The study of laughter has traditionally been proscribed by assumptions that laughter is A) an uncontrollable expressive signal B) predominantly associated with the comic. Rooted in classical commentary, the understanding of laughter has seemed to hinge on discovering the semantic structure of the jokes that trigger its "explosive" displays.

 

In stark contrast, recent work on laughter, particularly in Conversation Analysis (CA), tends to divorce laughter from humor and finds it coordinated with speech with precise rhetorical control. Rejecting expressive or semantic approaches, this paper will explore laughter from the perspective of the pragmatic question: What are talkers doing when they laugh? Key here is that recent data shows laughter abundantly insinuated into non-humorous talk. An estimated 2/3 of all laughter is in the mode often glossed with the folk idiom "nervous laughter." Indeed, what Gail Jefferson called "troubles talk" is the natural habitat of laughter, where the stakes for implicature are unusually high.

 

With this fresh picture of laughter, it is possible, in a neo-Gricean framework, to observe talkers using this ambiguous resource to manage conversational implicature in complex ways, often reducible only to specific instances. Yet all the CA data depend on current technological means of recording and transcription, which limits questions that might be asked about laughter's historical development alongside language. As a literary scholar who has taken up the toolkit of pragmatics, in this paper I will propose that the literary archive, which resounds with respresentations of laughter, can provide a deepened historical perspective, one not limited to examples from contemporary speech.

 

My presentation will begin with an overview of the emergent picture of laughter, as found in the works of Sacks, Jefferson, Billig, Holt, Glenn, Clift, Jacknick, Potter and others. I will read select instances of laughter in a range of pre-20th century literary texts, to open a historical perspective on a number of pressing questions. Given that literally anything can be laughed at, does laughter more often challenge relevance or (suddenly, even shockingly) extend relevance? What kinds of assumptions attend remarks met by laughter? What kinds of work does "nervous laughter" do in relation to conversational implicature? What changes in the uses of laughter can be observed across time?

 

User behaviour appears, so far, to suggest that laughter's chief pragmatic importance in these areas pertains to management of group affiliation, group identifications, and self/other boundaries (areas also found pragmatically active in uses of Reported Speech). While omnirelevant - occurring in all genres of talk - laughter thrives most in two kinds of environment: celebration and (more so) trouble. Its power is such, furthermore, that laughter can almost instantaneously affect the transformation of one kind of interactive environment, celebration or trouble, into the other.

 

The contribution of this paper will be in its demonstration of the applicability of pragmatics research in literary scholarship, uses of the literary archive for historical pragmatics, and the use of literary data to explore otherwise inaccessible pragmatic conditions.