the other interlocutor. Generally speaking, the reformulation can take the form of checking one's understanding (as appears to be the case with the utterance in question) or even of suggesting a particular interpretation of the facts, as happens in legal contexts (Johnson, 2002). Arguably, however, the reformulation can also provide the chance to produce a humorous comment on the speaker's previous turn. In this particular case, the presenter uses a jocular idiom (‘So you know your onions’), which is accompanied with the presenter's smile and a twitch on his face. On the surface, this utterance is pragmatically ambivalent.1 The presenter's comment not only establishes the wheelwright's expert credentials (and, thus, serves as an authorization strategy) by way of relating to the speakers’ immediately preceding communication, but also expresses the presenter's own playful attitude. This reading seems to be supported by the presenter's easy-going attitude, which is evident from his facial expression during a couple of previous turns (these are shown on the camera but the voiceover makes the actual words inaudible for the TV audience). Thus, it is the body language at this point that gives a clue to the likely preferred meaning of the utterance as an intentional trigger of the play frame. As an indexation of the playful nature of the emerging jocular interaction between the interlocutors, an utterance that serves to invite the play frame (such as this one) is likely to be taken up by the other interlocutor. However, while we would expect either complicit laughter or some form of joking behaviour, the expert in this scene does not do so. Instead, he concurs with the literal meaning of the presenter's utterance, i.e. the praise of the expert's skills, but fails to take up the play frame. His turn can thus be seen as constituting a dispreferred reaction (cf. Brown and Yule, 1983; Pomerantz and Heritage, 2012) to the presenter's prompt in the first turn. This interpretation appears to be supported by the fact that the expert does not simply acknowledge the presenter's positive appreciation of his skill but actually avoids any token of explicit conversational confirmation (such as ‘Yes’) or an attempt to hedge the praise, as might be expected. Instead, he elaborates with providing extensive factual information (‘We hold the royal appointment in the position of wheelwright so we look after their, the royal collection of carriages’; lines 9--11). He thus does not respond to the presenter's offer to step back from the serious business at hand and engage in a momentary playful banter between the two interlocutors. The follow-up reaction from the presenter indicates his surprise at the unexpected nature of the response obtained. Visibly taken aback, he retorts with a mild expletive (‘By ‘eck’; line 12) and acknowledges that the expert's credentials are not subject to playful joking (‘So no messing there’; line 12). In other words, the presenter's reaction can be understood as an awareness (and surprise) that his earlier offer to the other interlocutor to open up the play frame has not been taken up. Interestingly enough, the follow-up reaction is a meta-linguistic utterance that explicates the actual intention of the presenter's first turn, i.e. the invitation to a playful exchange. Now, why should the expert opt out of that offer? A possible explanation is that the wheelwright could perceive the utterance as a potential threat to his positive face. From his point of view, his professional credentials could be somewhat compromised should he engage in momentary joking on this topic. He seems not to admit that possibility and, instead, chooses to enhance his positive face with two references to the royalty (‘We hold the royal appointment [. . .] so we look after their, the royal collection of carriages’). These unequivocally serve to boost the expertise that the wheelwright had established previously off-camera in a talk with the presenter. Since the presenter frames the interaction as humorous for the ultimate benefit of the audience, he does not, technically speaking, need the ratification of the play frame from the expert. However, regardless of the production design of the programme, the presenter is in the precarious situation of having to attend to the unfolding interaction in his primary communicative frame with the expert. The extract, thus, shows a momentary tension between the interlocutors arising from the clash between offering and not taking up the play frame. The two speakers are momentarily at cross-purposes, pursuing divergent goals. While the expert cautiously sticks to his on-screen role of a knowledgeable professional, the presenter steps back from his official role of a celebrity broadcaster by adopting a stance that can be interpreted as potentially jocular. By doing that, he attempts to inject the interaction with more spontaneity that could arise if the invitation was accepted. As the attempt is resisted by the expert, the discrepancy between the interlocutors’ aims becomes evident, with the presenter at this point hastily retracting his offer of the play frame (cf. ‘So no messing there’) in an attempt to rectify the situation. Even so, the momentary awkwardness actually boosts the impression of authenticity: as observed by Middleton (2014: 3) ‘‘awkward moments’’ are documentary in the sense that they ‘‘are moments when an encounter feels too real: unscripted, unplanned, and, above all, occurring in person’’. 