DOI 10.

1515/text-2013-0025

Text&Talk 2013; 33(45): 553574

Naomi K. Knight

Evaluating experience in funny ways: how friends bond through conversational humor
Abstract: This paper explores conversational humor between friends and demonstrates through a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) perspective how friends play with evaluative meanings in their humor to achieve bonding and affiliation. Sequences of talk that feature shared laughter are analyzed and it is shown that speakers make humorous contrasts between social values related to their friendship groups and community memberships. Using SFL tools like appraisal, the examples reveal contrasts as well as layering of evaluations of experiences, people, and things in the speakers lives with underlying community values known to be shared with those with whom they are joking. It is argued that this convivial conversational humor is one kind of affiliation process in which friends manage their connections to each other and to the social world. This paper contributes to SFL theory by providing new insights into humor and conversational talk, and also builds on the theory by offering connections between humorous uses of appraisal and affiliation as a model for social bonding. By doing so, this paper aims to highlight the value of a systemic functional linguistic perspective on conversational humor. Keywords: humor; conversation; affiliation; bonding; appraisal; evaluation; SFL

Naomi K. Knight: Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, British Columbia, V5A 1S6, Canada. E-mail: naomik@sfu.ca

1Introduction
This paper explores conversational humor between friends and focuses on the role of evaluative meanings and the construal of affiliation as essential elements of this type of humorous discourse. It contributes to systemic functional linguistic theory by providing new insights into humor and conversational talk, and also builds on the theory by offering connections between humorous uses of appraisaland affiliation as a model for social bonding. By doing so, this paper aims

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to highlight the value of a systemic functional linguistic perspective on conversational humor.1 A good sense of humor is a highly desired commodity (cf. Cameron 2000: 417) or quality that we seek in friends, partners and colleagues and an essential ingredient in gratifying relationships (Lockyer and Pickering 2001: 634). This has much to do with the fact that we use humor, particularly in conversation, to negotiate our attitudes and values together. Having a good sense of humor in the eyes of someone else often entails sharing the same perspectives toward experiences, persons, and things in their world, evaluating them, and being able to play with these values (cf. Partington 2006). Furthermore, when we share a background of experiences, such as in friendships, we create humor by playing with values we have established together (Knight 2010a). This paper argues that it is this play with evaluated experience that constitutes the kind of banal humor (cf. Provine 2004: 215) that is found in casual conversation between friends, and that its interpretation relies upon the shared values of the friendship group. It specifically explores how evaluative meanings, both overt and covert, are layered and manipulated by speakers in order to share a laugh and thereby bond together. Evaluations in text are analyzed through the appraisal framework (Martin and White 2005) and related to their functions in the social context within a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) perspective (cf. Halliday 1978). Through such SFL notions as metafunctions (Halliday 1973) and bonding (Stenglin 2004; Martin 2004, 2010; Martin and Stenglin 2006), conversational humor between friends is shown to be a rich and complex site for negotiating values and affiliating into communities.

2Background on conversational humor

Linguists across a range of perspectives have focused on different elements of the phenomenon of humor to establish how we convey funniness in language. Outside of linguistics, the humorous incongruity (cf. Koestler 1964; Mulkay 1988; Schopenhauer 1957 [1819]: 76), that is, the mechanism behind what makes a joke potentially humorous, has been widely investigated and is a common feature ofresearch on humor. In linguistic terms, this humorous incongruity has been

1Note that it does so by providing an overview of the applicability of this perspective to the fields of study in humor and conversation. This paper does not delve into theoretical considerations of how humor and affiliation affect the parameters of SFL. For a deeper discussion, see Knight (2010a).

