Humor and argumentation in everyday talk

This paper explores the relationship between humor and argumentation in everyday talk at three different levels: first, theoretically, by examining argumentation approaches in relationship to conversational humor; second, methodologically, by asking for the potential projection of the classical operational background (deduction, analogy, causality and so on) into the analysis of comical moves; and third, empirically, by showing the plausibility of finding argumentative traces in everyday, spontaneous comical utterances. As a central point of our exposition, we went back to the work of Olbrechts-Tyteca (1974) as a conceptual support for a common operational background both of humor and argumentation. We state that the discussion of those three levels is relevant for understanding how arguments work in everyday, humorous talk.