1 Sacks (1992) describes similar utterances in terms of ‘sequential ambiguity’ since they could be taken up in the next term as both serious and non-serious (cf. also Holt, 2016). However, this is not a case of ambiguity since the humorous intention appears to be quite clearly signalled by the presenter. Rather, the other interlocutor opts out of the offer of the play frame by ignoring the non-serious orientation and following-up the utterance at its ‘face value’. J. Chovanec / Lingua 197 (2017) 34--49 39 3.1.2. Achieving in-tune-ness Generally speaking, any communicative situation between interlocutors is dynamic and can change in a matter of a few turns. That is also the case with the interaction analysed here: gradually, the speakers achieve mutual in-tune-ness, which ultimately leads to a brief joking episode between them. The segment presented in Extract 2 below has a complex structure that involves three distinct components: the voiceover, the presenter's reflection on the activity, and a dialogical interaction between the interlocutors. The voiceover frames the other voices, acting as an extradiegetic narrator (Chovanec, in press). First of all, the voiceover marks the shift of the programme from the previous scene and sets the context for the next activity (‘The first job (.) shaping some spokes’; line 1). The sound track then cuts to the presenter who retrospectively comments on the trade of wheel making. While there is some potential for humour in the presenter's monologue, namely the allusion to prostitution unwittingly made in his statement (‘one of the oldest trades’; line 4), Guy Martin refrains from indexing the obvious humorous potential of this phrase in any way, though he manifests his awareness of it in a negative self-correction (‘Not the oldest’; line 5). But, since the utterance is delivered in a neutral tone devoid of any paralinguistic or embodied indicators (e.g. a chuckle), he does not take up the chance to turn his unintended double entendre into an act of humour. It is only in the brief dialogic exchange between the expert and the presenter that the mutual alignment of the speakers towards the play frame becomes enacted. Thus, in lines 7--13, the expert gives a running commentary on what the two of them are currently doing. The interaction is dominated by the expert, who is fully in charge at this point. The presenter's reactions, spread over several subsequent turns, become reduced to minimal tokens of acknowledgement (‘Yes yeah’; ‘All right’; ‘Oh yeah’). This is the context in which the interlocutors achieve mutual in-tune-ness (or demonstrate its achievement on the camera) that culminates in a brief joking episode in lines 12--14. Extract 2. Humorous comment on the presenter's failure (Episode 2; 26.30--27.01; Handling the spokes). Within this segment, there are two occurrences of laughter that show the interlocutors’ mutual alignment. In the first of these, Guy Martin acknowledges the expert's advice on how to shape the spoke that he is presently shown working on, adding a couple of unintelligible words that are uttered with laughing intonation (‘A:::ll ri:::ght . . . heh he’; line 12). In this exchange, the interlocutors have different orientations: while the expert is primarily involved in transactional communication, coordinating their common activity, the presenter's contribution consists of interactional talk only, attending to the smooth operation of their momentary relationship. The emerging in-tune-ness is a prerequisite for the appearance of situational humour in the next turn, where the play frame in actually established by the expert. Here, he makes a comment on the way the presenter handles the task (‘See we don’t wan’ all the spokes on the floor’; line 13). This utterance functions as a ‘laughable’ (Holt, 2011) since it elicits laughter from the presenter in the ensuing turn. At this point, it is not evident to the TV viewers from the visual track why the expert makes the utterance. However, the reason can be inferred from the activities that the interlocutors are involved in at that very moment. The presenter is working on a wooden spoke that is held between two wooden posts, secured in the correct position with his legs. The inference to be drawn from the words of the expert is that at least one -- and probably more than one -- of the spokes fell to the ground and had to be picked by him. However, since the whole scene is composed of several edited shots, this incident is left out from the visual track altogether. What remains is merely its subsequent verbal trace in the sound track in the form of the expert's humorous comment on the incident. Reflecting on something that evidently went wrong, the utterance could be read as a veiled criticism of the presenter's inexperience, and thus constitute a potentially aggressive tease directed by the expert, with face-threatening consequences, 40 J. Chovanec / Lingua 197 (2017) 34--49 at the other interlocutor. However, the tease is formulated by using the inclusive pronoun ‘we’. This mitigates the possible face threat to the presenter because the expert's use of the pronoun serves to enhance the mutual nature of their activity. Also, the utterance is prefaced with the pragmatic