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described as a contrast between what is said and what is implied (Partington 2006), and in order for it to be interpreted as humorous, the implied and surface meaning must co-exist or be simultaneously present (Giora 1995; Giora et al. 1998). According to cognitive linguists following script opposition (Raskin 1985) theory, this contrast involves a shift between semantic scripts. When a speaker tells a joke, an expected, surface linguistic form collides with an unexpected and opposing underlying script of the joke, causing a shift in the hearers reading of the initial script to reinterpret it in joking terms, resulting in humor. This focus on the humorous mechanism, however, does not alone account for why a contrast or shift and its result in the mind of the hearer might necessarily be interpreted as funny. Further research has suggested that the reaction to potentially humorous talk also be taken into account (cf. Carrell 1993; Simpson 2003: 42), and Attardo and Raskins (1991) later script opposition model, called the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), acknowledges this need in its incorporation of the situation including the audience into its model for interpreting humor. This is particularly important for humor in casual contexts of spoken discourse such as conversation, in which identifiable humorous constructions, such as jokes with a punch line, are less common. Those who have considered humor initially from a social perspective, focusing on less structured spoken kinds of humor, have contended that it must in fact be interpreted in relation to the interaction between speaker and hearer (see, e.g., Glenn 2003; Holmes and Marra 2004; Coates 2007). Coates (2007) explains that spontaneous, spoken conversational humor is characterized by banal comments, humorous stories, banter, and simply when speakers pick up a point and play with it creatively (2007: 31). This kind of play happens moment by moment as conversations unfold, and is so varied in its expression that it cannot be easily identified focusing on a particular speakers talk alone (i.e., in search of contrasting meanings). Thus, researchers in conversational humor have often used the signal of laughter as their contextualisation cue for humor par excellence (Kotthoff 2000: 64), and its presence in an environment of incongruity can show that the contrast has in fact been interpreted as a humorous one (Zijderveld 1983). Archakis and Tsakona (2005), for instance, in applying the General Theory of Verbal Humor to conversation incorporate laughter as a secondary necessary cri terion by which they could detect where the incongruity actually occurred, and Partington (2006) uses laughter as his determiner of laughter-talk, focusing on the talk preceding and provoking, intentionally or otherwise, a bout of laughter (2006: 1) in which he identifies different mechanisms of laughter-talk. Laughter, particularly shared laughter, was pervasive in the conversations between friends that were considered for this paper, so it served as a useful signal for identifying an environment in which humor could occur. By considering the talk surrounding

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a bout of laughter in conversation, then, it was possible to locate the contrast in meanings leading to the laughter reaction.2 It has also been shown, particularly in conversation analysis (CA) studies, that laughter can perform a range of functions in conversation, such as conveying alignment or affiliation (cf. Glenn 2003; Goodwin 1986; Jefferson 1984), while research that has focused on conversational humor among friends has demon strated that its social functions are distinctly solidarity-oriented (cf. Hay 2000; Kotthoff 1996; Norrick 1993; Priego-Valverde 2003). Hay (2000: 721), for instance, found that negative categories of the use of humor in the function of power, such as control and creating conflict, seldom occurred in her study on humor in friendship groups (see also Holmes and Marra 2002). Humor has been shown to facilitate, increase, and reinforce existing or underlying relations of familiarity and informality (Kotthoff 1996) and conviviality (Priego-Valverde 2003) with friends. Norrick (1993: 44) explains that this is because friends share a customary joking relationship in which their underlying shared bonds negate the need for social politeness conventions, so that joking works to defuse any aggression and create solidarity (1993: 3435). It is through this humor that, according to Norrick, participants are able to manipulate talk by presenting a self, to probe for information about the attitudes and affiliations of interlocutors, to realign with them, and to relieve tension and foster friendly interaction (Norrick 1993: 5). Along these lines, this paper explores how friends communicate funniness together and use conversational humor and shared laughter to bond and construct solidarity. Linguistic relations between spoken text and social relations of solidarity and bonding have been comprehensively explored in the approach of SFL, most prominently by Poynton (1985), who developed a model of social solidarity and described its linguistic realizations, and by Stenglin (2004) and Martin (2004, 2010; Martin and Stenglin 2006), who have shown how language is used to align readers and hearers into communities. Notably, speakers are shown to employ evaluative meanings in their talk in order to construe these kinds of meanings and relationships, exhibited effectively in these studies through the SFL appraisal framework for analyzing evaluation (Martin and White 2005). Appraisal offers a comprehensive set of resources for identifying different types of evaluations made in language, even covert ones, and the connections made be2While humor scholars are careful to acknowledge that not all humour involves laughter, and not all laughter involves humour (Chafe 2007: 1; see also Attardo 2003: 1288), this paper does not claim that laughter is an invariable marker of humor per se. Rather, shared laughter is used as a discourse marker in conversations between friends for a particular kind of talk that I refer to as convivial conversational humor. It is within this particular context that shared laughter serves as a signal of some phenomenon going on that may be funny.

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tween these expressions and the construal of bonding and solidarity provides a useful model to apply to conversational humor between friends. In his early work, Halliday identified the usefulness of an SFL perspective on humor in his discussion of verbal play:
Verbal play involves all elements in the linguistic system, from rhyme and rhythm to vocabulary and structure. But the essence of verbal play is playing with meaning; includ ing ... playing with the meaning that is inherent in the social structure. (Halliday 1978: 160)

However, Simpson (2003: 75) recognizes a notable absence of any serious provision for humorous discourse across the systemic-functional work, and for that matter across the critical discourse work that draws on functional linguistics. While further SFL research has been undertaken more recently on humor, it has only been explored in case studies that include humor as one aspect of the overall study (e.g., Painter 2003 on child humor development; Caple 2008, 2010 on newspapers; Hood and Forey 2005 on conference presentations; Martin and White 2005 on film and literature). Or, SFL concepts have been used in sections of humor studies to a minimal degree (e.g., Partington 2006). This paper extends on initial entries into a theory of humor from an SFL approach by Knight (2008, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 2011) to offer a thorough picture of a particular kind of humor in conversation between friends: convivial conversational humor. Through this approach, the full interaction surrounding instances of shared laughter are investigated to demonstrate the way that convivial conversational humor is co-constructed by friends. It will be shown that friends in these instances negotiate their affiliations by playing with evaluations about shared experience in humorous ways.

