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THE FILM-AUDIENCE RELATIONSHIP:

LAUGHTER AT A COMIC FILM

by

Carl Mounsey Jones

Dissertation committee:

Professor Paul Byers, Sponsor Professor Robert McClintock

Approved by the Committee on the Degree of Doctor of Education

FEB 1 0 1997Date.

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education in

Teachers College, Columbia University

1997


UMI Number: 9724833

C o p y r ig h t 1997 b y J o n e s , C a r l M ounsey

All rights reserved.

UMI Microform 9724833 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.

This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

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1

ABSTRACT

THE FILM-AUDIENCE RELATIONSHIP:

LAUGHTER AT A COMIC FILM

Carl Mounsey Jones

This research initially used Conversation Analysis to explore the

extent to which the film-audience relationship had the characteristics of a

conversation. The comic film All of Me was selected for study because

audiences at comic films actively respond to the film by laughing audibly.

Although most film-audience research has used data from multiple

films, the data for this research were acquired by audiotaping thirty

screenings of the same film from seats in many theaters at different times of

day. The data also included written observations at each screening to note

audience size, seating patterns, date, time, weather, etc.

A preliminary examination of the data supported much that

conversation analysts had observed impressionistically.

When audiotaped data were examined by a computerized waveform

analysis of the film talk and the audience laughter, it was found that a stable

rhythm of about 7 .4 2 Hz underlay the film talk (already reported and

described by Byers), that the inter-speaker intervals in the actors' talk were


2

related to the underlying rhythm, and that the interval between a film joke

and the audience laughter response was also related to the rhythm

underlying the film talk.

The most unexpected finding: when the spoken joke is followed by

screen silence (to accommodate the expected audience laughter), the

audience laughter rhythm is initially entrained by the screen-talk rhythm and,

in the continuing laughter, the audience members entrain each other. That

is, the audience response is both £c> the film and with each other.

This suggests that audiences "enjoy" not only the humor o f jokes but

their conjoint participation in highly organized laughter--as disco dancers,

musicians, or marching armies experience conjoint participation in a tightly

rhythmic behavior.

The report includes fourteen examples of waveform printouts in which

the rhythms underlying the screen talk are shown as well as detailed traces

of the rhythms underlying the laughter following the spoken jokes.

The focus on data from multiple audiences of the same film, the

ethnographic note-taking (participant observation), and the use of waveform

technology goes beyond the limitations of conversation analysis alone.


c Copyright Carl Mounsey Jones 1997

All Rights Reserved

ii


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank my family for their unswerving faith in my ability to complete this dissertation successfully.

I thank the members of my committee: Professors Paul Byers, Hervd Varenne, Clifford Hill and Robert McClintock as well as Professors Forsdale and McDermott, who influenced the early stages of this work.

I particularly thank Profesor Byers without whom this research would never have been completed.

CMJ

iii


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page

I INTRODUCTION AND S U M M A R Y ......................................................................1Background .................................................................................................1Organization of the report ....................................................................5

II RELEVANT LITER ATUR E....................................................................................11Film-audience research .......................................................................13Laughter re s e a rc h .................................................................................. 2 4Conversation analysis ......................................................................... 30The Provine article ............................................................................... 33Comments on the literature .............................................................. 3 4

III RESEARCH ORIENTATION AND DATA COLLECTION..............................37Collecting the data ...............................................................................43The film and p lo t .....................................................................................46

IV PLANNING THE DATA ANALYSIS ............................................................... 49Conversation analysis: concepts and findings .............................. 49Audience size and amount of la u g h te r ............................................57The film-audience relationship as "conversation"......................... 59Laughing with or a t ............................................... 65Laugh starters ........................................................................................68The organization o f the laughter ....................................................71Silence ......................................................................................................74

V WAVEFORM A N A L Y S E S ................................................................................... 78Byers' report: waveforms and measurements .............................. 81

VI D ISCUSSIO N-SUM M ING U P ........................................................................ 105

REFERENCES..................................................................................................................109

iv


FIGURES

Figure 1. Waveform manipulations............................................................................. 86

Figure 2. Three rhythms ............................................................................................. 87

Figure 3. FFT showing all three rhythms ..............................................................88

Figure 4. Amounts of laughter ..................................................................................91

Figure 5. The peak-to-onset relationship #1 ........................................................ 92

Figure 6. The peak-to-onset # 2 ....................................................................................93

Figure 7. The peak-to-onset # 3 ....................................................................................94

Figure 8. The peak-to-onset # 4 ..................................................................................95

Figure 9. The slap scene ............................................................................................. 96

Figure 10. The slap and coughs ............................................................................... 97

Figure 11. The rhythm of the la u g h te r ....................................................................98

Figure 12. Organization of audience laughter #1 ................................................99

Figure 13. Organization of audience laughter # 2 ............................................. 100

Figure 14. Clapping at a concert............................................................................... 101

v


1

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

Background

Long before undertaking this research, I had a personal interest in

communication and this eventually led to graduate study at the Annenberg

School of Communication in Philadelphia where my studies included some

experience in film making. I also worked as a film projectionist for professors

who were interested in films as communication media. At that time Ray

Birdwhistell, an anthropologist who had introduced the study of kinesics, the

systematic study of body motion and facial expression as "nonverbal" forms

of human communication, was teaching there and I became intrigued with

his way of thinking about communication.

Birdwhistell had worked with Gregory Bateson who had developed

"communication" as a sub-field of anthropology that had its roots in

cybernetics and structuralism. In Communication: the social matrix of

psychiatry (Ruesch & Bateson, 1951) the two authors wrote near the

beginning:

As of today, we believe that communication is the only scientific model which enables us to explain physical, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and cultural aspects of events within one system (P.4).

Instead of the commonly accepted view of communication as a matter of

sending and receiving messages, Bateson, Birdwhistell (and others) were


2

interested in the organization and/or structure of interaction and their

research methods were concerned with discovering patterns of relationship.

They preferred the structural methods of cybernetics and linguistics to the

lineal methods of the survey-oriented sociologist or the abstraction-oriented

psychologist. For me, Birdwhistell’s (and Bateson's) way of thinking was

new and different and this "new paradigm" was refreshing and exciting.

I took every course that Professor Birdwhistell taught and then

decided to continue my studies at Teachers College where I could study and

work with such people as Louis Forsdale, Ray McDermott, Hervd Varenne,

and Paul Byers, all of whom were familiar with and taught out of this

structuralist-cybernetic-ethnomethodological way of thinking. I had been

introduced to the research in conversation analysis (CA) and when I reached

the stage of planning doctoral research, I looked for a way to combine my

interests in film, communication, and conversation analysis and eventually

decided to explore film-audience communication and to use the basic

findings of conversation analysis as a guide.

Film-audience communication is an interesting and even problematic

form of communication since the film explicitly "communicates" an

audience but the audience does not, in a conversational sense, participate in

a "conversation" with the film--at least not directly. This, as the literature

suggests, has become a somewhat unresolved concern in communication

research generally and conversation analysis in particular although

conversation analysts did not use movies as data or consider the film-

audience relationship as a conversation.


3

There is, however, one kind of film in which the audience response is

explicitly vocal-the comic film where the audience response is audible

laughter. There have been efforts to infer audience "effects" to filmic

"causation," by psychological inference, or by interviewing filmgoers, but

these methods, in my view, were unsatisfactory. Attempts to assess the

effects of comedy by measuring the amount of laughter (or box-office

receipts) have little value, except perhaps to the film making industry.

This led me to the idea of studying the audience response to a comic

film where the recordable response is laughter but also to be a "participant

observer" and careful note-taker as well as using my understanding of

conversation analysis as methodological tools.

The usual procedure or method of the conversation analyst has been

to "eavesdrop" and sometimes to record conversations. When studying

audience laughter responses, the data have usually come from "going to a

lot of comic movies” and making impressionistic inferences from the

accumulated experiences. I decided to go in another direction: to go to the

same movie many times. This would have the value of holding one side of

the "conversation" constant (the movie and its jokes) and studying the

variety of laughter responses by different audiences of different sizes in

different theaters of different sizes at different times.

When the comic film All of Me was previewed and promised to be in

theaters long enough for multiple showings across several months, I chose it

for this research and collected tape recorded and observational data from 30

screenings.


4

In this report I will show:

— that the amount of audience laughter at a comic

movie is not a reliable or useful indicator of the

"funniness" of a joke.

— that the amount of audience laughter is not a

reliable indicator of the overall humor of a comic

film.

— that a comic film is constructed to anticipate and

allow for audience laughter as a conversational

"turn."

— that the audience response (laughter) is partly in

relation to the film and partly in relation to the

laughter of others in the audience; that is, the

audience laughs both a i the film and with itself.

— that it is more useful to see audience laughter as

"triggered" or released by the film humor than as

caused by it.

— that the "laugh starter" recognized by

conversation analysis is a significant catalyst in

engendering laughter.

— that data from "participant observation" at

multiple showings of a film can offer an added

dimension or perspective to the analysis and

description of the film-audience relationship.


5

— that waveform analysis of recorded film-

audience vocal behavior can show precise

underlying temporal relationships that both confirm

and extend the findings of conversation analysis.

— that the film-audience interaction does not

constitute a "conversation” as that interaction is

conceived by conversation analysis, but that the

relationship is essentially within the framework of

the "rules" described by conversation analysis.

Organization o f the report

In the next chapter I will cite the literature that I found relevant to my

research. When I was first planning this research, I conceived it in terms of

film-audience research but it eventually became apparent that this would be

too much to fit into a doctoral project. The "relevant literature" alone was

overwhelming. Thus my research aim was narrowed to a focus on the points

where my interest in communication intersected with the concerns of

conversation analysis. This, in turn, led to a still narrower focus on the

laughter in a comic movie and, even beyond that, to the growing concern

for untangling the uncertainties about laughing-gi and/or lauahinq-w ith .

The relevant literature, then, was narrowed to the w ay human

thinking about humor and laughter evolved across time toward my present

focus on the significance of laughter as film-audience communication. I have

ignored the vast literature that seemed only peripherally related but included


some that is historically interesting.

In Chapter III I discuss and clarify the relation of the cybernetic-

structuralist thinking about communication to conversation analysis and the

way this shaped the nature of my data collecting. Then I can describe more

fully the rationale behind my data collecting and how this was carried out.

These two parts of Chapter III will imply my "method” which will emerge

more clearly as I subsequently implement it in the following chapter. Finally,

in Chapter III, I offer a brief outline of the plot-story of All of Me so that the

humorous events that produced (or did not produce) laughter can be

understood in the context of the whole film. Otherwise a reader of this

report could find some of the humorous ambiguities in the text puzzling or

meaningless.

In Chapter IV I briefly put my data alongside various findings of

conversation analysis research, but I hope to go somewhat beyond the usual

conversation analysis reports as my communication-oriented data and

analysis permit. There are tw o particular aspects to this: first I believe I will

be able to support certain "impressionistic" findings by conversation analysis

by presenting data relationships that are more explicit when they emerge by

seeing their variation across multiple audiences and from taped records and

from notes on observed audience behavior. Second, I will be more question-

oriented than answer-oriented. I have come to think that some conversation

analysis is more devoted to describing "how conversation works" than

"what questions about human relations have arisen from the research." The

significance of conversation, from my perspective, lies in its significance for


interpersonal (and/or social) relations. This, of course, is implicit in all social

science, but that implication is sometimes overlooked when the focus is on

a part instead of a larger "whole."

I am, in this research, concerned with a narrow focus—the place of

laughter in experiencing a comic movie. But I want to attend, at the same

time, to how my findings inform a larger interest: how we "get it together"

through various forms of communication. Since conversation analysis has

become an umbrella label for a wide variety of research by anthropologists,

linguists, psychologists and sociologists, many of the research reports do

not describe very clearly how the findings were derived from whatever data

the researcher used. Some seem to me to be little more than personal

guesses or impressions and some seem more interested in labelling than in

describing the behavior labelled. (Many, however, are offered explicitly as

"best guesses" and some do, in fact, describe their discovery procedures

explicitly.)

Given this unevenness in a comparatively new field of research

interest, perhaps m y most significant contribution will be to demonstrate

the value of using the multiple perspectives that are possible by multiple

records of different audiences at the same movie, the combination of

recorded and ethnographic data, and the application of waveform

technology and analysis.

My research, I believe, will not specifically contradict the findings of

others but it may clarify w hat some others have offered only as impressions

Many researchers, for example, have suspected a response phenomenon


8

called "laughing together" that is somehow audience-organized. I will show

that this audience-response phenomenon is both film-entrained and audience

self-entrained. "Audience" is a somewhat confusing term that sometimes

refers to a single collectivity and sometimes to the individuals within the

collectivity. In this sense there is a parallel with the word "team"--as in

"basketball team." The behavior o f such a team cannot be explained by

comparing it to other teams in terms of games won or lost nor by comparing

the relation of individual (team) members to the rules governing basketball.

Although the press and/or public may look at team scores or points made by

individual players, the coach and the players know that much of a team's

"success" comes from the organization of the interaction among the players-

-i.e. their "teamwork" or cooperation. Unless it is recognized that an

"audience" is both a single responsive unit and that the laughter response

comes from the organized interaction of the individuals who comprise it, the

study of "audience response" will be inadequately understood.

When conversation analysts began to sense that laughter was not

only s i a joke and began to suggest the with idea, they were recognizing the

possibility of an organization within the audience. Sacks (1974) wrote of

"multiparty laughter having differentiated starts," and later wrote of "pulsed

bursts" (in Jefferson, Sacks and Schegloff 1987, p. 155). The idea of

"laugh starters," was proposed and the same authors wrote, "it appears

that an occasion of laughing together is an activity in its own right, an

achievement of various methodic procedures" (p. 158).

To continue my earlier basketball analogy, the basketball game


9

proceeds so quickly that a careful observation of their "teamwork" would

require a slow-motion film projection. At a comic movie the laughter of a

"multi party" audience also proceeds too quickly for close examination.

After I had collected my data and began to "analyze" it in relation to

conversation analysis concepts, I discovered an additional possibility for

looking more closely at my recorded film-audience laughter data. One of my

professors at Teachers College has devoted much of his research activity to

the study of rhythms underlying human interaction (Byers, 1972, 1976,

1988, 1992). He was aware of my data collection and asked my permission

to examine a few seconds of one of my tapes. His results were

subsequently included in one of his publications (1988 , p .249) in which he

showed and discussed a waveform analysis of a few seconds of one of my

data tapes. Since Professor Byers' research has shown "micro" regularities

in vocal interaction, I wondered if—or how--such rules might apply to the

laughter response to jokes and he offered to apply his waveform technology

to selected sections of the three tapes I had selected for examination. Since

his equipment can display and measure vocal activity far beyond the

capabilities of human perception, I asked if he would allow me to include his

waveform displays of relevant pieces of my data tapes in this report. He

agreed and the results of his research add another dimension or perspective

to my findings. I will describe Professor Byers’ work in relation to this

research more fully in Chapter V. I will not mix the data from the waveform

technology in the Chapter IV analyses, although I will refer to the Chapter V

displays that follow.


10

Chapter V is devoted to the presentation and analysis of waveform

data. Professor Byers has contributed the hard copy printouts he has made

and their captions and I will discuss their relation to this research.

Chapter VI will be a discussion of the results of the various forms of

analysis, their relation to my dual-perspective data collecting, the

implications I find in the research, some suggestions for further research and

some personal speculations.

In order to contribute to the goal of bringing the study of human

behavior into the realm of "hard science" where data is recorded and made

available for examination by others for other (or future) forms of analysis, I

will make my taped records, or cassette copies, available to responsible

scholars who request them. I do not believe that the practice of regarding

recorded data as privately-owned possessions contributes to progress in the

social sciences.

I should probably acknowledge that the ideas and substance of this

document are entirely mine, but that in order to enhance its readability and

clarity it has been professionally edited.


CHAPTER II

RELEVANT LITERATURE

This research is primarily concerned with audience laughter at a comic

film which is a particular aspect of my original but unmanageably large

interest--the "film-audience relationship." In order to see audience laughter

in a larger perspective, however, it will be useful to look across time at the

way the thinking about films, audiences and laughter has evolved. Therefore

I have organized this chapter to look, chronologically, at the literature

related to films and their audiences followed by a section devoted to the

evolution of thinking about laughter.

