Initiating shared laughter in multi‐party conversations

This study examines the conversational organization of shared laughter. Previous studies have shown that participants routinely create shared laughter through a sequence of first laugh invitation and second laugh response. The present study reports that, while in two‐party interactions such a sequence routinely occurs with current speaker providing the first laugh, in multi‐party interactions someone other than current speaker generally provides the first laugh. The distribution of “who Iaughs first” is influenced in part by conversational activities in which shared laughter gets embedded, such as teasing or story and joke‐telling. By letting someone else laugh first, current speakers in multi‐party interactions may orient to a bias against laughing at one's own laughables. By this distributional feature, multi‐party shared laughter comes closer in its organization to one‐to‐many communicative events, such as stand‐up comedy. Thus laughter may be most fully realized in its small group manifestations rather than as a one‐to‐one phenomenon.