3Data and approach

The data for this study is a subset of naturally occurring casual conversations between friends in the Canadian context collected for Knight (2010b). The six examples in this paper are drawn from 21 humorous phases that were identified within the conversations. A humorous phase is a unit identified first by the occurrence of recipient laughter, and then by the surrounding stretch of text in which, following the notion of phase developed by Gregory and Malcolm (1995 [1981]), there is a significant measure of consistency in what is being selected ideationally, interpersonally and textually (Gregory 1995: 161). This is a dynamic perspective on the unit of study, taking into account the way that humor in casual

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conversation is constructed ongoingly and shifts through the discourse. The examples were selected for their short length in light of the size restrictions of this paper, but were also chosen as sequences that more clearly exhibit the evaluative contrasts that are significant to the description of convivial conversational humor. The friends in the data set were both females and males ranging from ages 2030 and most participants were undergraduate university students, or were in postuniversity jobs.3 All of the participants signed consent forms prior to recording and their names have been changed to ensure anonymity, and the full data set was cleared for Knights (2010b) research to meet the requirements of University of Sydneys Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC). The systemic functional linguistic approach (cf. Halliday 1978; Martin 1992) is applied as a model that situates language in its natural social environment, connecting our use of language to the social structure we construe through it. More specifically, it provides a comprehensive framework and set of tools for investigating the functions of solidarity and bonding and their linguistic expression in conversational humor. Resources for exploring humor that are provided by SFL include the dimensions of metafunctions (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 31) for distinguishing layers of meaning and stratification for organizing levels of language and social context in relation to one another; the appraisal framework for examining attitudes in text; and the theory of bonding to interpret these meanings in relation to their social functions in context. By applying these resources to conversational humor between friends, it will be shown that the metafunctions distinguish different meanings of appraisal toward experiences and things, and that these are significant features of the humorous contrasts resulting in laughter; it will be further shown that this has implications in the related social context particularly in solidarity and bonding between the participants. The features of metafunctions, stratification, and appraisal and their applicability to conversational humor between friends will be described in Sections 3.1 and 3.2. Bonding theory will be further developed in Section 4.2.

3It must be noted in establishing the viability of the data that it is undoubtedly affected by the ideological configurations of the participants, most markedly in terms of nationality, age, class, and gender (see comments in Section 4.2 on gender). The scope of this study is thus necessarily limited by these aspects, and the broad similarities between many of the participants (e.g., middle class status) would clearly affect the topics of conversation and uses of humor at stake in the data. It can be argued, though, that the shorter range of variation (e.g., in age and class) arguably minimizes the effect of categories of age and education. These aspects of the humor would form an interesting topic for future study.

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3.1Applying the concepts of metafunction and stratification

Halliday divides language into three intrinsic metafunctions that have evolved to serve in peoples lives (Halliday 1978: 4; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 31). These comprise ideational (construal of experience), interpersonal ( enactment of social relationships), and textual (organization of this information into coherent text) components. According to this theory, we create these three kinds of meaning simultaneously through discourse. The metafunctional hypothesis is significant for the current analysis in that it allows us to consider distinctly while giving equal analytical weight to the interpersonal (relationship-building) meanings in language and the ideational (information-giving) meanings that are played with in humor.4 SFL also connects the different levels of language across strata, from semantics or discourse semantics (Martin 1992) (meanings) to lexicogrammar (wordings) to phonology (soundings). There are systems of meaning in discourse semantics that are ideational, interpersonal, and textual, lining up with systems in lexicogrammar and in phonology; speakers choose from all of these systems in an instance of language. The strata relate to one another by realization, described by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004: 26) as the process of linking one level of organization with another, so that meanings are realized by wordings which are realized by soundings. Further, social context is connected to language as another stratum in SFL, situated above all the strata of language and realized by it. Thus, with the concept of stratification we can systematically connect patterns of meaning in humorous texts to their functions in social life. The patterns of meaning found in convivial conversational humor can be specifically interpreted through appraisal resources and notions of bonding and solidarity.