marker ‘see’, which is conventionally used to start an explanation rather than formulate criticism. The tease thus appears somewhat ambivalent in terms of its effect: the potentially aggressive nature is counterbalanced by its benevolent function (Dynel, 2008). In other words, the tease can -- and is -- taken up as an occasion for rapport-building and bonding between the interlocutors, even though it has a biting edge to it. Moreover, the fact that it is the expert evaluating the workmanship of the non-expert -- rather than the other way round -- reduces the critical nature of the comment, making the possible face threat to the non-expert inherently less grave and more easily framed as benevolent.2 In his reaction, Guy Martin instantly acknowledges and appreciates the humorous nature of the utterance by emitting several tokens of good-natured affiliative laughter (‘Yeah oh heh heh heh heh’; line 14). This helps him to cope with the potentially face-threatening nature of the expert's first turn, whereby the presenter is turned into the butt of humour on account of his inexperience with the technical process at hand. In this exchange, the laughable is introduced into the conversation by the expert rather than the presenter. The latter simply follows suit. Interestingly enough, while the presenter prepares the ground by inviting the play frame through his willingness to enrich their interaction by adding a jocular attitude to it (cf. lines 7--8 in Extract 1, as also manifested by the embodied performance of his easy-going attitude in that part of the scene where the interlocutors’ talk is overlaid by the voiceover), it is the expert who actually produced the first explicit humorous act in their interaction. A possible explanation for this phenomenon could be sought in the momentary change in their roles: once the expert becomes the dominant interlocutor in the interaction (guiding the presenter to perform the manual task), his more powerful and leading role enables him to initiate the performance of humorous verbal acts. 3.1.3. Engaging in joint joking Once the play frame becomes established and the interlocutors demonstrate their mutual affiliation, longer segments of conversational joking can emerge. While such instances of joking typically accompany the interlocutors’ involvement in some joint (physical) activity, they occasionally develop into side sequences that have little relevance to the activity itself. The TV audience is then positioned into watching social talk between the interlocutors in the form of seemingly spontaneous chat. In terms of the structure of the programme, the joking episodes constitute distinct interludes between segments devoted to more transactional business. The transactional thus gives way to the interactional, enabling the performance of various humorous acts (Partington, 2006). Extract 3 captures the situation of joint conversational joking as it is developing in relation to the physical activity performed by the interlocutors: Extract 3. Reciprocated laughter and joint joking (Episode 2; 27.51--28.16; Making a wooden wheel). 2 I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing this out. J. Chovanec / Lingua 197 (2017) 34--49 41 The first seven turns of the extract (lines 1--8) consist of small talk generated by the presenter, with the expert merely expressing agreement. Guy Martin's utterances seem to be motivated by his professional capacity of the presenter, who is required to produce running verbal commentary at various stages of the documentary programme. Thus, his initial factual statement (‘You see (.) so (.) this is the original way’; line 1) expresses a positive evaluation of the technical process that the two participants had just performed. On the micro-level of linguistic analysis, the conjunction ‘so’ has a dual function: it serves not only as an utterance launcher prefacing the presenter's summarization but also, simultaneously, as a prompt to the other interlocutor to provide some reaction or elaboration. While the expert concurs, the presenter does not give him a chance to elaborate and interrupts with a self-confirmation (‘It's right’; line 3). What follows is a momentary overlap with the expert repeating his confirmation (‘Yes’) and elaborating by simply reformulating Guy Martin's opening statement (‘we’re doing it exactly as our forebears did’; lines 4--5). Martin reacts by likewise replicating his last word, pronounced with a rising intonation and a lengthened sound to indicate his engagement. This is followed by a repetition by both speakers of ‘Spot on’ in lines 7 and 8, whereby they evaluate the outcome of their work -- the placement of wooden spokes in the wheel. The cluster of linguistic forms that we find in this segment -- the repetitions, echoing and overlaps -- are all evidence of the speakers’ mutual alignment, which is a typical prerequisite for playful talk (cf. Coates, 2007: 46). These are concrete, micro-level linguistic phenomena that help to construct the impression of spontaneity in the interaction. However, not all is so smooth since the expert's inspection of the outcome of their work reveals that the product is far from perfect. Accompanying his utterance in which he identifies the problem (‘This seems funny. . .’; line 10), the camera cuts to two misaligned pieces of wood (‘the biggest gap’), which serves as a