What is it about?
Have you ever made a joke and no one laughed, or heard one that everyone understood but you? These everyday situations may seem simple, but they show how complex humor can be in real conversations. This review talks about the book The Multimodal Performance of Conversational Humor, by Dr. Elisa Gironzetti, which explores how people use humor while talking to each other. The book doesn’t focus on stand-up comedy or jokes with punchlines. Instead, it looks at how humor happens naturally during conversations with words, smiles, facial expressions, and eye contact, with examples from real conversations in English and Spanish, combining language analysis with tools like eye-tracking to understand how humor is created and shared between people. This review analyses each book chapter critically, highlighting its remarks, arguments, findings, and results, and concludes by discussing the book’s overall contributions to ongoing research in this field.
Featured Image
Photo by Surface on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This review is important because it highlights a book that helps us understand how humor works in real-life conversations in two languages (Spanish and English), not just through words, but also through smiles, eye contact, and body language. Another key aspect of the book is that it also brings together different theories in a clear and well-organized way, making it easier for both experts and non-specialists to follow. Overall, this work presents a book with a solid foundation for others who want to explore how we use humor in our daily interactions and how to conduct experimental research about it.
Perspectives
Reading this book and writing this review was an enriching experience. As a researcher with a background in figurative language, I've always found humor and irony to be particularly challenging aspects to study. In her book, Gironzetti shows that it's not only possible to explore these topics experimentally, but also to do so by clearly connecting theory and practice and explaining it in a way that is accessible to specialists and non-specialists. In my review, I aimed to highlight how Gironzetti approaches such a complex construct (humor) with brilliance, summarizing the book's structure, highlighting its key contributions, and sharing my perspective as a reader and researcher. For me, the most important aspect of my review is showing that this book is a valuable contribution to the study of humor and communication, and an essential read for scholars interested in this field.
Caroline Girardi Ferrari
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Review of Gironzetti (2022): The Multimodal Performance of Conversational Humor, Metaphor and the Social World, March 2025, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/msw.25006.gir.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