3.2Appraisal in play
The appraisal framework involves resources for modalising, amplifying, reacting emotionally (affect), judging morally (judgment) and evaluating aesthetically (appreciation) (Martin 1995: 28). It usefully distinguishes between subtypes of attitudes according to whether an emotion is being conveyed (affect), or the speaker is evaluating a concrete or abstract object (appreciation) or person
4While equally important for analyzing language, it suffices for this study to focus on the interaction between the interpersonal and ideational metafunctions but not the textual, as the interaction between these metafunctions is most salient in conversational humor.

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(judgment), which is important in identifying targets of humor. It also accounts for the ways that speakers amplify (increase or mitigate) their attitudes or upgrade/downgrade the intensity of categories in their talk through a system of graduation (Martin and White 2005: 35). Engagement is another system of appraisal that accounts for how speakers variously commit themselves to what they are saying, and is a useful tool in interpreting implicit evaluations in talk. Due to the equal status and closeness of friends (cf. Poynton 1985 on tenor) in conversational humor, it is difficult to interpret the evaluative meanings that are played with as they often appear as expressions of experiential meaning and on the surface look to be only informing the hearer of some information. However, Martin and White (2005) make the important distinction between inscribed (or explicit) and invoked (or implicit) appraisal, accounting for both those evaluations that are overtly inscribed in such features as attitudinal vocabulary (e.g., great) and those that are hidden within tokens or ideational meanings that evoke attitudinal responses in culture (e.g., the suspect charged with sexual assault). Thus, through the resources provided by appraisal theory, it is possible to extract different levels of evaluative meaning, both explicit and implicit, thatare used in a humorous way and to take into account the ideational targets of appraisal as meaningful experiences, people, and things at stake for the interactants. Consider the following excerpt in which three speakers create humor around the harmful effects of taking antibiotics, an action which speaker C has just committed, explicitly expressing evaluation and laughing: (1)5G:You know what pills scare me a little bit G: ... like antibiotics, like they totally mess up your DNA C: Seriously? See that? == And I ruined my DNA! F: == No they dont. C: So G: ((laughs)) By considering this data with the tools of appraisal, we see that evaluative meaning is an important element of the humor: G has conveyed a negative appreciation of antibiotics which is then intensified by C as ruining instead of just messing up her DNA; the target is also shifted to C herself as the ruiner. Through the appraisal system of graduation we can see that C is creating humor through

5See appendix for transcription conventions.

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yperbole, and that upscaling this evaluation is funny because of what is being h evaluated and who is involved in the talk. That is, while antibiotics can be negatively appreciated by these speakers for possibly having a damaging effect on DNA, when C turns this into a negative judgment of herself for completely ruining her own genetic structure, it becomes a humorous impossibility to be laughed off. Not only is the target of evaluation shifted to give C agency of her own DNA, this negative judgment adds a self-deprecatory layer to the humor that also impels the hearers to laugh instead of condemn her for taking antibiotics. It is this combining and layering of appraisal meanings that is crucial for the interpretation of humor; the intensification of Cs appreciation combined with negative self- judgment is layered on these participants shared values toward pills (as seen in Gs earlier mitigated negative appraisal pills scare me a little bit) and toward their friend C as a friend who they would not actually condemn for using antibiotics. That the underlying values have been established in their unfolding conversation and set up to contrast with what is said is a fundamental feature of convivial conversational humor. In terms of the humorous contrast, both the evaluations made in the talk and the underlying values have to be co-present for the participants in order to be interpreted. What is happening may be considered similar to Partingtons (2006: 226) mechanism of reversal of evaluation, whereby evaluations in humor are suddenly overturned so that meanings to which we would normally attach positive or negative evaluations are instead given the opposite appraisals. This notion is useful in that it brings evaluation into the conceptualization of the humorous mechanism, but a reversal of a positive evaluation with a negative one, or vice versa, does not suffice to explain how friends create their humor. Rather than simply negative versus positive values, we have seen that it involves multiple layers of evaluative meanings assigned to or coupled (Martin 2000) with differ ent experiences that are meaningful to the par ticular interactants (such as C taking antibiotics). To be precise, speakers combine (often implicit) evaluative meanings, interpretable through the inscribed/invoked distinction in appraisal (Martin and White 2005: 6168), and layer them in a humorous, incongruent relation to what they have communicated to be their shared values. The co-present evaluations may both be positive or negative, but differ instead in terms of their appraisal type. This will be demonstrated in Section 4 below. In the following section, the appraisal framework is applied to analyze the talk surrounding laughter in the examples, and various layers of evaluative meaning are identified in relation to values established in the unfolding discourse by the conversational group. The targets of appraisal that is, the ideational meanings being evaluated will be examined to uncover why friends in these conversations laugh together and how this facilitates bonding and affiliation.

