This study investigates interaction between native Japanese speakers in food-related storytelling, focusing on how participants share their food and culinary experiences in the past and present humorously, deploying linguistic devices, prosody, laughter, and embodied actions. Building on studies of storytelling, food talk in interaction, laughter, and humor, I explore how humorous laughter is used to accomplish three actions in humorous storytelling: to display “surprise,” to “ridicule,” and to express “funniness” (Nakamura, 2002). I show that ridicule laughter was used to recount episodes about the story character’s poor cooking skills or failure to cook or do the dishes, and funny laughter was used in stories about story characters’ eating behaviors that were contradictory, unusual, or inappropriate for the occasion and in stories about unexpected or extraordinary ingredients in food or dishes in a meal. I also demonstrate that story recipients actively contributed to the humor by bringing surprise laughter to the storytelling to upgrade the storyteller’s assessments in funny or surprising stories and by using exaggeration and metaphor in their response comments to transform the characterization of surprise or complaint stories into humorous ones. This study illuminates the interactional process through which participants collaboratively co-construct humorous food storytelling in talk-in-interaction, by elucidating how storytellers and story recipients co-experience incongruity between their predictions and reality, collaboratively (re-)discover humor in the event together, and achieve mutual understanding of the different social actions accomplished by humorous laughter. It reveals that humorous food-related stories are told based on fixed ideas, knowledge, cultures, social norms, and identities that the participants share about food aspects among their group members. It suggests that humor in food talk dynamically changes in the interaction among co-participants in social and interactional contexts and that food humor is continuously modified, as we expand our food experiences and revise our concepts related to food.
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