Non-verbal humor and joke performance

AbstractMany jokes fall outside the province of script theory, because they depend on performance in various ways. Interactional features of the joke performance, along with pantomime, gestures, voice shifts, and so on, require modes of description separate from the verbally oriented script theory. There are significant differences between the written joke text and the oral joke performance, and these differences cast doubt on the simple extendibility of script theory from written joke texts to the spoken joke performance.