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4Results of SFL analysis

4.1Play with appraisal in conversational humor
It was revealed in the analysis that the conversational participants employed all resources of appraisal consistently in combination with one another for humor, and that these meanings were often covert (i.e., invoked). Engagement resources were useful for affording invoked appraisals, as will be shown in the examples (Section 4.2). The ideational targets of evaluation were particular to the conversational group in that they had specific attitudes attached to them; that is, attitudes that were shared between them and by which they could create funny alterations. This is exhibited in the following three examples. In example (2), the three female participants laugh about the overeating they did during the holidays and its implications for them, inscribing appreciation for eating and pie and invoking negative self-judgment for humorous purposes: (2) U: == Yeah I saw like my family and friends ... I ate well ((laughs)) N:We all ate well. ((all laugh)) N: Dude we all ((laughing)) ate good pie! ((continuous laughing)) U: Yes I agree. ((continuous laughing)) On a diet now. ((all laugh)) The positive appreciation of eating by U is taken up by N as she explicitly includes all the conversational participants in the action, and furthers it with her own positive appreciation of the calorie-heavy dessert pie. It becomes clear that there is another layer of evaluative meaning in the form of negative judgment when U invokes it through her claim to be going on a diet, contrasting their previous display of enjoyment in eating a diet-defeating food. They share a laugh in response to this about the negative values they normally attach to overeating, resulting in the need to diet, and indicating an identification with being bodyconscious women by layering opposing evaluations targeted toward fatty foods and themselves. By bringing the meaning of going on a diet into this conversation, U has identified herself as someone needing to lose weight, but by laughing this off together as a group, these participants show that in fact going on a diet simply for eating some pie is a funny value to all of them. Evaluations are thus used to negotiate healthy body values as relevant to this conversational group, implicitly taking on the form of self-deprecating humor. However, as Kotthoff

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(2000: 55) shows, female speakers organize their presentations so that other people do not laugh at their expense, but rather at the expense of the norms which they mock collectively by laughing at them. Speaker N demonstrates overtly that this is the case by involving all of the participants in her mocking as we, but it is because they can all share in the values associated with pie and also with body consciousness that they can laugh together.6 Example (3) shows another layering of attitudinal meanings along with the use of graduation for humor as the speakers complain about the cold weather in two Canadian regions: (3) P: So uh gaw ... in Quebec its so frickin cold N:((laughs)) P: like ugh I hate this! N: ((continuous laughter)) P: I want to go back to Toronto == yeah N: == ((laughing)) where == its mild. P: == Now everybodys like yeah Torontos so cold Im like Torontos not == cold N: == (laughs) P implies negative appreciation toward the province of Quebec with intense force (a parameter of graduation) for being so frickin cold, and, along with her following inscription of intensified negative affect hate as an affectual response to this cold, the humorous hyperbole sparks laughter by N. This is then countered with an opposing positive appreciation for the city of Toronto, the current city of both speakers, exhibiting the underlying congruent opposite evaluation attached to Toronto that makes this sequence funny. This is revealed further when the speakers laugh at Ps portrayal of others complaints about the coldness of Toronto, adding another projected layer of evaluation to contrast with their love for the city. Furthermore, since P is originally from Quebec (a detail known to the participants and made evident in earlier talk), the speakers shared values toward P as a Quebecer are also in play, exhibiting a complex sequence of evaluative layering for humor. Example (4) demonstrates a combination of judgment and graduation for humor by speakers describing an overweight woman who appeared at speaker Ss workplace:
6While it is likely the case that the all-female gender of the participants plays an important role in this example and has specific implications for the humor (cf. Gray 1994; Kotthoff 2000), there is no space here to explore issues of gender and humor (but see Section 4.2).

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(4) S: this big big big hu:::ge lady walks outta ((laughing)) the car like == A: == How big == was she S: == Im talking like L, N:((laugh)) ... S: a house ((laughing)) like fit at least three people A: ((laughs)) Even more covert than the previous examples, the speakers in this example invoke negative judgment toward the lady by marking the quality of being big with a great deal of graduation (intensification of size), and it is clear when A alludes to a fat joke (a construction popularized by comedian Rodney Danger field, cf. Tribute to Rodney Dangerfield 2004) that they are negatively judging this woman for being fat. Again, as in example (2), the participants in this sequence create humor by conveying attitudes about body maintenance, but this time the target is removed from the conversational group. Furthermore, she is even dehumanized and objectified by being appraised aesthetically through appreciation rather than judgment when compared to a house. In this way, the participants share an underlying congruent value toward themselves as being more normal in size by teasing an outside other as intensely abnormal. This indicates the interesting social work of community belonging that is being constructed through discourse (further discussed in Section 4.2). These examples demonstrate that evaluative meanings are significant for the interpretation of conversational humor between friends, and that the ideational targets of these combined appraisals are highly contingent upon the conversational group and their values as expressed in discourse. This leads us to consider why this type of humor is so saturated with evaluative meanings; what are the participants doing when they joke about values? The following section provides an answer in describing the concept of affiliation as a social function of conversational humor between friends.

