Page 186 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

164 Meredith Marra and Janet Holmes

will have no effect on a hopper blockage. She characterizes Sam unmercifully as
dumb eh (line 1) and then uses a typical expletive to signal her astonishment at
his stupid behaviour why the fuck is he banging the dust extraction pipe (line 4).
Ginette then ruthlessly exposes Sam to ridicule by reproducing the exchange
she conducted with him in a way that clearly demonstrates his lack of common
sense. Ginette represents herself as asking an apparently innocent question
what’s the matter Sam (line 11). Sam’s response hopper’s blocked powder’s not
coming through to the head (lines 13–14) is then directly juxtaposed to her dev-
astatingly direct challenge exposing his illogical behaviour so why are you
banging the dust extraction pipe (line 15), providing much amusement to her
audience. Ginette has set Sam a trap into which he neatly falls. Ginette finishes
off by wickedly mimicking Sam’s dim-witted response as he finally gets the
message oh (line 16). Sam is thus presented in the final exchange as an idiot who
cannot see the stupidity of his behaviour until Ginette spells out for him quite
explicitly that his actions are not well directed to solving the problem. Focus-
ing on individual shortcomings is quite acceptable in this community of prac-
tice, and is in fact a common strategy for ensuring team members keep up to the
mark.
The team works 12 hour shifts which begin with an early 6am briefing meet-
ing. One of Ginette’s typical strategies when team members arrive late is to use
humour to signal that this has been noted e.g. good afternoon sue at a 6am meet-
ing! Dressing down another late-comer she calls out nice of you to join us, were
you busy making babies last night? Her humour often has this kind of raw edge,
as do the interactions among other team members – jocular abuse is the normal
coinage of their everyday workplace interaction (Holmes and Marra 2005).

4.3. The influence of community and ethnicity

Humour contributes to the distinct characteristics of a workplace team. Teams
develop different attitudes to humour and tolerate different amounts of humour
at work; distinctive topics of amusement develop in different communities of
practice; and teams develop regular verbal humour routines, as well as different
styles of humour. Holmes and Marra (2002b) identified distinct workplace cul-
tures based on the amount, type (single utterance or extended sequences), style
(contestive vs supportive) and construction (collaborative vs competitive) of
humour, and found that these dimensions provided a means of constructing a
distinctive humour configuration for each workplace. These dimensions also
provide the basis for comparing the two workplaces described in this paper.
Compared, for example, to many Pa ¯keha ¯ government departments we have re-
searched, there is a high level of humour in both these workplaces, especially in
regular staff meetings. However, the humour in the Ma ¯ori workplace is gen-
erally relatively supportive and collaborative compared to the more contestive