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Article published In: ‘Only joking’: Negotiating offensive humour in interaction
Edited by Chi-Hé Elder, Eleni Kapogianni and Ibi Baxter-Webb
[Pragmatics & Cognition 32:1] 2025
► pp. 8–38

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(Un)intended offence

Speaker meaning and discursive scales in the negotiation of offensive humour

ORCiD logo with link | The University of Queensland
 | The Open University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with The University of Queensland.

Published online: 26 September 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.24019.hau
Abstract
A frequent response to someone taking offence in response to conversational humour is to claim the utterances in question were ‘not serious’, ‘taken out of context’, or that any offence taken was ‘unintended’. Yet in some instances such claims are construed as inadequate or irrelevant. In this paper we consider why that is the case. Building on a detailed analysis of incidents in which ostensibly joking utterances are construed as offensive, we propose that offence is a fundamentally scalar phenomenon: not simply in the sense of the joking in question being open to evaluation as more or less offensive, but with respect to the morally ordered scope of that offence. The degree to which perceived offences become impervious to claims that any offence caused or taken was ‘unintended’ is a function of the scope of the spatiotemporal scales invoked through the joking itself and subsequent responses to it.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Conversational humour, intentionality and offence
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Scaling and offensive joking
    • Case 1.“Let’s hope Ebola works”
    • Case 2.“Greek mate”
    • Case 3.“I’ve hired Indians”
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (103)
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