4.2Affiliating through value-based humor

The analyses presented in Section 4.1 demonstrate that a specific kind of friendship work is going on through talk. The friends in the examples played with values toward things, people, and places with which they were all familiar, but in a way that showed their relations as members of broader social groups (e.g., eating pie as related to body consciousness ideals of women). To be precise, friends used humor in the examples to negotiate their shared belonging to communities;

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to affiliate as members of the same communities in a culture while laughing off their lack of affiliations with others. Attitudes are played with in talk as a way of negotiating the values around which these communities are built, or value bonds (Knight 2010a; see also Martin et al. this issue), that bring community members together in semiotic terms. This process, as revealed through convivial conversational humor, is one of affiliation (Knight 2010b). The notion of how friends affiliate was developed from linguistic discussions of bonding by Boxer and Corts-Conde (1997) in the ethnography tradition and by Stenglin (2004) and Stenglin and Martin (e.g., Martin 2004; Martin and Stenglin 2006) in systemic functional literature. According to Boxer and CortsConde (1997: 282; emphasis in the original), humor is used by conversational participants in a negotiation of a relational identity with others and through others, leading to a sense of group membership and an effect of bonding, and especially among friends, maximum RID (relational identity display) can be accomplished through joking and teasing that bond (1997: 293). Boxer and Corts-Conde bring together important notions of how speakers both identify and bond together as an interrelated aspect of conversational humor. Stenglin and Martin (cf. Stenglin 2004; Martin 2004, 2010; Martin and Stenglin 2006) further these insights by grounding the concept of bonding in patterns of language. Bonding is fundamentally about ways of building togetherness, inclusiveness, and affiliation (Stenglin 2004: 22) and is connected with language by its expression in appraisals in text. Bonding is concerned with the negotiation of feelings in language as a way of aligning hearers/readers into overlapping communities of attitudinal rapport (Martin 2004: 323), and we express feelings as interpersonal attitudes to ideational experience (2004: 337). Further, Martin (2004) shows how different types of attitudes in appraisal can be used to create communities. It is thus by sharing value-infused experiences, both concrete and abstract, that participants bond together into a community of like-minded people (Stenglin 2004: 402). Applying this concept to conversational humor between friends, bonding becomes even more complex. This is because humor allows speakers to construct these important aspects of relational identity display, togetherness, and community building in different ways than those conceptualized thus far for bonding. Conversational humor provides a way of negotiating not only coming together into like-minded communities, but also distinguishing ourselves from unwanted values of communities that we do not belong to. It does so by allowing us to laugh off what is not us, while also avoiding rejecting the other altogether as in serious talk. The term affiliation, therefore, accounts for the various ways that we construct ourselves together as members of different communities of values, and is expressed in patterns of attitudes tied to particular experiences in talk.

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Consider the following excerpt in which three males discuss beers they like and one speaker uses humor to affiliate not as a fellow light beer drinker but instead as a real man: (5) S: I drink Coors Light now man C: == Whoa W:== Ive been drinking light beer a lot in the summertime C: I thought you were a man this whole time ((laughs)) S: Come on ((all laugh)) While not explicitly inscribed with appraisal, this example features a great deal of invoked evaluative meaning that is used to create humor and thereby negotiate affiliation among the group. When S conveys a positive appreciation of a light beer, afforded by his counter-expectant use of now (cf. Martin and White 2005: 67),7 it is first matched by one speaker who admits that he drinks it a lot in the summertime. This can be viewed as a straightforward kind of bonding in which the speakers rally around a shared positively charged ideational meaning (Martin and Stenglin 2006: 217); in this case, the meaning is light beer, a simple but important symbol to this conversational group. However, C uses humor to turn this into a laughing affiliation in which he can bond with the others more broadly as real men. He does so by invoking negative judgment toward S for going against his expectations of manliness, using the expression this whole time to convey a counter-expectant attitude toward S; that is, a false impression of the positively judged quality of being a real man because he now drinks light beer. He also marks this as a non-serious remark by his own laugh. When S reacts by joining in and jokingly pleading for respite from this teasing, the participants laugh together. These speakers thus affiliate together as members of the same manly community by laughing off their lack of affiliation to those who would typically drink light beer (e.g., women). This complex construal of different affiliations is even more evident in the data when humor is combined with more serious talk by different speakers, as in the following example. This sequence exhibits four speakers (one of whom is a Brazilian male) discussing cross-dressing by Brazilian men. As speaker K provides evaluations to tie to this ideational meaning (of dressing like a girl), the hearers react variously by disaffiliating and by affiliating through humor. In order to explore this long example, the text will be discussed in segments. At the begin-

7That is, counter-expectant to the attitude he held before toward this kind of beer.