Then I will look at the research that is called (or which called itself)

"conversation analysis" but with a particular focus on the conversation

analyst's encounter with and study of laughter and most particularly with

laughter at comic movies. This attempt to keep this report narrowly focused

on my particular research concerns has encountered two problems. The first

is the difficulty of deciding what research is or is not included under the ill-

defined label "conversation analysis." The originators of that labelled field of

research are not clear themselves about that. The word "conversation" is

fuzzy around the edges, but whatever conversation is, it has been defined

and studied in a variety of ways by researchers from multiple disciplines. I

have tried to confine the citations in this chapter to "traditional"

conversation analysis (the lineage of sociologists who began their research

under that label with a shared methodology) but there have been so many


12

defectors, intruders from other disciplines, and methodological shifts

that the field of study is now quite interdisciplinary and labels have become

somewhat irrelevant.

In the end I have limited my selection to those whose work I

particularly intend to set alongside my own. It will become clear in the next

chapter that my own research focus is not really that of the conversation

analyst and that my thinking and methods are significantly different. It will

also become clear that even some who still call themselves conversation

analysts have strayed far from the original fold and are, in fact, closer to my

concerns. My greatest concern (and regret) is that, to keep my focus

narrow, I have ignored much important research that has now gone far

beyond the original concerns and work of traditional conversation analysis.

Another concern that bedevils this chapter is the matter of

sequentially dating the evolving research. In many cases I have been unable

to establish the sequence because many published "sources" are in

collections dated long after the original writing (or oral presentation at a

conference) and in one significant case an author's name appears (along

with co-authors) well after his death but because his earlier work was

included in a subsequent publication. Also, some collections of papers do

not show the dates of the original work they include. I cannot guarantee

that my sequence is always correct.


13

Film -audience research

Probably the most comprehensive volume is B. A. Austin’s The Film

Audience: An international bibliography of research (1983). Austin has

observed that the film audience is "a neglected aspect of film research" (p.

xvii). There are at least four reasons for studying film audiences according

to Austin:

1. First, to quote Austin,

w e have a sharp picture of the industrial and technological development of the medium while, comparatively, the development of the medium and growth of the medium's audience is, at best, a fuzzy, soft focus image enlightened mostly by armchair philosophy and apocryphal reminiscence (p. xix).

2. By 1976 standards 53% of the total U. S.

spectator amusement expenditures were spent on

movies.

3. In spite of the money spent, which suggests a high

attendance, U. S. cinema attendance has been

declining over the years.

4. Despite a decline in attendance, box office records

continue to be broken annually for a few films,

inflation, the VCR & movie rentals, and cable TV,

notwithstanding (p. xix).

Austin points out that audience research has been done by the film

industry but not released to the general public in any straightforward way

due to "Hollywood’s phobic attitude toward external examination and


14

research" (p. xx).

In the 1920’s Carl Laemmle, the founder of what would become

Universal Pictures, began doing "field studies" of audiences for Hale’s (road

show) Tours. Mr. Laemmle maintained an unobtrusive presence while

counting the attendance on the tours based upon the time of day, and rate

per tour per day.

During the 1930s a film exchange system was established and the

nickelodeon patrons were observed as to their affiliation or disaffiliation with

the film provided. If spectators enjoyed a film and applauded it, the

nickelodeon owner scurried around and tried to get more like it, and if they

grumbled as they left the show, he passed on the complaints to the

exchange, and the exchange, in turn, told the manufacturers (p. 4).

In this way a route of communication was established from audience

"through exhibitor to distributor and producer, enabling the nickelodeon

patrons to make their wishes known to the makers of the pictures" (p. 4). In

those days directors and producers would use "seat-of-the-pants" methods

such as detecting restlessness in the audience, a personal "laughter scale,"

or hiding microphones in restrooms of the theater and having restroom

attendants ask patrons questions about the picture currently playing (p. xxi).

During the 1940s applause and laugh meters were used to measure

audience reaction to the films. About this same time "respondents were

asked to manipulate mechanical devices so their responses could be plotted"

(p. 20). The mechanical devices were extremely intrusive, very distracting,

and clearly not the way in which people view films they choose to see.


15

There was also preproduction research using a variety of tests. One

test was designed to determine the marketability of a film based upon

50-100 word synopses of several films. The responses to these synopses

were frequently solicited at shopping malls. They were to imagine that they

had decided to go to the movies and then on a scale of 1-10 to rate "how

likely they would be to attend each movie described" (p. 9). The casting test

was another type of preproduction research. A major studio might use this

to determine the market value of a particular movie before its release, based

upon a statistical analyses of the star’s "marquee value."

The number of tests used during production are considerably higher

than those used during preproduction. They include:

1. Title tests: does the title attract an audience's

interest?

2. Advertising research: does the ad campaign's

intent match the potential audience's

understanding?

3. Trailer tests: while still in the theater, audiences

are interviewed after seeing a trailer in order to

determine their affiliation with w hat was seen.

Post-production research included sneak previews (advance

screenings) of tw o types:

1. There were marketing previews, used as a film

neared completion. This approach included an

array of questionnaires, focus groups, mall


16

interviews, telephone interviews, and "wired

theaters” (i.e. a theater has been bugged in places

like the bathrooms to eavesdrop on the patrons as

a way of getting their honest reactions to the film

or trailer).

2. The second type of "advance screening" involved

production previews used to "adjust the timing of

scenes so that audience laughter, for example, did

not step on subsequent lines" (p. 19).

Sometimes ads were run in newspapers asking people to come to

previews. At other times the studios would solicit individuals for previews

rather than relying on self-selection.

Several reasons have been given for the social scientists’ reluctance

to investigate the motion picture audience:

1. A frequently voiced reason is the notorious

difficulty of obtaining industry records due to its

secretive and insular nature.

2. The film industry assumed that each new film

presented a new problem and was not a typical

product.

3. Social scientists were unable to attract

commercial, government or foundation funding for

such work.

4. In the distant past the film industry was


17

considered vulgar, partly due to its newness and

popularity.

5. There has been a feeling that "the sociology of the

cinema is trite and/or well known."

6. Beginning in the early 1950s, the diffusion of

television "stole whatever research interest might

have been directed at movies" (p. xxvii).

Another problem underlying most of this early "audience research"

was appropriately described by Stadler (1991):

In most previous film theories, reception issues are either marginalized, or approached in problematic terms; they define the film as an art form, its text as a fixed object, and its viewers as a passive subject (p.718).

This statement by Stadler calls attention to the limitations of traditional

research which tells us very little about how people behave in the presence

of the film and with each other while watching the film, even though the

film industry is very interested in an audience's direct involvement with a

film. An interview after seeing a film or manipulating an instrument during

the film are not direct involvements with the film.

Many film studies concentrate on film as an art form as Stadler

stated. Film as Art by Rudolf Arnheim (1957) and Film as a Subversive Art

by Amos Vogel (1974) are examples of this approach. Other studies cite

artistic themes but generally reflected only the professional viewers

semiological and linguistic capacity to "read” the subtleties of films.

Among theorists film is often referred to as a text. James Monaco's


18

How to Read a Film (1977) is a good example. Another problem: the film as

art approach often presumes that the visual is more important than the

sound channel. Film as a mass medium of communication employs two

channels, visual and audio, both of which are manipulated to create

messages which the filmmakers hope will interest their audiences. Typically

and in keeping with film ’s history the visual channel is emphasized over the

sound. As Lindgren (1963) pointed out, "... even with sound, the film

remains primarily a visual art" (p. 9 4 ).

Often film studies have stressed the visual over the sound channel

and were concerned with the dreamlike and symbolic quality of the filmic

experience for the viewer. Perception in the cinema: a fourfold confusion.

by George Lellis (1979) is a good example of this approach. John

Harrington’s, The Rhetoric of Film (1973) is almost entirely about the visual

channel except in one chapter in which he acknowledges that, historically

speaking, sound was a significant factor even during film’s silent era and

even when it did not come from the film itself:

Even though sound came late and film had to begin as an exclusively visual medium, the non-silence of the silent film must be recognized. Viewers in the early theater seldom knew actual silence during a movie since most early film came complete with musical score for a piano and accompanying instruments. Musical accompaniment muffled interfering noises and welded an audience together by providing dominant sounds for the ear and a guide to appropriate response to screen action. Even if silence were possible it would seldom have been desirable. Complete silence would have drained away much of the rhetorical effectiveness of a film's visuals. An absence of sound tends to make viewers highly conscious of the small noises running through any audience - coughs, sneezes, shuffling feet, crunching popcorn, guffaws, or wisecracks (p.37).


19

Film study "purists" emphasize the visuals; yet within this tradition

there are those expressing a minority opinion in favor of sound, especially

talk. As Beh (1976) wrote:

The purists who rule out words seen or heard for a pure cinema of visuals, are dismissing other real sensibilities found in words as a linear visual or audio suggestion. Total cinema should invoke as many of our faculties and sensibilities as possible (p. 182).

Further, Monaco (1977) says of the film theoretician and semiotician,

Christian Metz, that

[he] identifies five channels of information in film:1) the visual image, 2) print and other graphics, 3) speech, 4) music, and 5) noise (sound effects).Interestingly, the majority of the channels are auditory rather than visual (p. 180).

Even comedy film genre studies are skewed more toward the visual

end of the spectrum. A partial explanation for this is because so many early

films were silent comedies and many of comedy's masters (Chaplin, Keaton,

Harold Lloyd, etc.) are invariably mentioned in these books and reports.

Gerald Mast's The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies (1973) is a

representative example.

The omission by film theorists of the significance of sound in film may

partially account for their blind spot when it comes to the audience. What

they have not recognized is that communication is a multichannel process

(Birdwhistell 1968). In the case of film, the filmmakers (camera operators,

sound recordists, editors, artistic directors, etc.) work diligently to

superimpose and interweave the visual channel and sound channel


20

appropriately to achieve a total film while theorists separate the two for

other reasons. When reading these texts from a communication perspective

one quickly realizes that the audience is either nonexistent, taken for

granted or viewed as passive. The passive viewer has been with us for a

long time. Even T. S. Eliot offers a version of it:

In looking at a film, we are much more passive; as audience, we contribute less. We are seized with the illusion that we are observing an actual event, or at least a series of photographs of the actual event; and nothing must be allowed to break this illusion. Hence the precise attention to detail (in Carpenter,1979, p. 367).

Often audiences are assumed to be passive because viewing serious

film is considered to be a reflective process requiring reaction after the

screening rather than during its presentation. As a consequence, the

communication that transpires between film and audience on the one hand,

and audience member to audience member while in the presence of the film,

on the other, is simply assumed. This viewpoint marginalizes audience

reception and makes its analysis problematic.

The study of film spectatorship, in my view, is problematic for other

reasons. First, it needs to be genre-specific. Comedy and horror films are

intended by filmmakers, expected by audiences, and anticipated by both to

have either laughter or screams/gasps as responses respectively. Second,

given the approaches of film studies, with their emphasis on the visuals,

many ways of "reading the text" arise which is another problematic point.

The consequence of this is a galaxy of "experts" who interpret the visual

text. We have come to expect these experts sometimes trained in art to


21

guide us through the viewing experience. And further we may come to

regard an expert’s interpretation as the only noteworthy one. Hence our

reliance on academicians, on the one hand, and popular critics-reviewers, on

the other. This expert interpreter position was advocated by Walter Lippman

in his book, Public Opinion (1922) which was published just as film,

particularly comedy film, was starting to make an impact.

There are other recent studies which are illuminating in various ways

but still do not seem to recognize that a direct film-audience interaction is

taking place. Seraji (1990) found that cinematic style has an impact on

"what spectators see in a film" (p. 114) and that their understanding of the

narrative structure of the film is not affected.

Another way of thinking about film-audience interaction is from the

point of view of the audience's identification with film characters. Smith

(1991) examined this notion of identification. He suggests that "in watching

a fiction film we lose our consciousness of its fictional nature and thus are

able to respond emotionally to characters in the film as if they were actual

persons" (in abstract). Smith proposes a new theory of identification,

replacing the above by proposing that three levels of sympathetic

engagement i.e. recognition, alignment and allegiance, account for the

viewers identification with the fictional characters of the film. Smith’s notion

of identification implies the individual rather than the group. Through

interviews, whether group or singly, people were asked about their level of

identification with a particular character.

Two other studies inquired about individual audience members' sense


22

of identification (i.e. strong affiliations to stars or television shows along

gender lines). Spence (1990) used "ethnographic methods" to explore how

women viewed themselves as soap opera fans and the significance of that

recognition (in abstract). Bingham (1990 ), on the other hand, dealt with

male spectatorship and star image. He suggests that, although male stars

may have an unstable image, male spectators must be assured of their

dominance (in abstract).

One final note about identification: Jon Boorstin, an insider to

Hollywood filmmaking, elaborates in his book, The Hollywood Eye. (1990)

that industry filmmakers w ant American audiences to relate to their films in

either and all of the following ways; voyeuristically, vicariously, and

viscerally. According to Boorstin and with detailed elaboration he showed

how Hollywood uses visual techniques to set up the viewer for these kinds

of reactions.

Stadler, in his book cited above (1991), considered "film as

experience" for the audience. Spectatorship, Stadler argues from a

phenomenological point of view , is dependent upon the issues of an

intentionality of perception, "horizon expectation," and one's life in relation

to the world. Stadler describes the filmic text as an event rather than an

object. The viewer is not passive but actively "situated in a material

life-world rather than being ’constructed' or 'positioned' by the text" (p.

718). Consequently whatever meaning or understanding the viewer derives

is created by the "particular viewing experience which is determined by

personal, cultural, and historical variables" (p. 718). Stadler describes these


23

variables but not the observable specifics of the viewing experience.

Although most film-audience research recognizes that a film has an

"effect" on viewers, none of the research has studied the "effect" directly.

Instead, the effect is inferred from viewers’ manipulation of gadgets while

watching the film (and attending to the gadgets), or from interviews,

questionnaires, or by eavesdropping on conversations between viewers

before or after the "viewing experience." None of these procedures or

"methods" can, in my view, give entirely reliable results.

Much of what I have cited above as relevant research is relevant only

in contrast to some present-day research which is less concerned with

opinion and more with the behavior that engendered the opinions. It is also

inappropriate, I believe, to study only one side of an interaction or to carve

up events into classified pieces and then to study the pieces apart from their

larger interactional context. The relevance of the research cited above, then,

lies more in the recognition that the methods of research used have limited

the findings which, then, reflect the unrecognized premises inherent in the

methods.

Although the effects of the viewing experience are often thought to

include assorted variables (such as expectations, audience size, individual

differences, etc.) no researcher has, to my knowledge, studied or

considered the significance of interaction between or among members of the

audience. Only Austin (1983) has suggested "the role of varying contexts of

the movie experience." He wrote:


24

Movie-going is not an isolated activity. Regardless of whether the individual elects to attend alone or in the company of others, the physical ambience of the theater, the form of exhibition, and a host of other factors may play important roles in determining not only attendance decisions but also the film experience itself. Just as one would not attempt to interpret, in any meaningful and valid sense, nonverbal communicative behavior without the benefit of context, so too film audience research needs to consider and address the role of varying contexts of the movie experience (p. xxix).

Laughter research

The behavior that we call laughter has been a subject of interest

since, presumably, humans started laughing but, like sex, it is much studied

but little understood. It has been studied by humorists, physiologists,

evolutionists, historians, and even doctors who are beginning to suspect

that laughter has therapeutic value. Since it is often observed in human

relations in general and conversation in particular, it has come into the

concerns of the conversation analysts. Because laughter is a much debated

subject, I will offer a definition that will, I believe, be appropriate for my

research: Laughter, for me, is (among other things) a behavior I observed in

the audiences at the comic movie I attended. The behavior is related in

some way to utterances or other behaviors in the comic film and appears to

have some kind of regular relation to the events on the screen.

