The multimodal expression of humour in a law lecture: An exploratory case study

The multifaceted nature of humour has stimulated considerable interest among discourse analysts who have sought to enhance our understanding of how it comes into play during social interactions. Some studies have examined the use of humour in academic settings, specifically during lectures, highlighting a rich range of types of humour in terms of Attardo’s (1994) well-established theoretical frameworks of verbal humour based on incongruity, superiority, and release. Yet non-verbal cues such as gesturing, gaze and prosody can also have an important role in communicating humorous intention in oral academic discourse. The aim of this paper is to explore how university lecturers convey humour both linguistically and extra-linguistically. It is based on a case study of a video recording and corresponding speech transcript of a law lecture delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The methodological approach was grounded in multimodal discourse analysis supported by the use of multimodal annotation software to display and analyse co-occurring verbal and non-verbal resources. The results revealed the use of specific types of humour, including the teasing of students, disparagement of others, an informal register, and incongruity, while suggesting a synergistic relationship among various semiotic modes, as well as meanings relating to specific American cultural experiences and thus potentially problematic for L2 audiences during law lectures. The findings can be used to inform teaching strategies for assisting ESP learners in successfully processing humour, which tends to be particularly challenging for them on both the cognitive and linguistic levels.