laughable. Both speakers start laughing amid further unintelligible remarks. This banter culminates with the expert making a humorous biting remark expressing his negative evaluation of the outcome of the presenter's work (‘I’m glad I’m not riding the bike’; line 16). This kind of laughter, prompted by an otherwise non-humorous situation, operates as a face-saving mechanism whenever the presenter's lack of expertise or experience is revealed to the expert (and thus the TV viewers). To pre-empt the face-threat related to the criticism of the presenter, the expert adopts the play frame and emits several tokens of laughter. This takes away the potential aggressive nature of the criticism and allows the interlocutors to align, through mutual laughter and humour, in a joint negative evaluation of the failure of the presenter. The strategy of pre-empting and eliminating face-threat through non-humorous laughter appears to be the rule in this documentary programme (Chovanec, 2017). That is, also, a general communicative strategy through which speakers hedge their criticism of others. The partial unintelligibility of the conversation when the two interlocutors are exchanging banter is not coincidental. I interpret it as a conscious design on the part of the programme producers to enhance spontaneity. In many exchanges of this kind, the presenter's heavy regional accent, combined with his occasional very rapid delivery, makes his comments and asides in such joking interactions often very difficult -- if not impossible -- to understand. The preservation of these segments during the editing process indicates that complete intelligibility is not the programme producers’ aim. As a result, the TV audiences are presented with a broadcast format in which they merely witness jocular verbal interaction between the on-screen personalities, occasionally without being able to fully understand them. Such interactions then become displays of the interlocutors’ sociability. 3.2. Performance of spontaneity through humour-related acts In this section, I discuss two additional humour-related phenomena that have been identified as contributing towards the construction of spontaneity in the documentary. The first of these concerns the presence of laughter in off-hand dialogic sequences, often occurring without any humorous prompt and in quite extensive stretches. The second involves the performance of physical acts of humour (pranks) on unsuspecting individuals. Both of these phenomena are rapportbuilding, confirming the bond between the participants and both arise from and affirm the interpersonal, rather than the transactional, nature of the communication between them. 3.2.1. Co-participating in non-humorous laughter The mutual alignment of the interlocutors to the play frame can be demonstrated through their non-humorous laughter. This is laughter that does not follow any specific humorous act produced (either verbally or physically) by one -- or both -- of the interlocutors. Instead, it comes as a vocalised reaction to some other prompt present in the situation. Thus, it marks the joint enjoyment of the situation, rather than indexing some act or situation as humorous (cf. Attardo, 2015: 170). In this sense, the laughter is unprompted, i.e. not arising as a second part to verbal or non-verbal prompt.3 3 The concept of ‘‘non-humorous laughter’’ is not without its problems and its delimitation from ‘‘humorous laughter’’ is likewise far from clear. Since all laughter is ultimately caused by some (even psychological) prompt, the mere presence of an element triggering the laughter (a laughable) need not be decisive. In this connection, it may be useful to distinguish, for instance, between humorous and non-humorous laughable, taking into account the interlocutors’ intentionality and/or judgments on the humorous status of a given prompt. 42 J. Chovanec / Lingua 197 (2017) 34--49 In Extract 4, the presenter Guy Martin is accompanied by his friend Mike. They are riding period bicycles -- a Macmillan velocipede and a Penny Farthing, while the voiceover narrates historical information about the inventor of the pedalling mechanism. In this extract, both participants engage in laughter that is not triggered by any evident humorous act other than the situation itself, cf.: Extract 4. Non-humorous historical narrative and laughter (Episode 2; 19.22--19.59; Riding the Macmillan velocipede). The extract opens with extradiegetic voiceover narration that provides some historical information. In terms of production design, this level of narration is superimposed on the lower-level communicative interaction between the interlocutors in the visual track. There are two switches into the diegetic frame, where each of the two men comment on their experience of riding the historical bicycles. An interesting phenomenon of co-tellership occurs in lines 8--10, where the presenter Guy Martin complements the information in the voiceover (‘In 1842, Macmillan embarked upon an unusual publicity stunt’) by seamlessly continuing with the narration (‘He rode from ‘ere to Glasgow’). Thanks to editing, the two turns are placed in an adjacent relationship (Thornborrow, 2015: 55), even though they were originally produced in separate communicative frames and were addressed to different recipients. The presenter's next utterance generates an immediate reaction