“That kind of pants?!”: designedly ambiguous deadpan delivery of a possibly nonserious turn in multiparty Japanese conversation

Work on conversational humor often focuses on the use of laughter, smiling, and other contextualization cues used to frame an utterance or turn as nonserious. However, a possibly nonserious turn can also be delivered in a deadpan manner, with few or no such contextualization cues. Deadpan delivery of a possibly nonserious turn results in ambiguous framing of the turn for its recipients. In this paper, we use multimodal conversation analysis to analyze a single case from multiparty Japanese conversation in which a possibly nonserious turn is delivered in a deadpan manner and its recipients attempt, through the use of other-initiated repair, to resolve the ambiguity. We show how the producer of the possibly nonserious turn manipulates the repair work in order to generate humor. We also show how the possibly nonserious turn, and responses to it, can be seen as a type of collaborative conversational humor in Japanese, which can be referred to as manzai-like humor. This paper thus contributes to two relatively under-researched areas of conversational humor: 1) deadpan delivery of a possibly nonserious turn, including the ambiguous framing inherent in such delivery and how recipients attempt to repair this ambiguity, and 2) collaborative manzai-like humor in Japanese conversation.