Laughing between the characters’ lines: voice-over film narration as a source of humour

This paper explores a hitherto unrecognised source of humour in film discourse: voice-over narration that generates humour for the viewer beyond characters’ interactions in the diegesis. It is argued that humour arises from the narrator’s extradiegetic discourse, with the diegesis co-shaping the humour to varying degrees. Based on a grounded-theoretic qualitative analysis of The Wonder Years , four categories of (un)intentional humour are identified: narratorial humour, self-compromising humour, narradiegetic clash humour and narradiegetic quasi-interaction humour. These categories are dictated by the interactional organisation of the voiceover narrator’s contributions in relation to diegetic interactions, which affects the central setup–punchline structure and the emergent form of humorous incongruity. Overall, this paper indicates an overlooked topic at the interface of film discourse pragmatics, humour research and narration studies, and it opens new avenues for analysing the interplay between film narration and humour.