from his friend. Guy Martin's evaluative use of the vocative form of ‘man’ in line 11 overlaps with his friend's laughter that appears to mark admiration for the historical feat. The segment shows many features of spontaneous, authentic talk: there is a rapid conversational exchange between the speakers, involving latched utterances and overlap, and the friend's laughter is reciprocated by the presenter's extended tokens of laughter. There is no laughable in this segment: the participants use laughter not in response to some humorous prompt but solely to express their enjoyment of the moment. Another instance of non-humorous laughter occurs in the next couple of turns when the presenter continues narrating the story to his friend (‘He ran over someone when he got there and got locked up for the night’; lines 17--18). The factual status of this utterance is problematic: it provides a partially incorrect account of the incident.4 This narrative account of the events neither contains anything obviously humorous nor is it pronounced in a way that would indicate some humorous intent on the part of the presenter. Yet, it draws a number of responses from his friend, including several tokens of laughter. The initial laughter, prompted by the presenter's statement ‘He ran over someone when he got there’, indicates amusement but it quickly changes into an expression of commiseration and regret (‘oh dear’) once the presenter mentions Macmillan's arrest (‘and got locked up for the night’). Eventually, it terminates in two backchannel tokens of 4 According to Crofton (2015), he ‘‘pedalled all the way to Glasgow, where, travelling at 8 mph (13 kph) through the Gorbals, he knocked down a small girl. Although she was only grazed, Macmillan was arrested and fined five shillings -- although it is thought the magistrate, impressed by Macmillan's machine, paid the fine himself’’. A record of the event was preserved thanks to an article in a local newspaper. J. Chovanec / Lingua 197 (2017) 34--49 43 acknowledgement (‘right right’). Despite the absence of any humorous content, the first part of the utterance is assigned the status of a laughable thanks to the laughter tokens that it receives as a reaction from the other interlocutor. Following on with a latched utterance, the presenter then issues a personal evaluative comment that concludes his brief narrative (‘I don’t really know what the hell he was doing running over someone’; lines 21--22). This functions as a coda, i.e. a statement that wraps and finishes the story (Labov, 1972). While laughter features heavily in the reactions of both interlocutors during the telling of the story, the passage is not humorous per se. Moreover, since the laughter disappears half-way through the narrative, it seems that the story becomes re-evaluated from a ‘funny past incident that happened to someone else’ to a feeling of regret at the victim of the accident. The telling of this incident does not initiate any banter or joking between the interlocutors, who may feel it is inappropriate to joke on the topic. After a brief period of silence when no reaction comes from the friend, the presenter switches back to a more transactional mode by making an offer to change their bicycles (‘Do you wanna swap at the bottom?’; line 23). This concludes the entire scene. 3.2.2. Non-humorous laughter and the experiential mode Laughter obviously does not always index a humorous situation; sometimes it accompanies an activity that is performed jointly by two or more interlocutors, celebrating their success, helping them cope with anxieties and affirming their common bonds. It thus accompanies their physical experience, which may be new, unexpected, or incongruous with their expectations (for more examples and a systematic classification of this type of laughter, see Chovanec, 2017). Some of these functions of laughter are exemplified in Extract 5, which contains quite extensive stretches of laughter related to the experiential mode. The extract as a whole is representative of the way the programme actually documents the physical experience and verbal/emotional reactions of the main participant -- the presenter: Extract 5. Laughter to complement physical experience (Episode 2; 20.00--21.34; Riding the bike out of control). 44 J. Chovanec / Lingua 197 (2017) 34--49 The laughter emerges in the second part of the extract when the documentary shows the presenter and his friend chatting and enjoying their ride on historical bicycles. The laughter tokens in line 34 have an entirely non-humorous basis -- they come as a response to the rattling and bumping Guy Martin experiences when riding over a cattle grid. That is immediately followed with Martin's open criticism of his friend (‘All right you cheating bugger!’; lines 26--27), who swerved around the cattle grid to go through the adjacent field. Apparently, his friend ‘chickens out’ on the ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ experience that permeates the design of the entire programme. As a result of his act of evasion, Martin's friend is turned into the butt of humour in the presenter's biting remark. However, this is not an act of real aggression, as indicated by Martin's agitated laughter at his own remark. The mock aggression is merely staged: it is a further affirmation of the bonding function that laughter has in their