From this point of view two questions arise that concern this

research:

1) Can this laughing be described, in relation to the events on the

screen, in a way that relates the laughter to the organization of


25

the talk in the movie~as conversation analysts have described

that talk? An alternative phrasing might be: can the laughter be

seen as part of a film-audience dialogue?

2) Is this laughter "organized" and, if so, is it organized by the

events on the screen and/or by the laughers themselves?

These questions, however phrased, are discernible in the literature

and the conversation analysts have progressively moved toward proposing

answers although not in relation to the film-audience relationship. Their

answers, however, are tentative and impressionistic. As suggested earlier, I,

too, will propose an answer. I believe that the answer to both questions is

"yes” but I also believe that the questions, as stated, are not quite the

appropriate questions. But before presenting my data and analyses that will

clarify the matter, I will look at the evolution of the research concerning this

matter. To see this in perspective, it will be necessary to begin long before

conversation analysts appeared to study it.

Paulos (1980) in Mathematics and Humor looked across the early

thinking about laughter. He points out that the ancient concept of humor

was narrower than ours, being limited largely to w hat we would call farce,

burlesque, and slapstick and excluding 'higher' forms that might have raised

the classical estimate" (p. 2). Further, he says that, "up until the

seventeenth century, writers on humor were content to more or less repeat

the classical formulations" (p. 2).

Paulos cites Thomas Hobbes who, in 1651, introduced the superiority

or disparagement theory of laughter:


26

Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own that pleaseth them; or by apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves (in Paulos, 1980, p .2).

This seems to suggest that the butt of a joke is triumphed over, clearly

indicating a laughing-si relationship as opposed to a laughina-w ith . This

response suggests a feeling of self-satisfied superiority, a factor some

comedians work toward in many kinds of ethnic, sexist and racist jokes.

The Scottish poet James Beattie, according to Paulos, proposed an

incongruity theory in 1776:

Laughter arises from the view of tw o or more inconsistent, unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in complex object or assemblage, or as acquiring a sort of mutual relation from the peculiar manner in which the mind takes notice of them (in Paulos, 1980, p .3).

Beattie was also the first to note that laughter and fear are often associated

as in nervous giggling.

Kant, according to Paulos, emphasized the element of surprise, i.e.

the unexpectedness of the incongruity, and that this element of surprise is

done on purpose by putting one’s self into a "zany" frame of mind.

In 1860 Herbert Spencer wrote that laughter

often (but not always) accompanies amusement is due to an overflow of surplus energy through the facial muscles and respiratory system. It results when the serious expectations of the person laughing are not met and his attention is diverted to something frivolous (in Paulos, 1980, p.4).

Lastly, for my purposes, Paulos cited Freud who believed that jokes or

witticisms enable a person to vent his aggressive or sexual feelings and

anxieties in a disguised, subdued, even playful manner.


27

Eight years after the Paulos book was published another book, The

Anatomy of Humor: a biosocial and therapeutic perspective by R. A. Haig

(1988) appeared and the "biosocial" aspects of laughter began to appear. In

Haig’s citations the idea of laughing with begins to appear. Haig pointed out

that one of Darwin's most significant contributions to our understanding of

laughter and humor was his suggestion that laughter is a social

communication process developing in early infancy and rewards caretaking

adults and thus has survival value (p. 17). He also offered his own view of

laughter:

A dynamic group psychological process exists in which there is identification with other members of the group, and projection of the laugher's own secret fantasies onto other participants (p.17).

In the 16th century Joubert, according to Haig, wrote a "Treatise on

Laughter." His treatise was based upon the medical beliefs of the times and

concentrated on the physiological aspects of laughter.

He believed like Plato, that joy and sorrow were experienced in the heart, not the mind, and that laughter arose from the contrary feelings of sorrow mingled with joy (in Haig 1988p .12).

Haig, in his chronological glimpse of the theories of humor, said that

several other theories have emerged: that humor is a moderator of life

stress, that laughter is manifest from a pleasant psychological shift, and that

laughter is a reflection of a reduction in tension. It was once thought that

laughter speeded up digestion.

About forty years ago at a conference in New York City concerned

with feedback mechanisms in the social sciences, Gregory Bateson (1953)


28

discussed "the position of humor in human communication." In the

published transcript Bateson made the following points:

1. Laughter is one of three convulsive behaviors the

other tw o being sobbing/crying and orgasm.

2. Laughter is a language which can say many things.

3. Humor is only one situation that evokes laughter in

others.

4. Being in a humorous mode and responding to that

mode with laughter requires an appropriate

emotional attitude.

5. Humor was generally defined as a relaxed and

playful change which is safe.

6. Humor is dependent on the concept of

figure-ground, i.e. a joke is thought of as involving

a shift between a figure and a ground, and that

laughter is a sign of agreement that reconnects the

figure and ground. "The previous figure is not

denied; only its relevance is."

7. "One does not laugh hard where there is not the

possibility of feedback" (pp. 9 -23).

This last point is relevant to this research since the "hard" laughter at

a comic movie cannot involve "feedback" with an insensitive screen in a

theater. The only possible "feedback" is with other audience members. This

matter will be discussed more fully later.


29

Bateson's perspective was incorporated into the laughter research of

William Fry (1963). Accordingly, meta-communication and paradox are

essential ingredients to humor. Through verbal cues such as, "did you hear

the one about...," or nonverbal cues such as winks or smiles, or a

combination of these behaviors establish the metacommunicative play frame

which indicates a change of context-i.e . resolves an apparent paradox or

reconnects a figure-ground confusion. Another finding by Fry was that a

punch line or equivalent was always essential to humor in order to trigger

the humor and hence the laughter.

Koestler (1964) linked the creative insights in humor with creative

insights in science and poetry. The creative process in humor, science, and

poetry consists in the discovery of hidden similarities but the emotional

climate for each process is different. The scientist is somewhat emotionally

detached, the poet is sympathetically inspired by a positive admiring kind of

emotion, while the comic has a touch of aggressiveness. Although other

forms of reaction are appropriate to the scientific and poetic processes,

laughter is the intended and hoped for reaction to offerings in the humorous

mode. Koestler maintains that humor results from the 'bisociation' of tw o

self-consistent but mutually incompatible frames of reference. Laughter is

the behavior that is linked to the bisociation and resolution of incongruity

which seems to be left hanging in the air.

Apte in Humor and Laughter (1985) gives a considerable overview of

the laughter phenomenon. He points out that laughter has been a synonym

for humor or a criterion for the definition of humor. He also points out that


30

there are phonological constraints saying that laughter is far less predictable

as a unit type with combinatorial rules and constraints.

...laughter is not restricted by either the linguistic or cultural codes of the laugher. Individuals from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds can and do laugh in similar ways.Conversely individual speakers of the same language can and do laugh quite differently (pp. 252-253).

Apte also said that there are cultural values which are factored into

laughter's flow in human interaction. He suggested that each culture has

norms regarding the appropriateness of the expression of laughter related to

the nature of the social situation and that laughter seems more susceptible

than smiling to scrutiny in connection with sociocultural norms because

laughter is perceived to reflect less controlled and more marked behavior.

Laughter is more subject than a smile to restraint in accordance with norms

of appropriateness because it often has derogatory and aggressive

connotations that smiling lacks. For these reasons laughter can not be

substituted for smiling in many social situations.

None of the literature I have cited above has been directly concerned

with the place of laughter in human dialogue-conversation.

Conversation analysis

The conversation analyst considers face-to-face conversation to be a

systematically produced and conjointly organized activity. The goal of the

conversation analyst is to discover and describe the "rules" that underlie

conversation. The perspectives of conversational analysis have informed my

research-perhaps more than any other research approach.


31

During the early 1970s laughter’s place in the flow of conversation

began to be noted by conversation analysts, and the investigation of its

place in conversation was begun by Sacks (1974) when he noted:

1. that laughter is the appropriate response sequence for jokes.

2. that at the completion of a joke laughter has a priority claim as

a response over talking. Thus laughter is locally responsive.

3. that in multiparty settings laughter is an exception to the turn-

taking "rule" in conversation. In the laughter response to a joke

multiple laughers "speak" simultaneously and thus overlap.

4. that the parties to the joke are obligated to laugh; however

delayed laughter and silence are systematic possibilities upon

joke completion.

5. that jokes are intelligence tests of sorts.

6. that the degree of intensity in a laugh response indicates the

funniness of the joke.

Sacks’s approach embraced both the laughing s i and the laughing

with perspectives but the sense that "simultaneous" multiparty laughter

sounds were organized by the laughers, as conversations are organized by

the participants, had not yet emerged. Multiparty laughter had somewhat

the status of "hubbub."

In 1987 Jefferson, Sacks and Schegloff wrote that laughter "can be a

relevant consequential next action to some prior [action]" (p. 5), that in such

an event laughter can be expected to be "produced in an orderly fashion"

and that "it appears that an occasion of laughing together is an activity in its


32

own right" (p.6).

Between 1979 and 1985 Gail Jefferson contributed three papers

related to laughter to edited collections of conversation analysis research

(Jefferson 1979, 1984, 1985). Only the last of these, a paper titled "An

exercise in the transcription and analysis o f laughter," is related to my

research. As I will show in subsequent chapters, the usual notion of

transcription cannot be sufficiently detailed to reveal the internal

organization of "laughing together."

In 1 9 8 4 Atkinson and Heritage edited a collection titled Structures of

Social Action: studies in conversational analysis in which Atkinson pointed

out that there were some preliminary points concerning the general

character of audience responses that need to be addressed:

First, is that audiences are restricted in what they may do in response to what a speaker says, and are for the most part confined to the production of gross displays of affiliation (such as applause, cheers, and laughter) or disaffiliation (such as boos, jeers, and heckles). With the exception of heckling, these displays involve simultaneously coordinated activities by a group of people, and have as a design feature that they can readily be done together (p.371).

Since laughter is a non-speech sound, the early conversation analysts

transcribed the texts of conversations but laughter was only noted and,

perhaps, impressionistically described. Later Jefferson, Sacks, and Schegloff

wrote a paper titled "Notes on laughter in the pursuit of intimacy" for an

edited collection Talk and Social Organization (Button and Lee, 1987) in

which they suggested that "a detailed transcription of non-speech sounds

would allow analysts to observe how the talk sounds accommodate the


occurrence of such sounds" (p. 152).

33

The Provine article

After the data analysis for this research was completed but not yet

written up, an article titled "Laughter" by Robert Provine, a psychologist,

appeared in American Scientist (1996, pp.38-45). While this is not an

academic journal, the article was based on the author’s published research.

Although Provine's interest, like that of most psychologists, focussed

on the laughter of individuals, he recognized that laughter is almost always

the response to a "stimulus" of one or more others and therefore had social

implications. He wrote, for example:

Laughter is decidedly a social signal, not an egocentric expression of emotion. In the absence of stimulating media (television, radio or books), people are about 30 times more likely to laugh when they are in a social situation than when they are alone.... Aside from the obvious implication that sociality can enhance laughter and perhaps one’s mood, these observations indicate that laughter has a social function (p.41).

Although Provine, and his students,

...wandered various public gathering places where we eavesdropped on groups of laughing people. W e carefully took note of the principals engaged in the behavior--the gender of the speaker or the audience, whether the speaker or the audience laughed and what was said immediately before the laughter (p.41).

When they pooled their observational data, Provine wrote:

Contrary to our expectations, we found that most conversational laughter is not a response to structured attempts at humor, such as jokes or stories. Less than 20 percent of the laughter in our sample was a response to anything resembling a formal effort at humor.... Mutual playfulness, in-group feeling and positive emotional tone--not comedy--mark the social


34

settings of most naturally occurring laughter. Research that focuses only on the response of an audience to jokes (a common laboratory scenario) targets only a small subset of laughter (p.41).

Provine was also interested in the measurable characteristics of

laughter such as the sound spectra that "revealed the distinct signature of

laughter." He found that:

A laugh is characterized by a series of short vowel-like notes (syllables), each about 75 milliseconds long, that are repeated at regular intervals about 210 milliseconds apart (p .39).

The author also noted that, as the series of "notes (syllables)" is

repeated, the amplitude decreased for each successive "note." He included

a graph of the decreasing amplitude in which "the average amplitude of

eight successive notes is displayed for at least 22 subjects" (p.40).

The Provine research is, to my knowledge, the most recent and

interesting report concerning laughter.

Comments on the literature

Conversation analysis (sometimes, but incorrectly, known as

discourse analysis) research began to recognize that laughter was not only a

"response" to humor (e.g. a joke) but was, itself, an organized phenomenon

(Sacks, 1974). By 1977 the "laughing together" concept became explicit,

although the tools were not yet available to describe its organization within

the event in which it occurred.

Through the eighties it seemed as though a careful transcription of

laughter was required before a structural description relating laughter to the


35

triggering humor (joke) could be attempted. As I said above, no transcription

of a recorded conversation could be sufficiently detailed to describe the

internal organization of group laughter within the larger conversation. This

became evident, in a roundabout way, in a paper by Byers, who is not a

conversation analyst (and was therefore omitted from the citations from the

conversation analysis literature) but an anthropologist who studies

communication as the process by which any two entities find and manage

their relationship. In 1988 he published "Toward a cultural epidemiology of

emotion" in an edited collection titled Emotions and Psychopathology

(Clynes and Panksepp 1988). In this paper he set out to

display and discuss data records of human interaction in which the sharing of ’emotion’ is seen as a necessary concomitant of communication (p. 249).

One of the data records displayed was a single instance of a joke and

the following audience laughter taken from my collection of tape recordings

made in theaters at showings of All of M e .

Byers did not use the methods of the conversation analyst. Instead he

used computer hardware and software to turn the tape recorded sounds into

digitalized waveforms that were saved as computer files. The waveforms

were then processed to visualize the sound amplitude changes across time

with a precisely measurable amplitude in millivolts and time relationships in

milliseconds of time. Byers had already demonstrated that human vocal

sounds ride on an underlying rhythm and that, in conversation, the speakers

co-entrain each other onto the same rhythm (Byers, 1972, 1976, 1988 ,

1992). In the 1988 paper he showed, with waveform printouts, that the


36

rhythm underlying the joke-talk also underlay and entrained the laughter

sounds.

Although I originally intended to use conversation analysis as a basis

or variable for planning and assessing my own work and findings, I came to

see that conversation analysis began as a name for the research of Sacks et

a l.t but became the label for a wide variety o f research interests. Even so,

the work of conversation analysis served as both an impetus and organizing

idea for the research I will describe below.


CHAPTER III

RESEARCH ORIENTATION AND DATA COLLECTION

37

In the preceding chapter I discussed my interest in using both the

research and insights of conversation analysis and the perspective of

"anthropological" (cybernetic-structural) communication as developed by

Bateson, Birdwhistell, and many others. Since there are some significant

differences between these ways of thinking, I will now discuss and explain

how they are related to my research.

Both of these perspectives begin with the fundamental assumption

that human interaction (including the interaction between a comedy film and

an audience) is organized or, as Heritage (1984) put it, "can be found to

exhibit organized patterns of stable, identifiable structural features" (p. 241).

Since both Heritage and I have used the word "structural,” and since we

may be using it differently, the following tw o statements by Adam Kendon

(1990), who has long studied human interaction and is a "structuralist" par

excellence, will describe how I intend to use it:

...the structural approach...proposes to provide an account of how, in terms of behavior, occasions of interaction are organized. Each interactional event, it is assumed, is not created de novo, but is fashioned as the participants draw from repertoires of behavioral practices (units of language, gestures, orientation, posture and spacing, and the like) that are widely shared and follow certain organizing principles that are commonly adhered to, within any given communication community. It maintains that communication employed in interaction is a continuous, multichannel process and it seeks to provide descriptions of the structural characteristics of the communication systems employed in interaction (p. 15).


38

Since people regularly operate with multiple frames ofreference, they are oriented to a multiplicity of signals (p. 26).

The term "conversation analysis" usually refers to the research

concerning the phenomena we call conversation-and sometimes to other

interactions, such as film-audience or where audience laughter is seen as

related to on-screen conversation.

