Post 6_Irony and intersubjectivity

I’ve been in Bloomington for three years, yet I still find jokes the most impenetrable thing to me. More often than not, I was left wondering what was so funny and keenly felt myself most excluded as a culture outsider when the native teachers and colleagues of mine naturally cracked jokes to one another and burst into dramatic laughter during classes or breaks. Sidnell (chapter 4) helps to interpret my conundrum. This is also why I find example 16 the most difficult case to understand. If it were not for the elaborate analysis of the excerpt, I would have totally lost my mind as to what was happening between the two interlocutors. Suppose that I run into their conversation, would I feel as bewildered and excluded as I usually do when jokes are cracked? I suppose so. In order to understand the ironic nature and the “laughing point” of this interaction, both parties are expected to understand the difference between a country club and a stuffed shirt (this is also an idiomatic expression that excludes outsiders), the difference that makes “pack a lunch and buy you a martini” so funny. Be it jokes, ironies or allusions, it takes a shared past, resituated in a local real time to achieve the intersubjective understanding of them, as is concluded by Sidnell that “irony provides a particular vivid illustration of the way in which intersubjective understanding is a contingent achievement, accomplished on a turn-by-turn basis, as a by-product of other activities in which the participants are engaged.” It is the local, contingent, and sequential nature of conversation as interaction and action that serves to achieve the intersubjectivity. My difficulty in understanding irony, or jokes in general, a good counterexample, is therefore caused by the disruption of all these chains that lead to intersubjective understanding.

While I was reading Sacks (1992, Lecture 10), I was wondering whether I was reading a transcribed lecture on conversation analysis or psychoanalysis. How often can we see our own (not just neurotic people’s) poor sense of reality when we say “One good turn deserves another,” or “God’s mill grinds slowly but sure,” because we have mistaken Class 2 rules (the normative rules) as Class 1 rules (the causal rules) with no time-bounds, awaiting the natural consequences of those actions which were actually violative of the former? And how often do we live infant like with a projected operative parent or adult setting rules for us as prophecies? This is the mindset in which “positive things are treated not as contradictions with what your parents told you, but as the rise which will make the fall even more dramatic.” These great takeaways are elicited by a look at the accountable action of calling for help from strangers. However, intriguing as these analyses are, I find myself disoriented in the end as to where this kind of conversation analysis is going to take us. To see the structure of an accountable action or to see the driving force behind these actions?