on-screen interaction. The remaining instances of laughter (in lines 28, 34 and 46) are likewise purely emotional reactions, without being prompted by any humorous laughables in the preceding turns. The first of these laughter segments co-occurs with an utterance that Martin makes, finding it hard to control the speeding bicycle. Punctuated by several tokens of laughter, his repeated verbal reaction eventually peters out with laughter taking over entirely. After a cut to Martin's retrospection of the occasion, the scene follows with a prolonged laughing sequence. The nature of the presenter's laughter changes from ecstatic excitement to fearfulness, as the visual track shows Guy Martin looking somewhat distressed. Almost symbolically, the maniacally laughing presenter (lines 46--47) rides his bike out of the camera's angle, thereby ending the entire scene. 3.2.3. Performing physical acts of humour The last humour-related phenomenon that is involved in the construction of spontaneity is the performance of physical acts of humour. This is, arguably, the ultimate outcome of the playful interaction between the on-screen participants since they are involved in intentionally designing a special situation in order to play a trick on each other or on some third person. While the performance of such pranks underlies some specific formats of entertainment, such as candid camera (Brock, 2015), their occurrence in less openly entertaining programmes such as TV documentaries may come as a bit of a surprise. Unlike ‘fly-on-the-wall’ shows, the prank documented in this section does not involve any elaborate set-up and planning. It seems to be performed very spontaneously, on the spur of the moment. J. Chovanec / Lingua 197 (2017) 34--49 45 In Extract 6, Guy Martin is getting ready to clean a railway engine under the guidance of a young boilersmith: Extract 6. Playing a prank (Episode 1; 4.51--5.23; Cleaning the engine). The scene opens with a shot of the two men inside the cabin, while the voiceover specifies the nature of the activity to follow (‘. . .must begin with the basics. (1.0) Engine cleaning’; lines 2--3). Momentarily, the verbal and the visual tracks are in harmony, but once the narration switches to the narrative voice of the diegetic presenter, the viewers’ expectation of what happens next is disrupted: Guy Martin does not start cleaning the engine. Instead, he looks out of the cabin and, with a curious and enthusiastic look in his eyes, maliciously pre-announces a physical prank that he has apparently just conceived (‘Someone's going to get wet ‘ere’; line 4). Wielding the hose in his hands, he names the target (‘Heather’) that is still located out of the camera's angle and, thus, not yet visible to the TV viewers. At this point, the camera cuts to the target of the prank, showing a girl who cowers away from the jet of water spraying from the hose (see Fig. 1). The target of this physical act of humour is clearly a member of the production team since she's holding a clipboard with some papers. The scene lasts only for a second, with the camera instantly cutting back to the two pranksters enjoying a hearty laugh inside the cabin. Guy Martin swipes the hose in front of the boilersmith, who bends back -- still laughing -- in order to forestall the chance that he might become the victim of yet another prank by Martin. The scene then continues with the voiceover giving technical details about the cleaning and the two men eventually performing the job. The prank constitutes a brief interlude that is remarkable for several reasons. First of all, it represents a violation of the on-screen frame within which the participants interact. Their involvement of the production crew, by targeting a production team member with the prank, constitutes a momentary reframing of the whole situation, occasioning a shift of footing (Goffman, 1974; Goodwin, 2007; Chovanec, 2016a,b). Evidently, this stepping out of their communicative frame also involves performing an unexpected and -- most likely -- unplanned act that has no relevance to the activity at hand. Though the prank probably arises out of the spur of the moment, it has not been edited out during post production. Instead, it was incorporated as a very brief interlude within the monologic voiceover whose narrative exposition is thereby divided into two parts (see lines 1--3 and 8--12, respectively). The TV viewers are invited to partake in the amusement of the pranksters. Fig. 1. Performing a prank on the production team (Episode 1; 5.00). 46 J. Chovanec / Lingua 197 (2017) 34--49 Once again, the prank can also be interpreted as an opportunity for the participants to perform their gendered identity. The targeting a young female colleague in this physical act of humour provides a focus for the interlocutors' joint performance of masculine identity (cf. Benwell, 2004; Smith, 2008). 