Conversation analysis did not begin as "structural” research, as

Bateson (and others) intended that "method," but by sociologists looking for

the "rules" that seemed to describe conversational regularities. Following

the prevailing stimulus-response or cause-effect model, they tended to see a

conversation as a turn-taking sequence of alternating utterances between or

among two or more people. The content of the conversation and the

particular sequencing were not predictable but the "organized patterns of

stable, identifiable structural features" suggested that there were unspoken

rules governing this common social practice. The rules, of course, were

flexible and if the rules were "violated" by interruptions, inappropriate

responses or confusions about turns, there were other kinds of rules for

repairing the slip-ups. The units of study were largely the sequenced

utterances of the speakers but such matters as pauses and laughter and

other nonverbal behavior had to be considered. This kind of research could

be seen (returning to the earlier basketball analogy) as observing basketball

games to discover the underlying rulebook by which the game is played.

Conversations were easily seen to have constraining rules, but

conversation analysts were less aware that their research procedures were


39

constrained by the prevailing thinking in their disciplines.

When I studied with Birdwhistell, I was continuously reminded that

communication is multi-channel--i.e. a conversation is more than words.

Birdwhistell strongly objected, for example, to the term "nonverbal"

communication which, he said, was as inappropriate as saying "non-cardiac

physiology." This, then, was a problem with the early views of movies

where the research separated the visual from the sound and the early work

in conversation analysis where conversation was studied as a sequence of

utterances punctuated by silences or pauses.

As I wrote in the Introduction, Birdwhistell had worked with Bateson.

As a team in Palo Alto, California they worked with tw o linguists and two

psychiatrists on the detailed analysis of a film made of a psychiatric patient

and a counselor. This was to be published as The Natural History of an

Interview--a multi-disciplinary implementation of Bateson's methodological

design for communication research using the insights of cybernetics in social

science research. Because no release was obtained from the subject in the

film, the book was never published, but Bateson’s introductory chapter titled

"Communication" was eventually archived at the University of Chicago

(Bateson, 1971). From this beginning a new stream of research slowly

emerged. Bateson did not consider his communication formulation a method

but a "meta-method"--a design for research thinking across the social

sciences. There have been many people and a large body of important

research using Bateson’s or related "structuralist-cybernetic" thinking, but I

have not included this in my relevant literature. To include that literature


40

would have been overwhelming and perhaps a confusing distraction from

the particular focus of my research-even though my own research was

carried out in terms of "cybernetic-structuralist" thinking. This way of

thinking about research, which I have attributed principally to Bateson, grew

from many others as well--people and ideas that Bateson himself cites in the

paper (Bateson, 1971) mentioned above. It is beyond the scope of this

document to describe this thinking or paradigm, but various aspects will

emerge as they relate to my research and the first instance relates to

planning my data collection.

In his book Mind and Nature Gregory Bateson (1979) titled one

chapter "Multiple versions of relationship" (pp. 129-144). He points out that

binocular vision, for example, allows the perception and recognition of an

added, third spatial dimension and that that dimension is of a different

logical type than the objects perceived. This non-lineal cybernetic way of

thinking was the underpinning for my research. Instead of breaking apart the

film and the audience or the joke and the laughter and seeing one as

unidirectionally "causing" the responsive behavior of the other, I wanted to

find a perspective (a "binocular" view) that would see them as an interacting

unit--as participants in and co-creators of a particular kind of

"conversation." Instead of seeing an audience responding to a film (or a

joke) I wanted to see their relationships as larger events and how that was

being co-constructed. Instead of the "rules" that governed the behavior of

the individuals in a conversation and the "repair" possibilities, I wanted to

see films, audiences, and screenings both as single entities and as


41

interacting entities. The film, if considered alone, is the same entity at each

showing. I have, in fact, a videotape of the film with no audience sounds.

The screenings are always of the same film but the interaction of film and

audience is different for each screening. This was the rationale for collecting

data from 30 screenings. Since audiences are also different for each

screening, any organization within the audiences would be different and 30

different occasions might enable me to see contrasts there. Each of these

entities, then, was both a whole and an organization of parts. When

conversation analysts had described the basic rules or properties of

conversation, any talk-exchange interaction that followed, adhered to, or

reflected these rules was considered a form of conversation. From my point

of view, however, the apparent emphasis on vocal talk seemed to exclude

interactions that were non-vocal such as greetings that involved only

waving at someone from a distance, a nod or smiling acknowledgement, or

conversations among the deaf using only American Sign Language.

Since my undergraduate major was linguistics, I understood that

sounds (parts) are organized into combinations that become words, that

words are organized (via "grammar") into phrases, clauses, or sentences,

which, in turn, are organized into larger units. The basic design was familiar

and the ultimate research aim was to describe the way the items (parts) of

one whole are structurally related (organized) to be a larger whole. This part-

whole relation is sometimes distinguished as "levels" of organization or

"contexts" so that the whole is the "context" for its organized parts.

Scheflen and Ashcraft (1976), structuralists, put it in the following way:


42

The context of any particular event is the totality of larger events within which that event occurs. A context is thus a system of events. It is not a physical setting or an environment (p. 204).

In my research this generalized cybernetic language led to the

question: How is the film-audience behavior organized to make a screening

event (or film) an entertaining event? How are the audience members

organized to laugh (or not laugh) at jokes? Conversation analysis describes

the rule-regularities of an umbrella interaction called conversation but the

Bateson-proposed research approach would describe the way the behaviors

fit together to become comic movies, laughing audiences, and entertaining

screenings. I hope, in this report, to contribute to that goal.

Another aspect of Bateson's "binocular vision" translated, in my

research, to collecting data from multiple perspectives-multiple audiences

watching the same film, and to my using both observational and sound-

recorded data.

When I began to collect data and to focus on laughter, and with an

understanding of part-whole relationships, I planned to observe the relation

of audience behavior, i.e. the laughter, so that I could go beyond "it

appears" and describe in some detail the "organizing" events within the

audience as well as the "causative" events within the film. The

understanding of the organization of behavior that I had learned from

Bateson, Birdwhistell and the structuralists were the tools that enabled me

to describe in some detail the "lauqhino-w ith" phenomenon and clarify what

was only "appearing" to the conversational analyst. A behavior may be


43

observed (as Jefferson, et al. observed laughing-together), but its

description and explanation can only come from observing evidence of an

organizing process. Bateson’s structuralist thinking changed the focus from

isolated items (films, actors, audiences, laughter) to relationships and from

content to process--from parts to the relation of the parts to larger wholes.

Collecting the data

The considerations I have described above guided my data-collecting.

I have already discussed my decision to collect records of multiple

screenings of the same comic film instead of going to different films and I

have mentioned that I took notes. Now I w ant to discuss the matter of

"ethnographic" note-taking because the notes made at each showing are as

important as the tape recordings.

Before I learned about ethnomethodological research, and was obliged

to "take notes," I would have asked w hat aspects of an event I should pay

attention to and record in my notes. But after studying with anthropologists

I learned that one cannot know, in advance, what will be important or

relevant and that to make assumptions based on the researchers' experience

would limit the possibility of discovering w hat may be significantly related to

the phenomena one is studying. An honest researcher cannot know in

advance what to focus on, I was repeatedly told. Ideally I should observe

and write down everything. This is not possible but there are some

guidelines. The anthropologist may spend a year or more seeing the same

society day after day, not fully understanding what he or she is seeing. But


44

across time regular patterns emerge. In my case I w ent to thirty showings of

the same film and eventually patterns did emerge and direct my focus

somewhat. In the beginning I noted the time of day, the weather, who I

went with, where we sat, the number of seats in the theater, the color of

the walls, the placement of the screen, the character of the neighborhood,

whether the laughers were male or female, whether the same people

seemed to laugh loudest. I even noted my own mood, the behavior and talk

of a companion, when latecomers entered and where they sat. I noted the

slant of the aisles, the number of seats in a row, the approximate ethnic

ratios, whether people came alone, in pairs or trios, sat alone or next to

others, etc. etc.

In the next chapter it will become clear that much of this detail had

little value in this immediate research. But it will also become clear that

observing the audience as well as audiotaping the film-audience event gave

me the opportunity to make the discoveries that I would have missed with

only the audiotape. Most of these discoveries confirmed the impressions

from other research by providing more explicit evidence, but sometimes I

discovered significant questions that would have escaped me if I had used

only the conversation analysts' usual data.

When I decided, after my first viewing, to begin collecting data at

showings of All o f M e. I went tw ice more without making any records in

order to familiarize myself with it so that my attention would not be divided

between watching the film and watching and listening to the audience. On

one of these occasions I took a clicker device with which to count the


45

number of shots or camera shifts in the 90-minute film. There were 1050.

My film-audience data were collected at thirty showings in nine different

theaters in Manhattan between September 20 and December 20, 1984.

Audience size varied from about a dozen to about a hundred.

Even with all my precautions there were unanticipated problems. I

could not sit in the same relation to the audience since I could not predict

where others would sit and sometimes the loudest people were nearby and

sometimes distant but I noted this where I could. Tape recorders cannot

distinguish between talk and nearby squeaky seats or adjacent popcorn-bag

crunches nor can they compensate for the differences in theater acoustics.

Also, I did not always put fresh batteries in the recorder and, over time it

began to run slightly slower. This was not noticeable until unexpected

irregularities turned up in the waveform analyses where intervals can be

measured in thousandths of a second so that the rhythms found in one tape

showed a progressively accumulating difference when set alongside the

waveform trace of another tape. That is to say that, while a rhythm can be

found in the film speech (by waveform analysis) and is continued into the

audience laughter, and since the film speech for all showings is the same, it

is reasonable to expect that the rhythm underlying the talk in all the tapes

will be identical. In fact, however, it is not quite the same because the tape

recorder speed was slowly changing.

After I had recorded all thirty screenings, and when a videocassette

of the movie became available, I made a tape of that soundtrack which had

no audience sounds as a reference. But I made that transfer in our AV lab


46

where the tape speed was slightly different from any of my theater-recorded

tapes. If the highly compressed charts in Chapter V are closely compared,

that tape-speed variation can be seen. If I had not included the highly

precise waveform analyses into this research, these slight variations would

have gone unnoticed and would have been unimportant, but I mention it

here as a warning for those attempting to replicate my findings with my

tapes or who undertake research that applies waveform analysis to data

unwittingly acquired at differing tape speeds.

I might also mention here that in research on vocal interaction that is

sometimes concerned with the significance of the rising or falling pitch

contours of speakers' utterances that might differentiate a question from a

statement (a matter that is not a concern in this research) a speech sound

spectrogram is sometimes used to detect small pitch changes. Professor

Byers has shown me that his technology can achieve the same frequency

measurements of small fractions of vocalized syllables and can do this

accurately and quickly.

The film and plot

Since comedy often implies unexpected ambiguities, the transcribed

text I cite will perhaps make little sense without a sense of the film as a

whole. I will, then, very briefly describe what Pauline Kael, a reviewer for

the New Yorker magazine (1984), called "a romantic comedy about how

two antagonists in the same body fall in love and find happiness" (p. 124).

There are tw o main (comic) characters: Edwinna Cutwater (played by


47

Lily Tomlin) and Roger Cobb (played by Steve Martin). Edwinna is a very

rich, unmarried, imperious woman who is on her deathbed but who has

arranged for a swami to transport her "soul" to the young attractive, sexy

daughter of one of her servants. Roger is her unmarried lawyer who has a

long-time girlfriend (his boss's daughter), and who would prefer to be a jazz

musician. Edwinna and Roger intensely dislike each other early in the film

and Roger's relationship to his girlfriend, Peggy, is ambiguous.

The film opens with Roger playing in a jazz band and fades to the

following morning when his girlfriend, Peggy, awakens him with a present

for his 38th birthday. The large present is unwrapped and is "an African

gravepost." This scene and the ongoing conversation provides the occasion

for one of the joke-laughter sequences that are examined in detail.

Later, after her female doctor assures her that she is "really" dying,

Edwinna sighs and asks for a cigarette. Her doctor says, "You don’t

smoke!" and she replies, "Can’t hurt now." The camera cuts to three hands

silently (for several seconds) offering her cigarettes while the audience

laughs at the joke. The doctor is heard quietly saying "Ho Ho Ho Ho” which

is usually drowned by audience laughter and might have gone unheard in

theaters but is in the sound track. This is the second laughter response that

will be examined in detail. I have selected this part because the laughter (or

absence) is not mixed with film sounds except for the "Ho Ho Ho Ho"

sounds which can be recognized by comparing the soundtrack record to any

audiotape.

When Roger (Edwinna’s lawyer) is summoned to her deathbed to


48

amend her will he discovers that she doesn't intend to "really die" but to

give her "soul" to an employee’s daughter and says, "Is everyone here

bananas?" Edwinna asks him to come close to her and slaps him loudly

saying, "That's for bananas. Now get o u t.” This is a third scene that will be

examined in detail.

When the time comes for the "soul transmigration" there is a mishap

and, by mistake, her "soul" enters one side of Roger who, for the rest of the

film, is Roger on one side of his body and Edwinna on the other. The two

can talk to each other and this gives Roger (Steve Martin) endless

opportunities for visual and dialogic humor in men's rooms, in bed, etc. By

the end of the film the two "souls" fall in love and Roger splits from Peggy,

leaves his law firm, and becomes a jazz musician.


CHAPTER IV

PLANNING THE DATA ANALYSIS

49

When I first learned about conversation analysis, it seemed to be the

only research that would fit my particular interests and background. I had

become interested in film at Annenberg, where I became a projectionist for

film courses, I had become interested in the Bateson formulation for

studying communication, and I had an undergraduate background in

linguistics. After Annenberg I was exposed to the anthropological use of

participant observation and ethnomethodology and focused, particularly, on

the research of conversation analysis. This led to the design of my data

collecting and my intention to analyze my data in terms of conversation

analysis. When my data were collected, I set about describing the relation of

my data to that of conversation analysts and particular problems that they

were having when they began to include laughter as they encountered it in

conversation. Since my understanding of communication allowed me to

consider the film-audience relationship as a form of communication, and

since the response to a comic film was laughter, I began to see and describe

how the findings of conversation analysis could be applied to talk and jokes

in the film and how audience laughter compared to conversational laughter.

Conversation analysis: concepts and findings

The field of study called conversation analysis was first undertaken

and named by sociologists with Harvey Sacks as the predominant


50

contributor to the new field. Over time conversation analysis attracted many

researchers from other disciplines and was continuously enriched by the

methods and thinking of other disciplines, but the basic findings and

concepts of the founders continued to be the underlying framework for

those who chose to work and publish their work as conversation analysis

research. Meanwhile there was considerable developing interest in the study

of human relations or human interaction involving talk by some linguists and

anthropologists, some of whom were seen, and sometimes saw themselves,

working under the umbrella of "conversation analysis" research but who, in

fact, used quite different methods and concepts. This situation created

some confusion of labels, methods, and disciplines and even some scholarly

dispute.

When I began to examine my data in relation to traditional

conversation analysis, I spent years showing how my anthropologically

oriented data could fit the concepts and findings of the traditional

conversation analysis of sociologists. This was difficult since my "Bateson-

related" approach required me to look for relationships within my data and

to recognize that the significance of any data observation could only be

found in relation to the multiple contexts in which the observations were

embedded. The sociological research seemed principally concerned with the

relation of data to their traditional concepts. For example: Conversation

analysis, when that field recognized laughter as a conversational

phenomenon, was obliged to create "rules" to accommodate the observation

that laughter (seen as a single identified item) violated their existing "rules"


51

and subsequently realized (Jefferson 1985) that a detailed transcription

coding was needed to account for the variety of laughter sounds. (Such

responses to comic film jokes as howls, slaps, claps, or stomps were,

apparently ignored.) From my data it was apparent that the response to a

joke in a comic film in a theater could take many expressive forms and, for

dialogic purposes, were variants of one behavior.

I could find Q-jokes and narrative jokes identified by conversation

analysts:

The Q-joke is defined according to its question/answer format, where the answer to the question (or potential question) acts as the punch line for the joke. The narrative joke makes use of a narrative or story, i.e. being dependent on the spatial and temporal organization of the narrative (Wilson, 1989 , p. 60).