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ning of this sequence, we do not yet find laughter to mark humor, but rather a setup for affiliative talk by K: (6) K: Like I kindv reject femininity a little bit like I find it very weird in Brazil cause women are very, very feminine == C: == Yeah K: and men are very masculine ... K:  Yeah but you see a lot of guys in Brazil who arent necessarily gay who like to dress like women an K explicitly names a community that she is targeting of Brazilian heterosexual men, and brings out a value to associate with them of dressing like women that she marks as attitudinal with counter-expectancy.8 In relation to the underlying values that she has established in previous talk, in which she has herself negatively appreciated femininity values (I kindv reject femininity), this connection of dressing like women to Brazilian heterosexual men seems to be projected in a negative light as something to be condemned in affiliative terms (cf. Knight 2010a, 2010b) and this is how T, the Brazilian male in the group, responds to it in the lines that follow: (7) T: No! But they- if you uh- everyone dresses == K:== Because I remember being at == T: == Oh youre talking about (festival) right K:  the Carnival and like a whole group of guys they were all dressed like women == T:  == Yeah but theyre not men dressed like women; theyre like in a costume like a little costume like you know whaddamean? You can li- theyre not reading into this about womens feelings you know what I mean? They-they dont wanna know what its about to be a woman. Theythey wanna just have fun an-an I dont know pick up girls thats the idea of the thing. Well thats how they () == T counters Ks comment in a serious key (Hymes 1972) first by negating Ks claim (No!) and then denying values of femininity as being associated with
8Counter-expectancy is realized by her expression but and she also realizes the Engagement subsystem of disclaim: deny (Martin and White 2005: 118120) in her negation: by negating that these men are gay, she invokes a belief that it is typical to expect the gay but not the heterosexual community to positively appreciate cross-dressing.

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razilian men; he then adds new, positively appreciated masculine values to this B group of having fun and picking up girls. However, this is where K takes the opportunity to tease T and the Brazilian male community: (8) K: == Dressed like a girl ((laughs)) == T: == Well they dont really dress like a girl! Alright? K: Yeah I saw guys dressed like a girl T: What is- what kind of girl would dress like that! C, N:((laugh)) T:  The costumes they wear are like Im sorry excuse me a whore or something like ((N laughing)) th-they wear like costumes == (all the time) K: == Yeah yeah T: Yeah K repeats the incongruent value of dressing like a girl in humorous juxtaposition with those masculine values T has just proposed, but he does not share her laughter; instead, T denies Ks remark as condemning instead of laughable, and provides his own humor by negatively judging this type of dressing up as not at all feminine but licentious. This layering of evaluation and use of dysphemism whore with girls who dress in this way sparks laughter from the other two participants, C and N, who affiliate with T by laughing off this kind of licentious behavior. Note that this laughter shows how they are able to bond with T now in humor because they share broader values about appropriate dress, whereas they could not bond before around specific Brazilian male values that they do not share. K does not affiliate with them by laughing, but instead couples a new humorous evaluation with her target community of Brazilian males: (9) K: Because they dont know how to dress like a guy ((laughter in voice)) N:((laughs)) == T: == Women just I dunno N: ((laughing)) K negatively judges Brazilian heterosexual men by joking that they do not have the masculinity to be able to dress like a guy, and she is joined in laughter by the other female member in the group, N, who teams up with her to laugh off the community through this play with their masculine values. At the same time, T disengages from the conversation and disaffiliates with the women laughing in his unfinished clause Women just I dunno.

