Investigating Conversational Humor in a Talk Show: “Dorehami”

Despite the importance of humor as one of the cultural and social elements, most studies in this field have examined humor out of its context, mainly limited to the analysis of canned jokes, whereas conversational humor is the product of a common interaction between the speaker and the audience. In light of this limitation, the present study sought to investigate the conversational humor in Persian. The data were randomly collected from an Iranian talkshow called Doorehmi which was aired on Nasim television channel in 2018. Then, the conversations between the host and the male and female guests were analyzed based on Dynel’s (2009) framework of conversational humor. The results showed that male guests used more humor strategies (n=258) than femal guests (n=220).  Moreover, male guests used more witticism, anecdotes and banter compared to female guests, while female guests employed banter, witticism, anecdotes and self-denigration more than male guests in their conversations. Also, the guests did not use the put-down strategy in their interaction with the male host, and self-denigration was absent in the discourse of the male host.