And I could find "list completions":

List completion can constitute utterance completion; i.e., a point at which another can or should start talking. Crucially, forthcoming completion is projectible from the point at which a list is recognizably under way; i.e., given two items so far, a recipient can see that a third will occur, and that upon its occurrence utterance completion can have occurred whereupon it will be his turn to talk (Jefferson quoted in Atkinson, 1984, p. 386).

And I could find what Sacks (1974) called "multiparty laughter having

differentiated starts" which was his label for the observation that people in

multiparty interactions do not necessarily start laughing in unison. In

research later than that o f Sacks, I even found some recognition of

"contexts," such as the remark from Heritage (1984): "Specifically, it is

assumed that the significance of any speaker’s communicative action is

doubly contextual in being both context-shaped and context-renewing" (p.


52

242). In my language this means that to understand the laughter you must

understand its relation to a joke (context) and to understand the joke you

have to understand its sense in the comic movie.

I eventually realized that my goal of demonstrating the relation of my

data to traditional conversation analysis was not unlike the effort to fit a

round peg into a square hole, but this lengthy process was not entirely

discarded. I found a number of questions that concerned conversation

analysts and which also concerned me and to which my data could usefully

be applied.

My data included the experience of observing thirty audiences

responding to the same film and I had made copious notes on how laughter

emerged and from whom in the audiences of all sizes. I noted, for example,

that the behavior called laughter could also take the form of screeches,

thigh slapping, clapping, floor stomping and even whistling-all equivalents

of laughter in a theater. I could sometimes identify individuals or small

groups that "started" the waves of laughter and the particular jokes that

brought laughter from women but rarely men. In small theaters or small

audiences I could recognize differences in the laughter of pairs or trios in the

audience from that of people who came alone. Most of all, perhaps, I began

to recognize that in small social groups a laugher was easily identified by the

others, but that in a darkened theater the audience members were socially

anonymous except to their companions. W hat the conversation analyst saw

as a "violation" that required "repair" in a small social group was often

simply acceptable in the theater. My first "discovery," then was the limited


53

application of conversation analysis to my data, although I recognize that

conversation analysis has enriched my research, and I hope that this

research will be useful to conversation analysis.

Although the experience of thirty screenings of the same film is an

invaluable base for this chapter, thirty 90-minute audiotapes and uncounted

pages of written notes of observations are both unwieldy and unnecessary

for the analyses I will present. For this report I have selected the audiotapes

of three screenings and within those three audiotapes I have selected three

scenes to examine in some detail.

The three tapes were selected because (1) one has the most laughter,

(2) one has the least laughter, and (3) one is about midway between the

other tw o in amount of laughter.

The first of the three scenes, near the beginning of the film and the

first dialogue between main characters, is a prolonged talk interchange with

multiple jokes that elicit both interspersed and overlapping laughter. The

following is the script dialogue of this scene w ith annotations only for

significant pauses and mumbled (soft) talk-sounds. I will offer a more

detailed transcription below--when the details relate to analysis.

Near the beginning of the film Roger Cobb is awakened by his

doorbell, sleepily goes to the door, looks through the peephole to see who is

there, mumbles "Oh God!," opens the door, and his girlfriend, Peggy

Schuyler, comes in lugging a large wrapped package. As she enters, this

dialogue begins:


54

PS: Happy birthday, my darling.

RC: Yeah..Yeah (mumbling)(As she moves past RC they kiss perfunctorily.)

PS: So how does it feel to be 38?

RC: Oh great. Just think, in 2 years I’ ll be 40 , in 12 years I'll be 50.I’m ..I'm really excited about this. It's..its 's fun.

PS: Oh, sweetie, (quietly)

RC: Hey! What am I doing with my life? W hat am I doing with mycareer? What am I doing with us? [a "list’ joke which becomes a "Q-joke]

(Short pause)

PS: You're boring us.(long pause. Present is noisily unwrapped.)

RC: Yeah, (mumbled during the pause)

PS: Do you love it? ... It’s an African aravepost!(long pause)

RC: You brought me a qravepost for my 38th birthday?

PS: (Looks hurt during long pause.)

RC: Look, I..I'm sorry. I like it. I really do. It's really nice, (pause)Look..um.. I've been thinkin'...Remember...remember that thing you used to wanna talk about and I never did? You know, the M-word. Well, I think maybe it's time we dM the M-word. (pause)

PS: Roger, I don't think you're ready to do the M-word.

RC: Yeah I am Honest, Peggy...I wanna get...M -d .

PS: Roger, (pause) if you can't say the M word, then you’re not ready to dfi the M word.

RC: Of course I can say the M word. Geez! (Long silence while RCvisibly gags on his next word.) ...Marriage..Marriage. Of course I can say it. What do you think?

PS: I think we shouldn't get into this right now. You're going to be


55

late for work and you know how daddy hates that. I just came by to wish you a happy 38. (They kiss loudly as she’s leaving.)

RC: Happy happy 3 8 ...that's a contradiction in terms.

The dialogue in this scene provides multiple opportunities for laughter which

may anticipate, follow, or overlap the screen talk and provides the

opportunity to discuss various aspects of the talk-laughter relationship.

The second scene is the "Gotta cigarette..." and the third is the slap

scene, both o f which were described earlier. I will discuss the details of

these scenes later, when I can show the relationships as they appear in

waveform printouts.

There are various ways to show the variety of audience laughter

sounds in a transcription. When conversation analysts began to study

laughter, Gail Jefferson realized that a close study of laughter required a

transcription form more detailed than that used for speech and wrote "An

exercise in the transcription and analysis of laughter." This was eventually

published in a "handbook" collection (see Jefferson 1985). I experimented

with various ways to differentiate a variety of laughter sounds but have

used only a crude version here for tw o reasons. First, Jefferson's highly

detailed transcriptions of laughter sounds, while useful for close

phonological study, must be learned and understood (decoded) by the

reader. One or tw o "words" may be embedded in several lines of assorted

descriptive laughter symbols. This approach has a number of problems: it

deflects the non-technical reader from possible humor in the scene; it cannot

include the facial expressions or gestures and, however detailed, cannot


56

include the "flavor” of the screen-audience relationship.

While detailed transcriptions are appropriate for the careful study of

laughter itself, they are not always useful for the comprehension of the

larger interactional context--as a close examination of individual trees can

obscure the sense of the forest. I do not mean to diminish the value of

detailed transcription notation where it is useful, but only to note that it

would not be useful in my analyses in which I want to call attention to the

significance of the context of laughter more than the laughter as an isolable

event. I do not need a detailed notational description of the wide variety of

audience response sounds.

When, later, we look at the relation of audience laughter to film talk,

it will become evident that what conversation analysts have called

"affiliation" is far more reflected in the temporal relationships of pause

lengths in turn taking than in the particular sounds that we collectively call

laughter. That will be displayed graphically in Chapter V.

The aspects or findings from conversation analysis that I want to re

consider here are (1) the relation of audience size to the amount of laughter

(always in relation to the same on-screen jokes), (2) the matter of film and

audience as participants in a "conversation" with each other, (3) the

concept of laughing-with as against laughing-gi, (4) the significance or

identification of the "laugh starter," (5) the evidence that audience laughter

is organized by both the film and, internally, by the audience, and (6) the

matter of silence--the absence of expected laughter.


57

Audience size and amount o f laughter

The problem here is that, on one hand, a larger audience can produce

more and/or louder laughter, but it is easily discovered that they do not

always do that. There are several ways that this might be explained. An

audience in one "ethnic” area may not understand a joke aimed at a

different "ethnic" audience. There is some supportive evidence for this in

terms of sophistication, education, language competence, dialect, etc. There

is also evidence to suggest that advertising or reviewers create different

expectations (Bateson considers "expectation" to be a context) in audiences

and there is the possibility that the reputation of certain stars itself creates

an expectation for a particular response. The Beatles, for example, needed

only to walk on stage to produce predictable screams from certain teenage

girls.

A more serious research-related question that has arisen in

conversation analysis has taken tw o forms: if laughter breeds or engenders

more laughter, does an initial silence breed more silence? This possibility has

been recognized in the conversation analysis of small group talk in non

theater settings. As Sacks (1974) noted,

Parties to the joke are obligated to laugh, however delayed laughter and silence are systematic possibilities upon joke completion (p.349).

While Sacks did not elaborate on the "systematic possibilities," Gail

Jefferson (Jefferson et al. in Button and Lee, 1987) carefully described how

silence "systematically" followed "improprieties" in a conversation where


58

nude bathing and a covert implication of sex was repeatedly mentioned by

one speaker (pp. 152-205).

These observations by conversation analysts offer little that can be

related to audience laughter, particularly where "improprieties" are often the

explicit subject of jokes and where the audience members are less

concerned with being identified as "affiliated" with an impropriety than at a

comic movie where the movie, as a context, "organizes" them to laugh with

others a t improprieties. And here the possible "violation" of laughing-at a

"violation" is inverted by the context. In a small social group where "proper"

behavior is expected laughter following an impropriety may be seen as

"affiliating" the laughter with the impropriety and may "systematically"

require silence, whereas in the context of a comic movie, it affiliates the

laughter with the others in the laughing audience. From this perspective an

interesting question arises: if the small social group is watching/hearing an

impropriety together on television, which is the context that will determine

the permission to laugh? The small group context where one person's

laughter would be a personal "exposure" or the watching-television context

where it would be an expected response?

My data tapes show an unexpected set of relationships. Both my

"least laughter" tape and my "middle laughter" tape are from screenings

with the smallest audiences-about a dozen people each. This laughter-

amount relationship will be shown visually in a waveform display of all three

audiences in the next chapter.

Beyond convincing evidence that audience size does not determine


59

the amount of laughter, this unexpected relation of audience size to amount

of laughter, offers little beyond the possibility that silence engenders silence

and/or that one audience, by chance, had laugh starters and the other did

not. In the discussion of silence below, 1 will show how, from my

observation notes, that there was a "context intrusion" that would require

consideration in any attempt to propose an explanation for the persistent

silence of one audience. This will do little to explain the absence of laughter

but it will raise some clarifying questions.

The film-audience relationship as "conversation"

To my knowledge, conversation analysts have never considered the

film-audience relationship a form of conversation. I had not thought of the

film-audience as engaged in a conversation since the audience does not

"talk back" in a conversational sense. But when Gail Jefferson began to look

at the way laughing was managed in a conversation, I realized that there

were some elements of conversation involved since the audience was given

a "turn" and laughed. Conversation analysis had held that a laughter "turn"

was an exception to the one-speaker-at-a-time rule and one that required no

"repair" when multiple people laughed at the same time.

If the film and audience at a screening were to be compared, in any

way, to a conversation, this would require a comparison of the dialogic

features that could be found in both--such as seeing the laughter response

as a "turn."

Leiter (1980) has listed and summarized conversation analysis


findings, particularly those concerning the distinguishing characteristic of

conversation: speaker change or turn-taking. I will cite his list of observed

features, which have emerged from the conversation analysis research

paradigm and note, where possible, the relation of each to a comic film.

Following this, I will look at the comic film-audience relation through the

lens of my research paradigm and my data.

Here is Leiter's list with my assessment of their applicability to a

comic film in brackets. This list is adapted from Leiter (1980, pp .216-217)

1. Speaker change occurs and/or recurs. [Yes]

2. Overwhelmingly, one party talks at a time. [Not "overwhelmingly."]

3. Occurrences of more than one speaker at a time are common but brief. [Audience laughter sometimes overlaps screen talk, but following screen talk often suppresses laughter.]

4. Transitions from one turn to a next, with no or only slight gaps or overlaps are the commonest transitions. ["Slight gaps" is impressionistic. When precisely measured, as in Chapter V , they are structurally significant in film-audience "conversation."]

5. Turn order is not fixed but varies. [Yes, but related to filmscript--and actor-timing.]

6. Turn size is not fixed but varies. [Fixed in film, variable in the audience.]

7. Length of conversation not specified in advance.[Film length is fixed. Laughter length is unpredictable.]

8. W hat parties say is not specified in advance. [True for first-time viewers of the film and all audience response.]


61

9. Relative distribution of turns not specified in advance. [Specified in advance, hopefully, by film.]

10. Number of parties can vary. [Not if audience is considered one party. If individuals, yes.]

11. Talk can be continuous or discontinuous. [???]

12. Turn allocation techniques are obviously used. The "next" may be selected by prior or self-selected.[Buying a ticket is a form of "self-selection. Film may attempt to select occasions for laughter.]

13. Various ’turn-constructural units’ are employed.This translates: a turn can be anything from an "mmm" sound to a lecture. [Doesn't apply easily to comic film.]

14. Repair mechanisms exist for dealing with errors or violations. [Impossible for film, unlikely for audience.]

Given the conversation analysts form of conceptualizing either

conversation or the discovered "rules," the comparison above is awkward

and not very useful. I will now outline another design, from my research

paradigm, for looking at the film-audience relationship (as "conversation").

1. Humans are continuously "in communication" with each other across a spectrum from intimate relational behavior (which may or may not involve talk) to consensual forms such as ignoring each other or nqi talking or not looking at each other.

2. The interpersonal behaviors are framed by socially recognized contexts: classrooms, funerals, parties, subway spaces, restaurants, etc.

3. Within a given context participants are expected (social "rules") to behave according to the "rules" of that context (e.g. talking at a party, not engaging strangers on a bus, wearing clothes appropriate to each occasion or context).

4 . In all contexts there may be sub-contexts in which one or another form of interpersonal talk is


62

common or allowed. There are general "rules" for that cluster of talk, interchanges called "conversations" and within that cluster are further sub-contexts that may determine the required or allowable behaviors. (One may say "excuse me" to a stranger, nod to an acquaintance across a room, say "Oh shit" to an intimate, or interrupt by saying "I object" in a courtroom). "Rules" apply to immediate contexts.

5. Comic movies are contexts where laughter is probable and expected but optional.

6. An observer of audiences at comic movies can discover that audience laughter is expected at some times but would be "violations" at other times, that talk among audience members is considered one order of violation, and that laughter unrelated to the movie by latecomers is a different order of violation.

7. The examination of comic movie scripts and the timing of the actors will show (below) that allowance for audience laughter is a pre-planned and explicit structural feature o f a comic movie.That is, the joke is designed as a (sub) context for laughter and the movie is designed to allow for some features of "conversation."

8. The laughter at a comic movie (and elsewhere) is itself a context with a structure (described below) that allows or may engender or entrain the laughter of others in the audience. (When, following this paradigmatic design, the laughter of an individual is examined, it clearly follows "rules" determined by [among other things] the physiology of the laugher and, within that context, it is even possible to distinguish the gender of the laugher).

I have intended this "contextual" design description to show several things:

1. that collecting and/or recording observable

behavior w ithout filtering the data collection

through a label-determining screen is of value (i.e.


the value of examining the structure of behaviors

instead of examining only those behaviors related

to an a priori abstraction);

2. that asking if or how the film-audience behavior is

like a conversation is less useful than asking how

the interaction is conjointly organized and

maintained as a form of communication;

3. that, when one organizes observational data on a

hierarchy of contexts, the "causation" can often

be seen as partially found in the next-higher

context and not attributed only to a prior behavior;

4. that conversation analysis has essentially studied

conversation as though the same "rules" could be

applied to all conversations without reference to

contextual variations.

This has required, an unnecessary profusion of labels to account for

the variety. In Jefferson's paper (Jefferson et al. in Button and Lee, 1987),

for example, she labeled the talk item of one participant in a conversation an

"impropriety" to explain the subsequent silence by others. There is an

understandable social logic to this, but it is limited to a particular social

context. There are other social-conversational contexts (i.e. other groups) to

whom the same talk item would not be an "impropriety"--such as the use of

well-known four-letter words in a conversation among male soldiers.

In my data, where it was possible to see as well as hear some of the


64

laughers, particularly in two of my selected screenings, I became aware that

some jokes (such as Edwinna's sweetly asking Roger to come close and

then slapping him in the face for an earlier insult) were most often followed

by shrieks of laughter from women but rarely from men. By watching a

small audience I could also discover that, when the response to a joke was

slapping knees and/or stomping the floor, this "alio" of laughter was only

from males. The linguist, Deborah Tannen (e.g., Tannen, 1986, 1990a,

1990b) has been much concerned with gender differences in conversation

and described in detail how different "rules" apply in female versus male

conversational talk. Her work clearly implies a recognition that the "rules" of

conversation are differently managed in different social or interpersonal

contexts where gender relations play an important role.

