Trying to Be Funny: A Conversation Analysis of Humor in EFL University Students' Role-Plays

Through the lens of conversational analysis (CA), humor or funniness is not an inherent property of a message, nor an internal state of any social action, but as something interactionally achieved (Glenn, 2003). Teachers are often encouraged to utilize humor to reduce anxiety, lower affective filters, and make language more "memorable" (Bell, 2005; Tarone, 2000; Ziyaeemehr et al., 2011). In the current research endeavor, we focused on an activity called "Drama and Creativity," an extracurricular activity which is offered to firstyear undergraduate students at a public university in Thailand. During the activity, students worked in groups of three to four to collaboratively create a role-play which they later performed in front of their peers. Twenty-four students participated in the activity, and a total of seven role-plays were video-recorded. The goal of this study was to offer evidence of student achievements of humor construction in an EFL classroom context. We analyzed the sequences where laughter occurred in the data and identified linguistic and sociolinguistic resources that students used to construct incongruity and project laughable tokens in their role-play performances. The findings revealed that students were able to mobilize category-bound practices (Housley & Fitzgerald, 2015), embodied gestures, and activity-bound expectations to create unexpectedness which resulted in laughter among the audience.