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This sequence demonstrates how speakers use different strategies for affiliating through expressions of evaluated experience in discourse, and that humor is one major way of constructing solidarity relations across communities. Because the humor in this sequence is combined with more serious talk, it uncovers how speakers can negotiate their in-ness and otherness (Eggins and Slade 1997: 155) to communities in different degrees by rejecting them or by simply laughing off their values as humorous. Moreover, it makes clearer the point that convivial conversational humor is only successful when the participants share underlying values by which they can bond together. Interestingly, both of the examples in this section feature underlying values of masculinity versus femininity, demonstrating that ideological categories like gender are equally negotiated through humor as more local community belongings (e.g., light beer drinkers; see Knight 2010c for more on ideological categories in conversational humor). Furthermore, the layering of evaluation (rather than simply a reversal) is exhibited as these speakers both vie to establish different positively charged values as part of the same Brazilian male community, and K laughs off the opposition between them (e.g., positively appreciating picking up girls in Ts line They-they wanna just have fun an-an I dont know pick up girls thats the idea of the thing while also positively appreciating dressing like a girl as shown in Ks laughing response Dressed like a girl (laughs)).

5Discussion and conclusion

The analyses in this paper have demonstrated that humor in conversation is a significant resource for doing major friendship work. By using humor, friends are able to laugh things off that might otherwise cause tension in the friendship group. For instance, example (5) showed how challenging another friends masculinity is taken light-heartedly when done through a play with evaluative meanings toward something around which the friends could bond: beer. In addition to offering a way to laugh through tensions, convivial conversational humor was shown to bring friends together in solidarity around particular values that were, in turn, related to wider communities in which they could all belong. Friends showed that they shared similar values by evaluating things, people, and experiences in their speech, and layering these evaluations of ideational meanings so that they created humorous contrasts. Laughter was shared when the friends could share an underlying community value, and by this relation, be able to interpret the spoken evaluation that contrasted it. The pervasiveness of shared laughter in casual conversation between friends indicates that this is a constant and ongoing negotiation. Convivial conversational humor is a complex and usefully

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covert way for friends to affiliate that is, to bond together around shared community values while laughing off evaluations of things that might otherwise, in serious conversation, cause us to fight or even to dissolve a friendship. These kinds of ongoing negotiations are arguably what keep friends friends: we can talk about the things we love and hate while still enjoying the aspects that differentiate us from others and from one another. This paper has aimed to highlight the value of applying an SFL perspective to conversational humor as a relatively underexplored but highly complex field of study, one that requires a robust and comprehensive framework for its interpretation. It follows from Knights (2008, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 2011) research on humor in a conversational setting that not only applies the concepts of SFL but attempts to work out how humor can be theorized within and can affect the parameters of an SFL perspective. It was through the tools offered by the appraisal framework of SFL that the linguistic expressions conveying these meanings could be interpreted, as the framework accounts for the often implicit evaluations that saturated the conversational talk. By applying appraisal, it was also evident that it was different types of appraisals that were played with (i.e., feelings, judgments, and appreciations). Furthermore, it was shown that the humor created was not simply a matter of contrasting positive with negative evaluations, but layering kinds of evaluations contrastively according to the values held by the participants who shared in the laughter. By considering the work on bonding in SFL and connecting these ideas with the humorous play with appraisal in the conversational humor between friends, the notion of affiliation was developed to explain how such discourses allow speakers to constantly negotiate community belongings, laughing off social tensions as a way to bond. This work demonstrates that we can glean insights from the tools offered by SFL that may not be offered in other theoretical frameworks: in short, appraisal provides a framework to get at the significant implicit evaluations and layering of attitudes in conversational humor between friends; the metafunctions allow us to explore the way that these interpersonal attitudes are combined with ideational experiences in highly specific ways for the conversational group; bonding theory offers a concept of community building from which notions of affiliation could be conceived in humor; and stratification provides a way to give semiotic evidence for these social functions by relating them systematically through the linguistic system to their expression in patterns of evaluations toward experience in text. Beyond its aim to extend the applications of SFL and broaden the theory, this paper contributes to current developments in linguistic humor studies as a whole. It sheds light on how we constantly construct humor, and simultaneously forge friendships, through our casual talk and it shows that having a good sense of humor is an ongoing social project.

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Appendix: transcription symbols (adapted from Eggins and Slade 1997: 15)
. falling intonation ? rising intonation ! rise-falling intonation , continuing intonation words quoted speech () indecipherable speech (words) transcribers guess ((words)) laughter description includes extent (e.g., continuous) and person(s) uttering : vowel lengthening - speech cut off ... short hesitation in turns == overlapping speech lowered volume (Jefferson 2004) words stress/emphasis words analyst marking of evaluative points under examination

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Bionote
Naomi K. Knight is a postdoctoral research assistant at Simon Fraser University currently working on research into psychotherapy communication with Peter Muntigl. She received her PhD from the University of Sydney and has also published in conversational humor and interspecies communication. Naomi is the co-creator of the Free Linguistics Conference and co-editor of its annual proceedings. Address for correspondence: 193 Dorchester Boulevard Unit 203, St. Catharines, ON L2M 7V8 Canada <naomik@sfu.ca>.