Data from multiple perspectives, when seen and sorted or classified

multi-lineally (i.e. in terms of levels or contexts) can yield a context-related

description that can account for the variety of interpersonal talk forms that

exist under the umbrella term "conversation."

The original concern of this section about film-audience behavior as

conversation has, I believe, taken on a new form from my perspective. In

the film-audience interaction, both sides bring fundamental or generalized

"rules" of communication or human interaction to the screening event.

There is ample evidence in my data that both the film makers and the

audience show this in their behavioral relationships and this will be

demonstrated throughout this report. But there is also equally ample

evidence that both film makers and audiences recognize and adapt to the


65

screening event as a context with its own "rules." It would seem to me that,

instead of inquiring into the way that the film-audience might be compared

to a conversation, it serves our study of human communication better to see

the film-audience interaction as an event with its own unique structure--and

that within that two-party interaction there is a structure of each "part" that

anticipates the structure of the other part, and that there is a describable

structure to the interaction between them. The traditional sociological study

of conversation analysis, as I see it, does not distinguish the substructures

within their named phenomena, although the work of linguists and

anthropologists does recognize the significance of levels (contexts) and

variation.

Laughing: with or at

In the earliest discussions of human laughter, at least through Darwin,

laughter was considered as an expression of inner feeling or emotion. It was

only when the concept of interpersonal communication appeared that the

prevailing cause-effect (or stimulus-response) paradigm led observers to see

laughter as an effect and assign its cause, in communication, to humor.

That, of course, was circular in that humor could be defined in terms of the

subsequent laughter or laughter could be defined as an effect of humor.

Perhaps the joke-laughter are an "adjacency pair" that are really a single unit

and require each other for completion. Early makers of comic films, as the

literature in Chapter II shows, judged the success of their films in terms of


66

the amount of laughter of audiences. The implication was that people would

pay money to see (and later hear) things that made them laugh. This

supported the obvious idea that viewers laughed a t "funny" things and that

"funny" was whatever people laughed at-

It seems odd to me that those who were carefully observing that

conversations often included laughter did not look at other contexts where

laughter was easily found and discover the limitations of the "laughing-at"

view.

For example, Byers (1988) writes:

In about 1930 I visited relatives in Florida who listened each week at the same time to a favorite radio program. After the program announcement, there were no spoken words.There was, first, a chuckle, then more chuckles by more people. The chuckles grew into laughter, more and more laughter, etc. Soon everyone present was convulsed with laughter. I was ten years old and it was "fun.” The "fun" was clearly in the participation in the organized process since there was nothing to laugh at. No proxmial cause. Nothing "caused" the laughter (p.256).

The above, then, shows that broadcast media, more than half a century

ago, recognized that there was a listening audience that tuned to a program

that offered only the opportunity to join in the laughter of others and with

nothing "funny" to laugh al-

During the early 1970s the conversation analysts began to note

laughter's place in the flow of conversation. This was reported by Sacks

(1974) where he noted (among other things that will be cited below) that

the degree of intensity in a laugh indicated the funniness of the preceding

joke. Some years later Jefferson, Sacks and Schegloff (1987) wrote that


67

"...it appears that an occasion of laughing together is an activity in its own

right” (p. 160).

These tw o kinds of reported observations, almost half a century

apart, strongly support the "lauahing-w ith" view and put both the comic

film-audience and, inside that, the joke-laughter relationship into a different

set of questions. I will discuss laughter in more detail in a section below but

I suggest, here, that it might be more useful to think of comic film jokes

more as "triggers" or "releasers" than as causes of laughter and that the

joke does not "make the audience laugh" but provides a socially

institutionalized and anonymous setting (or context) for audience members

to experience the participation with others in some form of human

"pleasure." This view, while not "explaining laughter," might allow it to be

studied alongside other social forms in which humans gather in organized

settings to participate in the co-construction of "pleasure." This could,

perhaps, help to focus the research interest in human social forms, one of

which is going to comic movies.

This way of seeing laughter at a comic movie also raises and

sharpens some other questions: W hat inhibited laughter at my "least

laughter" screening? Why does the same joke "fall flat" with some

audiences and not others? Do audience members who go alone laugh less

than those who go as couples or in a group? Is audience laughter organized?

This is the subject of the next section.


68

Laugh starters

The conversation analysts identified laugh-starters (and provided the

label) but offered little else. My data, both observational and tape recorded

(and the Florida radio program in 1930) suggest that "laugh starting" can be

examined from multiple perspectives or contexts. First of all, I suggest, as a

frame for looking at this phenomenon, that humans enjoy laughing. It is not

uncommon to hear such a comment about an occasion as, "We laughed a

lot" with no reference to what was laughed at (as it is common to hear

someone talk of "a nice conversation" with no reference to the content of

the conversation). There is also the obvious point that an audience has paid

money to see and hear a comic movie with the expectation of laughing. It is

possible that "laugh starting" can be traced to a universal "appetite" which

is commercially satisfied, in part, by comic movies. Within the movie it is

clear that there are carefully pre-planned "jokes" to engender laughter and

pre-planned allowances for the laughter so that it will not overlap with

significant screen talk. Then, within the response to the joke, it is common

to hear the laughter "start" with a loud sound from one person or, perhaps,

a couple or small group sitting together. This is what the conversation

analysts recognized.

When I went to the middle-laughter screening, I w ent with a female

companion. Just behind us and over her shoulder were a trio of people who

sat together and almost as soon as the movie started they were the loudest

laughers in the audience. My companion turned to me and said, "You should

be sitting with the laughers." That focused my attention on them throughout


69

the movie. This trio appeared to find the movie hilariously funny, laughed

first and loudest, and that screening produced far more laughter than any

other audience of comparable size and more than several larger audiences.

After this I was careful to see if laughing or laugh clusters commonly

came from the same audience members. There usually was some kind of

laugh-starter who was usually with one or more others. Trios or two couples

who sat together were more "effective" than a single couple. I have no

recorded instance of an unaccompanied person being a laugh starter. But I

did observe that there could be more than one laugh-starter group, that if

there were more than one they might start almost simultaneously but

sometimes one laugh-starter would get one "round" of laughter going and

that would be followed by a different laugh-starter and another or

overlapping "round" of laughter. I observed, over time, that it was possible

to hear laughter as a kind of scattered "hubbub" but that it actually often

came in repeated waves or "pulse bursts." The laugh starter seemed to be

loudest, followed by successive but decreasing "pulses." Then another

starter might begin another "wave" that would die out. It had been reported

in conversation analysis research that group laughter sometimes occurred in

"pulses." This "shaped" laughter could only be heard with any clarity when

there was prolonged laughter unmixed with screen talk and this was one of

the reasons for one of my selections. The waveform printouts in the next

chapter will display this phenomenon more vividly than I can describe it.

I was reminded by this laugh-starter phenomenon that it was once

common in Europe and perhaps elsewhere for some stage performers to hire


70

"claques”--people who came to the performance and clapped loudly. When I

first heard of this I supposed that the "claque" was hired simply to add to

the audience response. Now I believe they were, in fact, "clap-starters."

Then I was referred to a tape of a piano performance by Keith Jarrett in

Cologne, Germany with much applause that turned into the common

European form of whole-audience synchronized clapping. A small part of this

applause, a few seconds before and after the shift from general to

synchronized applause, was processed by the waveform technology and will

be included in the next chapter.

The "laugh-starter" reported in conversation analysis, then, is not only

the first person in the audience to laugh loudly following a joke. He (usually,

but not always a man) may simply be the person with the greatest

"readiness" to laugh and there may be more than one "starter" in an

audience. But the "starter" phenomena can be seen from another

perspective when the "starter" is seen as triggering what is already "ready".

When a comic film is advertised, a "readiness" begins for those who

"already" like comic films. Buying a ticket to see the movie increases the

readiness or expectation for laughter. The movie itself contains pre-planned

jokes to trigger laughter, and within the audience the person most "ready"

laughs first and "starts" or triggers the laughers that follow. In this sense

the audience is "pre-organized" to laugh when "started."

Laughter may be an inherent (genetic) expression in humans. The

contextual organization for this expression is some appropriate context

called "humor" (among other things). The appearance of a comic film is one


71

form of "organized humor" that, in turn, "organizes" some moviegoers to

buy tickets and go to the movie. Within the screening the film jokes

"organize" occasions for laughter and within the audience "laugh starters”

have a particular significance in the organization of the individuals who then

"laugh together.” The next section will consider the matter of the

organization of the laughing individuals in the audience.

The organization of laughter

I have suggested, above, that the onset or "causation” of laughter

can probably be traced all the way to human genes. Now I want to look

more closely at the organization of laughter as I recorded and observed it at

the screenings of a single film.

I suggested earlier that what the conversation analyst has called

"affiliation" is far more reflected in the temporal relationships than in the

particular sounds that we collectively call laughter." I also said earlier that I

was particularly concerned with the question about whether the audience

laughter was organized by the film or by the audience itself. The preceding

discussion of the laugh starter suggests one aspect o f the organization from

within the audience and I have already pointed out that the film is

deliberately constructed both to elicit laughter at particular joke-points and

to allow time for the audience to laugh without interrupting the ongoing film.

In this broad sense the film "organizes" the already-predisposed audience to

laugh at particular times and must make a guess at how long the audience

will laugh at a particular joke. After the "gotta cigarette....can't hurt now"


72

joke, the film allowed several seconds (i.e. did not continue with screen talk)

for laughter and signaled the continuation when EC said "Thank you" for the

silently offered cigarettes. (This screen silence interval can be precisely

measured by the waveform program.) At my "least laughter" screening there

was almost no laughter or none loud enough to distinguish from "noise." But

in other tapes the laughter continued well beyond the "Thank you" that was

intended, probably, to signal that the film talk was continuing. Of course

when the film talk started again the audience laughter subsided.

When, in the early dialogue between Roger and Peggy where there

were many closely-spaced jokes and/or "nonverbal" laugh-eliciting antics,

there was a great deal o f talk-laugh overlap and sometimes the audience

laughter even seemed to laugh in anticipation o f an implied joke-to-come--

such as the unwrapping of Peggy's birthday present, an African gravepost.

This, if one heard only the taped sounds, was a mishmash of talk-film sound

in which there was no easily hearable organizational pattern. The Byers

research that I mentioned earlier suggested that there was a measurable

regularity in the sequencing of interpersonal talk based on evidence of an

underlying rhythm that both or all immediate participants shared. The

conversational analysts, very early in their research, had recognized that

"turn-taking" was a clear feature of conversation and that interruptions or

overlaps were "violations" and described various "repair" possibilities but

they did not have (or use) a technology that could "magnify" the intervals

between turns and/or recognize underlying rhythms and their organized

relationships. Byers describes this, particularly in his 1992 paper (in


73

Varenne, 1992 pp. 233-249).

In the next chapter I will include, among others, waveform printouts

of some of this "mishmash of talk-film sound" which, when magnified and

measured, show that the interjected and/or overlapped laughter is clearly

integrated into the organization of the talk. This does not mean that the

"film is organizing the laughter," which is a cause-effect relationship, but

that the film-audience relationship, or any conversational relationship, will

show this evidence of organizational integration. Byers points out that this

logical relationship cannot be assigned to any conscious intention of the

participants and that this "mutual entrainment" of interacting pieces of

nature is recognized and studied in the physical and biological sciences.

Concerning the earlier suggestion that the temporal relations between

interactions reflect their "affiliation," Byers (1976) has written:

There is a biological response in humans such that certain rhythmic relations are perceived as good (sometimes referred to as "good vibes") and others, mismatching, are biologically disturbing. W e recognize that one usually feels uncomfortable if he is late, out of step, etc. This also operates at lower levels when we recognize that "timing" is important in team sports, music, acting, etc. (p. 136).

Thus our sense of "affiliation" in interpersonal relations, felt as "good

or bad vibes," may arise from temporal relationships that are not in the

immediate awareness of the participants. For example, if tw o musical notes

or tones are identical in frequency, or if a chord of notes are properly

frequency-related, they are heard as "in tune." But if one note is only a few

per-cent "off pitch," that disharmony will be "heard" even though the

listener could only recognize the difference when the notes were played


74

together. One can recognize disharmony without an awareness of the

frequencies involved.

I have tried to show in this section that the question about who or

what "organizes" the organization o f the audience laughter is not a question

that can be answered by either the conversation analyst or the data in this

research. What my data and the waveform analyses d fi show, however, is

that the organization of audience laughter is set within a biological frame.

The production of laughter requires an understanding of physiological

matters well beyond the concern of this research.

Silence

As any musician or standup comic knows, silence (as pauses) is an

important item and not simply the absence of talk or sound. Pauses are

structural units in conversations, music, or other bounded sequences. In

many social contexts "being on time" is a significant consideration. In each

of these cases the significance is related to its expected place in a

sequential structure. The conversation analysis researchers have described

silences that are a possible "response to a prior" and silences that would be

"violations" unless "repaired."

The silence I am concerned with in this section, and which accounts

for one of my three selected screenings, is the December 4 screening at

which there was almost no laughter. The question to consider is: Was that

no laughter "organized" and, if so, by what, who, or how?

My written notes show that I counted only six occasions of laughter


75

in the first 20 minutes of the screening. My observation that this screening

had the smallest audiences was not a tenable explanation since the "middle"

audience was almost the same size but laughed much more than the "least"

(December 4) audience. I cannot find a satisfactory "answer" to that

audience's silence. But my notes do contain the description of events in the

theater that offers some possible clues. I suspect, based on the

observations that laughter engenders more laughter and that laugh-starters

can, I believe, contribute to "setting a tone" for the audience relation to the

entire film. If this is the case, is there the equivalent of a "silence starter"?

Sometimes one goes to a party with expectations of excitement or gaiety

only to find that "it never got off the ground."

All I propose to do is to describe the events I noted and offer some

speculations about their possible relation to the comic movie at which

(almost) no one laughed. The following is from the notes I wrote during or

after the screening.

D. W . Griffith theater. Tuesday, December 4, 19 84 at 10:10 pm screening. The weather outside was very cold. W ent alone because friend didn't turn up. Bought ticket at 9 :5 5 , pm, fifteen minutes before the screening. Theater holds about 3 00 . Three sections divided by aisles. Sat 7th seat in 10th row. Theater hotter than usual.

Just after 10 PM I thought I would be watching the film by myself. At 10:05 an usher approached me and asked if I wanted to get a refund or a pass to see the film another day.Since I was interested in other people’s reactions to the film, I said I would take the pass for the weekend. The usher left me and I started to pack up. Then the usher called to me from the rear of the theater and told me that the performance would go on because six more people had just bought tickets. So while the film started three couples came in and sat behind me, one couple to my left and the other two couples to my right. Then


76

tw o more people came in and sat a few rows behind the others. I was now sitting with the audience behind me. A tactical error on my part. (Why didn’t I move back? Would the others wonder why? I decided to stay put and be unobtrusive.)

There was no response to the film from this audience, even at scenes

that other audiences laughed at. I began to feel uncomfortable being alone,

too hot, and with everyone behind me and no one laughing. About fifteen

minutes into the film a group of three people, a man and two women, came

in. They were talking loudly to each other and seemed to ignore both the

film and the other people. I couldn’t see if the others scowled at them but I

felt that their loud behavior was intruding on us.

It was after the "intruders" came in that I heard the first of the six

recorded laughs in the first 20 minutes. Since I was sitting with my back to

everyone, I didn't see who laughed but it w asn't followed by other laughter

and didn't have a "laugh-starter" effect. Neither did the other single laugh of

the evening. Because I had to pack up my notebook and recording gear and

put on my coat, I had almost no chance to watch the dozen or so people

leaving the theater. I wondered afterward if they looked bored, amused, on

drugs, or whatever.