4. Conclusion In this paper, I have investigated several phenomena related to the emergence of conversational humour in TV documentaries. The analysis has identified a number of ways in which interlocutors in the diegetic frame negotiate the play frame, use humour, and engage in joking behaviour. The findings are relevant for our understanding of how the producers of TV programmes enhance the impression of spontaneity in the genre of the documentary, alternating between the transactional and the interpersonal modes. First of all, the analysis has shown that the presenter has a central role in the discursive construction of spontaneity. While there is a script to follow, his interaction with experts and other individuals within the communicative frame of the programme provides the opportunity for less scripted and seemingly more authentic exchanges. The presenter is responsible for initiating the play frame, even though the invitation may be declined by the other interlocutor, e.g. where one's acceptance of the play frame and participation in an act of joking behaviour could constitute a face threat. It seems that the emergence of conversational humour is preconditioned by the achievement of mutual in-tune-ness between the speakers. In documentary programmes, that situation occurs where the interlocutors appear in situations involving more than the transmission of expert information, namely when they cooperate in order to achieve some common goal. At the same time, this joint orientation to the successful completion of a task enables them to operate in an experiential mode, which opens up the possibility of producing a running commentary on what they are presently doing as well as a retrospective evaluation of the outcome of past actions. In scenes of this kind, the presenter opens himself up to the possibility of failure, which exposes him to potential biting remarks and comments from the other interlocutor. The reversal of power in such interactions means that the opening up of the play frame can be effectively realised by an interlocutor different than the presenter, who is otherwise the dominant interlocutor responsible for moving the narrative forward. In the analysed data, that form of joking behaviour also appears to have a gender dimension: the speakers perform their masculine identities through banter and joking based on mock aggression, i.e., communicative behaviour commonly associated with playful and non-serious interaction between men. The aspect of male bonding is also attested in non-humorous laughter, i.e. laughter tokens that accompany the performance or the achievement of some activity without being motivated by any obvious or intentional humorous trigger. Probably the most extreme form of performing spontaneity is through humour-related physical acts such as pranks played on unsuspecting individuals. These findings have a number of implications for the analysis of broadcast talk, as far as the role of humour and the construction of sociability are concerned. One of the most salient mechanisms at play here appears to be constant shifts of footing. The presenter's talk is marked by frequent re-alignments, whereby he adjusts the orientation of his talk from monologic exposition delivered on the camera to his interaction with other individuals in the diegetic frame and, occasionally, even to the production crew involved in the shooting of the scene. Another dimension consists of the heterodiegetic voiceover that is added in post-production in juxtaposition to the multiple diegetic voices and their diverse mutual constellations. It is within this complex structure of the documentary that the true place of conversational humour needs to be sought. In case of prototypical documentary programmes that use the detached, omniscient external narrator voice, the voiceover is fully immersed in the serious mode because it describes the factual reality and provides contextual/background information about the phenomena presented. In contrast to that external voice, the presenter has the opportunity to present the factual reality in a more subjective manner in his on-camera monologue, with the degree of his subjectivity rising significantly in conversational interactions with other individuals. As a result, there emerges the possibility of not only using non-humorous laughter but also introducing the play frame and engaging in a range of less-than-entirely-serious forms of behaviour involving joint joking and physical pranks. It appears that the structural design of the dual narrative levels found in broadcast programmes provides the opportunity for sociability to be enacted through behaviour that is less ‘front-stage’, and thus more ‘ordinary’. These are the symbolic meanings connoted through the presenter's humour and (performed) spontaneity. It is evident that some of these forms of humour underlie the genre hybridity of the programme in question, where the transactional nature of TV documentaries becomes complemented with features commonly found in more experiencebased entertainment genres such as reality shows, makeover programmes, etc. Ultimately, all of that helps to overcome the scriptedness of documentary programmes and boost the presentation of the ‘sociable self’ of selected interlocutors, notably the presenter. J. Chovanec / Lingua 197 (2017) 34--49 47 Transcription conventions (following Hutchby, 2006). [ = .hhh ↑↓ underline CAPITALS <> >< sou::::nd ((note)) (1.5) (.) heh turns that start simultaneously latched utterances an audible intake of breath rise or fall in pitch speaker emphasis speech markedly louder slow talk fast talk stretching of a sound or a word description of non-verbal activity length of pause in seconds a brief pause (less than 0.5 s) laughter token References Arampatzis, Christos, 2012. 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