ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses mode adoption and its role in humorous discourse. It describes some conversational norms and the role of the listener, and examines how listeners respond to humor in conversation. Humor comes in many forms and is employed under a wide variety of circumstances. Daily conversations among friends are likely to include indirect comments that are meant to convey some degree of humor. The intimacy and common ground that is shared between friends makes peer conversation a safe space within which to play with humorous language. Studies of naturalistic conversations have examined the rates of verbal irony production and results indicate that forms of verbal irony are used on 7" or 8" of conversational turns. Mode adoption is, in essence, about adopting a broad manner of speaking, a manner that has been established via the joint involvement of the speaker and listener.