I would have said that the evening, from my data-gathering point of

view, had been a waste of time except, as I realized later, that it was

(unexpected) evidence that even such a small audience could sit through a

comic movie for ninety minutes and laugh so little. I have spent a lot of time

looking through conversation analysis research reports to "explain" this

evening of silence. There are plentiful reports of silence within a


77

conversation, but none that were relevant to a comic film-audience

occasion. I also considered such explanatory possibilities as the hour of

night, the day of the week (neither a good day or hour to expect large

audiences), the heat in the theater, the color of the walls, the temperature

outside, the near-end of the film ’s New York run, etc. All insupportable

guesses.

I believe that the only explanation may lie in the observation that as

laughing (e.g. laugh-starting) engenders more laughter, noi laughing may

engender more nol laughing. But I have found nothing in my data to support

that directly. This may be related to the party that "never gets off the

ground" or for unexplained reasons "falls fla t.”

In this chapter I have limited my analysis findings to what I could hear

on my tapes or read in my notes or what I could bring in from other

observation-related sources. The next chapter will put the equivalent of a

magnifying glass on small stretches of my recorded data.


78

CHAPTER V

WAVEFORM ANALYSES

Anthropologists and linguists have long recognized that cultural

groups vary in the amount of pause or silence between speakers, the degree

of loudness or the use of gesture, but these aspects of conversation were of

little interest to conversation analysis. They were only personally or

culturally idiosyncratic variations to the conversation analyst. Even linguists

who were concerned with such factors as stress or intonational rising or

falling--and who used sophisticated measuring devices such as

spectrographs-were not much concerned with measuring precise intervals.

Conversation analysts sometimes commented on their impression that

laughter seemed to have some kind of internal organization, that people

laughed together or with each other. And conversation analysts sometimes

talked of "affiliative" responses, but "affiliation" was more a matter of w hat

was said than how or when it was said.

I have often noticed that people may speak of "having a nice

conversation" with someone before they report w hat was talked about.

Applying the notion of a "nice conversation" to conversation analysis, it was

possible to infer a sense of "affiliation." But it was not until I began to read

the Byers research reports mentioned above that I became aware of how a

micro analysis of talk might reveal more about this aspect of affiliation.

Since Paul Byers (1988 , pp.249-279) had included a waveform chart

and analysis made from one of my data tapes, I was aware that this form of


79

analysis might help to resolve some of the questions in this research. Since

Professor Byers was related to this research as sponsor, I wondered if it

would be appropriate to ask him to process particular sections of my data

tapes and to include them in this report. He assured me that researchers

often used "consultants” with special expertise. Sociologists sometimes use

statisticians, and archeologists use special technicians to date artifacts, for

example. He offered to be a "technical consultant" for my research and

produce waveform charts with descriptive captions. He insisted, however,

that I become familiar with the technology and its possibilities and

limitations and that I would be responsible for interpreting the significance of

the waveform charts for my research.

Even though I began to acquire a modicum of competence in

understanding and using Byers' waveform technology, I was reluctant to

attempt to include the advantages of waveform findings in this report since

my understanding was too limited. After discussing this point with Professor

Byers we decided that I would suggest possible questions that might emerge

from this micro examination and he would produce charts and

measurements from events I selected and write captions explaining the

technical management. After I received this "consultant's report," I would

discuss the implications of the waveform charts and measurements for this

research.

Since waveform technology is little known or used in the social

sciences, it is necessary to give a brief orientation to the technology. The

following are the questions of particular interest that I submitted to Byers for


80

waveform exploration:

1. If there are rhythms underlying speech, are there

also rhythms underlying laughter and are they

related to each other?

2. Your research reports have suggested that there

are different rhythms for "ordinary" and

"performed" speech. How is that distinction made?

3. You have reported that the "next" speaker in

conversational turn-taking begins a finite number

of rhythmic beats after the previous speaker's last

sound peak. Is this also true for laughter? That is,

is a laughter response to a joke a conversational

"turn?"

4. If, as you have suggested, multiple speakers in a

conversation (like ensemble musicians) are on the

same rhythm, do laughers also vocalize on a

common rhythm? If so, is it the rhythm of the

preceding speech?

5. Conversations are organized by the participants

according to rules that conversation analysts have

described. Is audience laughter also organized by

these rules or by different rules?

6. In one scene in the film Edwinna coughs three

times and then slaps Roger. How are these non-


81

language sounds organized into the conversational

flow--or are they outside conversational rules?

7. Can micro-measurements of talk or laughter show

anything related to what conversation analysts

have called "affiliation"?

The following is Professor Byers' report.

Byers' report: waveforms and measurements

Unlike conversation analysis, waveform analysis and rhythms

underlying speech (or laughter) are not concerned with "social" behavior.

They are concerned with a biological (neurological) substrate that is not

accessible to human choice, purpose, intention, or awareness. When

humans ride on escalators, they have no control over the speed of the

escalator. When "on," the escalator moves the same with or without

"passengers" and the passenger behavior (standing still, walking while

riding, etc.) is independent of the underlying escalator. The escalator has a

potential organizing effect on passengers but is not, in the usual sense, a

determinant of their behavior--any more than the earth’s daily rotation

determines the behavior of the planet's inhabitants.

More than twenty years ago, long before the advent of desktop

computers and waveform technology, I discovered (1) that an Alpha-related

( ± 1 0 Hz) rhythm could be found in all speech in any of the few dozen

languages I examined, (2) that, in "conversational" speech the participating

speaker sounds were on the same (shared) rhythm, (3) that the speech


82

onset of a "next" speaker was an even multiple of rhythm-beats from the

preceding speaker's last stress peak, and (4) that in "performed" speech

(radio announcers, stage or movie dialogue) the predominant rhythm was

the Theta-related (± 7 .5 Hz) rhythm and that, unlike most non-professional

speech, sound peaks as well as onsets fell on the rhythm.

Electrophysiologists who study brainwaves long ago identified an

Alpha rhythm with a frequency of ± 1 0 Hz, a Theta rhythm with a frequency

of ± 7 .5 Hz and a Beta rhythm with a frequency of ± 3 0 Hz. It is my belief

that there is a fixed relation among these three brainw aves-that the Alpha,

Theta and Beta waves (and perhaps faster ones) are related as musical

notes are related: whole notes, half notes, quarter and eighth notes and are

rhythmically organized into multiple relationships: 2-4, 3-4, 4-4 , 6-3 , etc. My

considerable research using the present waveform technology to study

speech supports this relationship but I have not demonstrated it by

comparing my speech rhythms with EEG records of the same person.

It is my assumption that the firing of motor neurons in the diaphragm

and/or intercostal muscles produce the impulsing in the air flow from the

lungs that is reflected in highly magnified waveform traces.

The waveform technology accepts any analog signal (such as live or

recorded speech), sampling the input at any selected rate (from 1 to 5 0 ,0 0 0

samples a second) and writes the precise (digitalized) micro-voltage of each

successive sample to disk. This record can then be brought on the computer

screen where it appears as a bipolar waveform. This first "channel" can be

rectified (the bottom half folded into the top) and a selectable "moving


83

average" line can be calculated and drawn on a third channel. This will be

illustrated in Figure 1.

As the recorded speech is being "acquired "--turned into a waveform

file on disk-markers can be inserted (by pressing the space bar) to key the

waveform to spoken words, facilitating the match of words to the chart.

The technology allows the on-screen trace to be "magnified" vertically, or to

be compressed by any selected factor. Almost all the charts below have

been compressed to fit within the page size. My most common acquisition

rate is 800 samples-per-second which displays a tenth of a second as about

1 Yz inches on the screen or printout.

The waveform program also allows me to put vertical lines either

upward or downward from the baseline. I have marked various rhythms in

the following charts in this w ay. There is also an onscreen cursor which can

move back and forth across the screen or which can be fixed while the

waveform is scrolled. The program also allows for time measurement

between any tw o points in the waveform. If acquired at 800 samples-per-

second, the measurement can be to the nearest ten thousandth of a second.

The only other feature o f the program to be considered for present

purposes is the Fast Fourier Transform capability. A Fourier transform

displays all the frequencies embedded in complex waveforms--along with

those created by the equipment itself and assorted electrical interference.

While speech frequencies are usually in the 3 0 0 -4 0 0 Hz range, the

underlying rhythms are also present. While the FFT record is not very

precise at low frequencies (most recording equipment is not designed for


84

reliability at these inaudible frequencies), it is useful insofar as my

presumption of the 7 .5 -1 0 -3 0 Hz relationship allows me to look for this

relationship in the FFT record. I have included, below, an example of this.

The following are waveform charts, variously compressed, with

explanatory captions to make them comprehensible. I should add one more

caveat: Since Mr. Jones originally used a battery powered microcassette

recorder which, as the batteries wore out, slowed the tape speed slightly,

these tapes were copied onto standard cassettes. When a videocassette of

the film became available, Mr. Jones made a copy of the sound track

without an audience as a reference. For this he used an audio lab machine.

This meant that the rate of the underlying rhythms was slightly different for

each tape. The reference (sound track) record is significantly different from

the others--and confusing when long stretches are compared.

In the charts below I have not followed the usual custom of putting a

one-second reference on each chart. Instead, I have put rhythm marks

(where useful) and specified the rhythm intervals. All the charts have been

"compressed" (horizontally = time) but in varying degrees, depending on

the detail and limited by the space available on a "landscape" page format.

The first few charts are intended only as an orientation to the

capabilities of the technology: the creation and manipulation of "calculated

channels" and the use of the Fast Fourier Transform to find underlying

rhythms. Then I will compare the amounts of laughter that follow the

cigarette joke scene from the three different audiences. After that I will look

at the "turn taking" in the early dialogue between Roger and Peggy to


85

measure the peak-to-onset relationships and their relationship to the

underlying rhythm. For this I have used the tape from the sound track so

that audience laughter will not be mixed with screen talk.

Next I will look at the slap scene and at the way that the coughs and

slap fit the ongoing talk rhythm, at how laughter is temporally related to the

slap and talk, how the rhythm underlying the screen talk continues through

the laughter after the screen talk ends, and then at the evidence of internal

organization of the audience laughter in both the slap scene and elsewhere.

The last chart I will display is not from Mr. Jones' data but from

audience applause after a piano concert--as an example of another form of

audience response.

These waveform charts will, then, be related to the seven questions

posed by Mr. Jones--except for the last concerning "affiliation" for which I

can offer only a personal opinion since "affiliation" is not a directly

observable phenomenon, only an inference.


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F igu re I . W aveform m anipu la tions. The top chart is the bipolar form o f the acquired file Since speech is sound waves, it is always bipolar The middle chart is a "rectification" o f the first; the bottom half has been folded up into the top half. Hie lower chart is a "moving average" o f the rectified chart, a single line follows the peaks and a user can stipulate the number o f samples to average to get more or less detail in the trace

Hie descending lines on the bottom chart mark the basic underlying rhythm 1 found in the film speech. As I w ill show in the iicm chart, there are at least three identifiable rhythms underlying speech, each in a fixed time relation to the others

Die rhythmic "beat" usually falls at places in the trace where there is a sudden upward or downward movement or a sound peak I assume that this vhythmicity veUecis motor activity at the intercostal muscles and thus may be related to brainwaves

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Figure 2. Three rhvthm s. rhis chan trace is tire same as that in Figure I but more amplified venically. The vertical marks below the trace represent the same rhythm as those in Figure I. The vertical marks above die trace on the right coincide with the marks below in a 4 I relationship The more closely spaced marks on the upper left are in a 3 1 relation to those on die right and in a 4 1 relation to the rhythm marked below.

I am exploring the possibility that these three rhythms are related to the iheia-alpha-beta brainwaves Since individual brainwavefrequencies vary (and since brainwaves are not mechanically precise), this w ill require the collaboration of dec trophy.siologists Speechiccordines of subjects (made durum or soon after the FF (i tc-cordum) could then be compared for licquencs relationships co

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FRQ< X4> : 7.42 DB ( h n ) : 35.47 MID /.EOF<F5): 31.3/. F*. M_WORD

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Figure 3. F F T showing all three rhythms. I have suggested that the rhythms marked in Figure 2 are in a 7 .5-10-30 relationship The FastFourier Transform o f this talk shows peaks at 7.42, 9 77, and 29 89 Hz. There are also the expected doublings at 14.65 Hz and 19 54 Hz When the FFT display is panned to show lower frequencies, there are peaks at 3.71 Hz and 4 88 Hz (half of 7 42 and 9.77) The FFT has limited precision, but the discrepancy between 14.65 Hz and 14 84 (the double o f 7.42), is about a thousandth of a second in real time

31ie.se frequency ratios could be seen as artifaci except that they are derived from recorded speech, they can be found in all o f the ten ot twelve languages I have examined, and they show about the same range o f individual variation as alpha brainwaves (8 12 Hz). oo

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89

I have proposed three rhythms but suggested that one is the basic

underlying rhythm for this film speech and that another is more common in

ordinary conversation. This requires explanation. As I wrote above, people

in conversation, like ensemble musicians, share the same underlying rhythm,

and when they "take turns," each speaker begins a finite number of the

basic rhythm beats after the preceding speaker’s last stressed sound.

Figures 5 through 8 will show this. Thus the basic rhythm can be calculated

from few speaker-switch intervals and an FFT of the talk.

FFTs are helpful in finding the rhythm underlying speech but another

useful procedure is to print out a few minutes of uninterrupted conversation,

cut it into a few parts, and move one "baseline" slowly against another,

looking for instances of coinciding onsets (places where traces show abrupt

upward movement). As one chart segment is moved against another there

will be little onset matching until, at "rhythm-intervals," there will be a

sudden increase in "onset coincidence" between the tw o pieces. Evidence

of a rhythm will begin to appear. This method has the advantage of

smoothing out small expectable variations, and since a rhythm is the same

in either direction, it doesn't matter if one compared trace is time-reversed.

There are many unpredictable sources of variation in human behavior:

brainwaves are not mechanically precise; individual expression is encoded in

small variations (as in music); a microphone does not "hear" what ears hear

(words beginning with sibilant sounds have much greater amplitude to a

microphone than to ears); sudden sounds or light flashes will reset rhythms;

film editors may tamper with sequences; radio "editors" may technologically


90

compress taped speech. These variables make it difficult if not impossible to

use quantitative methods to study rhythms underlying speech but I hope to

show with these charts that rhythms have an overall integrity, a persistence

or continuity despite the small internal variations. This allows the researcher

to see rhythmic relations that would be overlooked by a quantitative analyst.

The rhythms underlying speech are analogous to the carrier

frequencies underlying wireless transmission. A listener does not hear the

carrier frequency but his receiver must be tuned to it. Thus it is possible to

say that the audiences at the comic movie are "tuned in" to the "carrier

rhythm" of the movie speech as people in conversation are rhythmically

tuned to each other. Since many researchers have observed a synchrony in

the body movements of interacting humans (and animals), it is not

necessary to talk to sense one's (underlying) rhythmic match or mismatch in

the presence of another. If, as I suspect, there is a demonstrable relationship

between the frequencies of an individual's underlying speech rhythms and

that same person's brainwaves, this would offer a new dimension to the

study of human relations. To examine the relationship between speech

rhythms and brainwaves, it would be useful to have both taped speech and

brainwaves of the same person in my waveform program for comparison.

The next chart figure compares the amount of laughter of three

audiences following the same joke. Following that are four pages of speaker

switching made from the videocassette of the movie without laughter. The

last series of charts examine the relation of the film jokes to the whole-

audience laughter and the organization of the laughter itself.


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F igure 4. Amounts o f laughter. In the film the dying woman says to the others, "Gotta Cigarette?." Her doctor says, "You don't smoke," to which the Teply is, "Can't hurt now." Several hands silently offer her cigarettes while the doctor says "Ho ho ho ho" and the audiences laugh until she says, "Thank you." The first inch of the traces above is the "Can't hurt now" and the four traces represent about nine seconds.The "Thank you" is not included in the traces but follows immediately after.

