Humor as Narrative Method: Identifying Moments of Incongruous Storytelling as Openings for Collaborative Authorship

• In Event: The Transgressive Potential of Humor Across Learning Spaces: Laughter, Critique, and Moments of Rupture

Abstract

Objectives: Play-based coauthorship is a seemingly amorphous project by which multiple stakeholders convene to compose a cohesive narrative (Burroughs, 2014; Tan et al., 2017; Simkins and Steinkuehler, 2008). Processes of coauthorship are particularly relevant in role-playing games (RPGs) – immersive storytelling games that prompt players to assume character identities and embark on collaborative adventures (Gygax & Arneson, 1974). While contemporary scholarship on gaming literacies has identified how play-based composing unfolds across laminated spatialities (Garcia, 2020) and intertextual resources (Author 1 et al., 2021), there is scant research on how coauthorship is discursively produced through gaming. Thus, I ask: How do moments of humor generate opportunities for coauthorship in a virtual role-playing community?

Theoretical framework: This paper draws upon humor studies (Author, in press; Gimbel, 2018) and conversation analysis (Goffman, 1974; Heritage, 2012; 2013; Sacks, 1987; Schegloff, 2001) to understand how humor mediates collaborative, play-based composing. Specifically, I trace moments of humorous play that feature narrative incongruity – namely, moments when “people discover there’s an inconsistency between what they expect to happen and what actually happens” (McGraw & Warner, 2014, p. 7). Using conversation analysis, I consider how moments of incongruous humor generate follow-in directives (Bottema-Beutel et al., 2022) for participation and improvisational storytelling.

Methods and data sources: This study is part of a three-year collaboration with an educational nonprofit organization named EdQuest (all names pseudonyms). EdQuest facilitated extracurricular programming that taught youth social skills and storytelling practices through gaming and role-play. During the 2021-2022 academic year, I facilitated an online course for EdQuest titled The Worldbuilding Workshop. Six adolescent boys enrolled in the course and took turns facilitating six-week RPG campaigns. This paper examines a campaign created by a participant named Olly. Data generation included game artifacts and Zoom recordings of play sessions – totaling nine hours of audio and video data. Data analysis occurred in three phases: 1) identifying moments of incongruous storytelling in the transcripts, and 2) determining the conversational sequence organization of humorous interactions, and 3) analyzing how participants’ humor functioned as follow-in directives for peers to engage in joint storytelling.

Findings & Significance: Participants frequently made intertextual references (e.g., The Marvel Cinematic Universe, Magic: The Gathering, etc.) from beyond Olly’s campaign to provide humorous, incongruous commentary on the cogenerated RPG storyline. Oftentimes, these comparisons and jarring juxtapositions signified discursive bids for narrative improvisation. In these moments, participants negotiated the unfolding plot points of the campaign. More than just compositional invitations, humor also signified consensus when proposed actions resulted in widespread laughter and uptake. These findings help forward implications for both practitioners and researchers. Educators might reconsider humor as a compositional event in which multiple stakeholders negotiate emergent storytelling. Researchers might reflect on how they code and analyze humor as a discursive phenomenon that signposts robust literacy practice.

Author

• Alex Corbitt, Syracuse University