'It\u27s just a bit of cultural [...] lost in translation': Australian and British intracultural and intercultural metapragmatic evaluations of jocularity

摘要

This paper explores evaluations of attempts at humour and reactions to them by participants and non-participants in a jocular interaction. There are two levels of analysis: (1) the instigator\u27s jocular comment and the target\u27s reaction to it, taken from the reality television gameshow Big Brother Australia 2012, and (2) the Australian and British interviewees\u27 (non-participants\u27) intracultural (inside one\u27s own cultural context) and intercultural (from another cultural context) evaluations of the comment and the reaction to it. It is true that jocularity in both cultural contexts is highly appreciated and tends to produce a laughing (or at least not a confrontational) reaction, which shows one\u27s ability to laugh at oneself and not take oneself too seriously. However, there are particular differences in intracultural and intercultural evaluations. For instance, while it was noticed that the Australian interviewees tend to make culture-specific remarks about how different their own and British understanding of humour is, the British interviewees try to avoid cultural or collective references and rather focus on jocularity -related benefits in interaction. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.