The top chart is from the soundtrack with no audience laughter. The second is from the "least laughter" audience. The third is from die "middle" audience and the bottom chart is from the "most laughter" audience. This chart shows that laughter comes in waves and each wave is usually started with a loud "laugh starter." I will examine the organization of the third audience laughter in figure (3. u,

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Figure 5. The peak-to-onset relationship #1. Near the beginning of the film Roger's girlfriend rings his doorbell, awakens him with a cheery greeting and a present (an "African gravepost"). In their conversation she says, "How does it feel to be 38?" and he says, (sourly) "Oh great, Just think, in 2 years I'll be 40, in 12 years I'll be 50. I'm really excited about this. It's fun." She says, "Oh sweetie" and he says, "Hey! What am I doing with my life? What am 1 doing with my career? What am I doing with us?" She says, "You're boring us." Then they unwrap the present and she says, "It's an African gravepost. Is that gorgeous?" and he says, "You bought me a gravepost for my 38th birthday?"

In this and the following charts each of these speaker switches is measured. I have written die spoken words above die traces. In each case the peak-to-oaset is an even number of ±7 .4 Hz rhythmic beats. 1 have written the number of beats on each of the curved lines connecting the peak to the following onset.

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Figure 6, Thgjjfiak-iQ-ynsgt if2 , When Roger says, sarcastically, "It's fun." Peggy says "Oh, sweetie" and the peak-onset interval is two beats. From her "sweetie" to his "Hey..." the interval is four beats. These charts were made from the tape of the sound track to avoid the problem of separating the film words from audience laughter.

toCO

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A- Cr-dAXWi ut ^

anTldoing w i t h e r A f t T r ^ S ^ ^ p lu s e ! ’ P e g g y '^ys "" You' r c ^ r i l g u / " ^ ! , ^ ^ Wh<" am ' doi" 8 whh career'-' Wha.She begins her "You 're" on the ocgocng. shared r h y L Z Z Z s a Z Z M 3 "d()uh,c « " * < • 'peak. I douht that this could be heard by even the sharpest ears. ' beaI' lnterva,s at,cr Roger's preceding sound

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Figure 8. The peak-to-onset #4. After the present, an African gravepost, is unwrapped, Peggy says, "Isn't that gorgeous?" and Roger says, "You bought me a gravepost for my 38th birthday?" The interspeaker interval is sis beats and there are two things to notice. The first is another double onset. Roger's "You..." is double-started, first on the ongoing rhythm and again on the peak-onset interval. The second observation is that the marked "peak" is not the final peak on die chart. Microphones are more sensitive than human ears to hissing sounds. Sometimes a microphone is tested simply by blowing on it. Peggy's final "s" sound on "gorgeous" has, apparently, been recorded louder than the sound to which Roger's onset is related.

In each o f these five instances the peak-to-onset interval has been an even multiple of the underlying ±7.42 Hz rhythm. In most nonprofessional speech the peak-to-onset interval is an even multiple o f the ± 10 Hz rhythm. While I showed in Figure 3 that all three rhythms can be found in all speech, the peak-to-onset interval is one indicator of the "basic" rhythm. Other indicators are the frequency with which rhythmic intervals fall on major onsets (i.e. from the baseline) and the observation that trained speakers more often match beat points and sound peaks, which is not common in ordinary speech.

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one second

Now get out!SLAP That’s for bananas.cough closer please cough

F igure 9. The slap scene. Roger has come to vis it F.dwinna. his dying client, and is told about the plan to traasfer her soul. After witnessing an attempt to enact it he asks, "Is everybody here bananas?" Edwinna motions to him to come to her bedside, coughs las though to display her illness), asks him to "come closer," coughs again and then suddenly slaps him loudly and says, "That's fo r bananas. Now get out." The first question is: how do the coughs and die slap fit into the ongoing dialogue?

The top trace is from die soundtrack w id i no laughter and shows all die talk in the slap scene. I have written die words between the traces. Since die trace is compressed to fit the page, I have marked a one-second interval

The lower trace is from M r. Jones' "m iddle laughter" audience. The traces do not match because M r. Jones' battery powered taperecorder was running slightly slow.

The loud laughter begins immediately after the slap and continues after the onscreen talk a>

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slap

Figure 10. The slap and coughs. This chan is from Mr. Jones' tape (the lower trace in the preceding figure) but is less compressed and ends just after the laughter starts. The first peak on the chart after the slap represents two simultaneous voices: that of the actress saying, "That’s for..." and the shriek of a woman in the audience.

I have marked the 7.42 Hz rhythm below the trace to show that die onsets of the "non-speech" coughs and lire slap fit the underlying rhythm as though they were vocal items. The next figures will examine die laughter in more detail.

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T

A

Figure 11. The rhv thm o f the laughter. The lower o f these two traces is a continuation o f the upper one. The last rhythm marker below the upper trace is the same as the first rhythm marker o f the lower trace. The vertical marks below the traces are the 7.42 Hz rhythm.

The first peak in the upper trace is the slap and the end o f the lower trace is the end o f the laughter. The slanted slash in the lower trace is the point where the film talk ends. The vertical lines above the traces represent the 29.6 Hz rhydim (see Figure 2).

These two traces show that die rhythm set by the film talk has entrained the rhythm o f the laughter. There is also evidence that the laughter has emerged in pulses and is not a continuous, random "clapping noise.” There is also evidence that the faster 29.6 Hz is also maintained by the audience as a group.

When nty waveform program averaged the fifty continuous rhythm marks below the trace of the slap scene the rhythm turned out to be 7.41 Hz instead o f 7 42 Hz, a difference o f two ten-thousandths o f a second per rhythm beat coco

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Figure 12. Organization o f audience laughter #1. This chart is not compressed but it is more enlarged vertically to show die extent to which the rhythm interval can be found within the audience laughter: as both an underlying and peak-to-peak rhythmic intervals. The slash at die left marks die end of the film talk.

The film talk rhythm entrains the audience response, but when the film talk-sound stops, die audience members continue to entrain each other on the same rhythm, although audience members are not as rhythmically precise as the trained actors. When the film talk with its inherent rhythm stops, audience members can hear and are entrained only by laughter peaks. The rhythm marked below the trace is the ±7 .4 Hz of the preceding speech and best-fitted to the laughter. The marks above are the 29.6 Hz rhythm fitted to the peaks.

Since die recording was made from one audience seat, it is probable that this display represents laughter of people near each other.

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FifiUTC 13. Organization of audience laughter M2. This is another example o f laughter hut from a different audience and following the "Gotta cigarette" joke. The vertical lines at the bottom mark the 7.4 Hz rhythm; those at the top the 29.6 Hz rhythm.

I tetistyg that die experience o f being a participant in this tightly organized group behavior is an experience o f "a ffilia tion" (among strangers) that has a parallel in other group activities with shared underlying rhydims such as cheering (or clapping) at public events, disco dancing, choral or ensemble music-making, marching armies, etc. Perhaps it explains the "fun" in "funny" when the response is laughter.

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F igure 14. Clapping at a concert. Since the coughs and slap in the slap scene conform to an underlying rhythm and since audience laughter behavior is internally organized in a way that is related to a common rhythm, I found an audiotape (unrelated to Mr. Jones’research) that included audience clapping following a piano-playing performance by Keith Jarrett in Cologne, Germany. There was no recognizable rhythm to "trigger" the clapping but the audience clap sounds suddenly became rhythmically synchronized. I include the piece of the waveform that shows the transition only to show another example of audience self-organization.

1 believe that these rhythmic entrainment phenomena suggest an aspect of interpersonal and intra-group behavior that is not explicitly recognized by the participants or studied by researchers. Many questions emerge from this rhythm evidence, the first of which concerns the possible relation of these rhythms to brain rhythms. I f it can be shown that underlying speech rhythms match the frequencies of brain rhythms, it will be a step toward understanding such impressionistic concepts as "getting it together," sharing "vibes," or the matter of affiliation generally.

This concludes my consultant's report for M r. Jones.

I

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102

My first impression, after studying Professor Byers’ waveform charts,

is that they demonstrate a partially determining "variable" that must be

considered in order to understand the organization of conversational talk,

the relation of laughter to conversation, the relation of audience response to

film talk, the organization of group laughter, and, perhaps, the subtleties of

"affiliation."

My second impression is that the waveform charts show with great

precision what has been available only intuitively or impressionistically to

conversation analysts. The charts also, for me at least, show that some of

the questions or suspicions that have arisen for conversation analysis and

for me need to be rephrased. The question about whether audience is

organized by the film or by the audience is answered in an unexpected way:

both. And the recurring question about whether the audience should be

considered individuals or a "unit" is now resolved in the same way: both.

Most important, I think, is that the waveform charts represent a new

perspective on many aspects of human communication, a perspective from

which new kinds of questions arise. The perspective implies a form of

"context" that is both larger in that the identification of an underlying

rhythm appears to be a kind of biological umbrella that is over or across talk

(and/or laughter) events and smaller in that small fractions of a second can

make a difference that may be felt but not explicitly recognized.

According to the Byers research, most interpersonal talk has an

underlying rhythm related to the Alpha ( ± 1 0 Hz) rhythm but the recurring

rhythm in the film talk (and the laughter) is related to the ± 7 .5 Hz


103

brainwaves. W hy this difference in talk rhythms is divided this way is not

approached here but emerges as a puzzle.

It is commonly recognized that "timing" is an important aspect of

comic humor (and many other things) but now there is a reference (or two

references) for measuring that "timing." For example, after Roger's line,

"What am I doing with us," Peggy’s "You're boring us" begins eight

rhythmic beats later. This was "funny" and usually was followed by

laughter. But, as I think about it, if she had said, "You're boring us" after

only two rhythmic beats, it would not have been as "well timed" and less

funny. That is, the "meaning" of her reply would be different if the interval

had been different. On the other hand after Roger suggests that he and

Peggy get "M-d," and Peggy says, "If you can't say the M-word, you can't

do the M-Word," Roger says, impatiently, "Of course I can say..." I hear the

"impatience" in his reply interval-one rhythm beat or as a continuation of

her talk. (Byers made a chart of this but it was not included here for space

reasons.) That is, the "meaning" of his reply is related to it's carefully

"timed" placement in the talk stream.

In the same way, it seems to me, the precise "timing" within the

audience laughter must contribute "meaning" to the laughing occasion. And

this suggests, to me, the implied meaning in the not-uncommon expression,

"We had a good time. We laughed a lot." So the question arises: is

"laughing together" in this highly organized way the implicit "meaning" of

"We had a good time"? I suggest, again, that waveform analyses may give

substance to the common expressions, "being in synch," or "sharing good


104

vibes" or "getting it together." This offers some clarity and explicitness to

the conversation analyst's statement, "It appears that an occasion of

laughing together is an activity in its own right, an achievement of various

methodic procedures” (Jefferson, et al. 1987, p .158).

The conversation analysts were perceptive in sensing that "laughing

together" was "methodic," that laughter occurred in "pulsed bursts," and

that there were "laugh starters." I believe the waveform charts offer specific

confirmation of these. On the other hand Gail Jefferson’s belief that a

detailed phonological transcription of laughter was required to understand its

significance or organization in conversation seems unlikely since the relation

of laughter to the larger "conversation" or its internal organization appears

in the charts to be related to rhythmic time units that are not available to

even trained ears.

In the physical sciences the concept of "entrainment" is recognized

and in the social sciences entrainment takes such forms as peer pressure,

"following the leader," or "going along for the ride." The charts repeatedly

show how entrainment works in human interaction, both in dyadic talk and

in film-audience relationships--and probably within laughing audiences.

Waveform technology, therefore, gives the various kind of human

interaction research, including conversation analysis, a new tool.


CHAPTER VI

DISCUSSIO N-SUM M ING UP

105

This research has changed course many times since I first began to

plan it, and now, looking back, I see both my uncertainty about what I was

doing (which is doubtless reflected in this report) and the advantages that

can emerge from moving from one perspective to another. Perhaps the most

important "finding" in this research is the value of reconciling multiple

perspectives and discovering that no single perspective (or theory or

disciplinary bias or blind attempt at "objectivity") is the right one. Each of

the blind men were, from one perspective, right about the elephant they

were examining, but each was also wrong to assume that his perspective

allowed him to describe the whole elephant.

I began with the naive aim of contributing to "audience research" and

to do this by using conversation analysis as my methodological guide.

Almost immediately it became clear that I could not study audiences except

in relation to the events they were "audiencing." Then the direction changed

to the film-audience interaction or relationship. Conversation analysis was

then not a very useful guide here since the CA people did not consider

audience response to a film as "conversation." Although I keep putting my

data against conversation analysis, it has, in the end, been only a "foil" and

not really much used as a scientifically grounded base. This is partly

because the conversation analysis I first learned was a very limited version

of what has become a large field of interest pursued by several disciplines


106

and with a profusion (or confusion) of research approaches.

My attachment to conversation analysis did, however, have an odd

use in my research journey because it led me to asking whether or not I

could think of a film and audience response as a "conversation."

Conversation analysts already knew the answer to that question. Since the

film cannot "participate" with (hear and respond to) the audience there can

be no "conversation." Fortunately my "inappropriate" idea became the most

useful one since it obliged me to do two things. It obliged me to get data

from many audiences seeing the same film and it led me to looking where

no one had bothered to look. My observational data, for example, took on a

significance that would have been rejected by the early CA people and my

examination of the film's construction led me to recognize that the film

makers planned the jokes and pauses as though the film were talking to

audiences. Then, when the waveform component was added, it was

possible to see that audiences not only responded to the film as though they

were in conversation but were, in a sense, having a "conversation" among

themselves.

This, of course, led me to recognize that "conversation" is only a label

for a form of human talk communication that had become a research reality

to those who necessarily defined conversation as that talk form that fitted

their rules.

One result of all this was to oblige me to go beyond labels and

disciplines and look at "what was happening" with a kind of naive surprise. I

was, in fact, surprised at what emerged in the research journey. Journeys


107

are, in unscientific talk, supposed to be more interesting and rewarding than

the arrival at a predetermined end point. That was certainly the case for me.

I believe that the significance of this research lies less in specific

discoveries (although w hat I found in the waveform charts were specific

discoveries) than in the demonstration that moving among different

perspectives and looking at the larger wholes or frames I have called

contexts--and peering into the part-components of seemingly simple

relationships--is (or can be) a valid and productive mode of research. I

believe, however, that the multiple perspectives must eventually include a

cautionary perspective on one's own research journey lest it become

ungrounded and scattered.

From this larger point of view this research offers little that concerns

conversation analysis or comic movies or audience response research or

even the study of laughter. But it has implications for human behavior

generally and human relations in particular. I believe it also has implications

for that procedure called data collecting-where the research is supposed to

know in advance what is and is not data.

If I were either to "do this research again" or to "take the next step" I

would probably try to focus on a clear research question or goal. I would

like to know, for example, why some forms of talk fall on an Alpha-related

while others (performers?) fall on Theta-related rhythms. I would like to

know if "affiliation" (a version of intimacy) is reflected in the rhythmic

relations of interactants. I would be interested in trying to design

"experiments" that would be useful in studying either of these questions.


108

I have, through this research journey, been less interested in

contributing to the evolving edifice of science and more interested in the

larger questions about the nature of science and human curiosity itself.

Another implication that arises for me from this research is the

difference between what human's say and believe they are doing and the

version that emerges from the perspectives of others. For example, people

say they go to a comic movie to enjoy the movie but it has emerged, for me,

that they go to experience their relation to each other. And people say they

laugh at funny jokes, but I have come to believe that people enjoy laughing

together and go to comic movies where they can expect to be "entrained"

to laugh together.

Finally I think I should offer some kind of apology to conversation

analysis research. I know less about conversation analysis now than I

thought I did when I intended to use it as a methodological tool or

theoretical base. This is not from any disrespect for CA research but reflects

my increasing awareness of how little we understand about many of the

involvements that we have created as realities by giving them a name:

conversation, laughter, affiliation, comedy. I am grateful to conversation

analysis for, however inadvertently, giving me a jumping o ff place for my

research journey. I trust I have done no disservice to the sub-discipline and I

even hope that this research report will inform both the past and future

work of conversation analysts.


109

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Button, G. & Lee, J. (Eds.). (1987), Talk and Social Organization. Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, Ltd.

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