The “Clinton Cackle”: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Laughter in News Interviews

Tanya RomaniukYork University

This paper discusses a previously undescribed phenomenon in broadcast news inter-views, namely the practice of interviewees laughing in response to an interviewer’s question prior to providing a substantive response. Specifically, it does so through an investigation of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (HRC) use of laughter in news interviews during her 2007 campaign for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Drawing on a conversation analysis framework, I consider two dimensions of HRC’s laughter: first, the retrospective dimension, arguing that HRC’s laughter acts as an implicit commentary on the interviewers’ questions, which also functions to undermine them; second, its prospective consequences—how laughter establishes a relevant context for a responsive next action. Ultimately, I demonstrate how both dimensions are relevant in varying degrees and given particularized features of the interactional context. Furthermore, it offers some important implications for subsequent analyses of laughter in broadcast news interviews as well as other interactional contexts.

INTRODuCTION

This paper offers a discussion of a previously undescribed phenomenon in broadcast news interviews (BNIs), namely the practice of interviewees laughing in response to an interviewer’s question prior to providing a substantive response. Specifically, it does so through an investigation of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (HRC) use of laughter in news interviews during her campaign for the Democratic nomina-tion for President of the United States. HRC’s laughter received some short-lived media attention, following a brief segment on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, which aired on September 25, 2007. During this segment, Stewart likened HRC to a robot with a robotic voice saying, “Humorous remark detected – prepare for laughter display.” A number of journalists and political commentators then offered their perspectives on what The New York Times columnist Patrick Healy coined the “Clinton Cackle.” Frank Rich, a liberal columnist for the same newspaper, said the laugh seemed to be her campaign’s way of responding to complaints that she is ‘too calculating and controlled’ and compared it to Al Gore’s long kiss with his wife Tipper during the Democratic National Convention in 2000. At the same time, presidential scholar Stephen Hess of George Washington University said HRC’s ability to laugh indicated she was becoming more comfortable as a candi-date. These and other comments are what led me to take a closer look at HRC’s laughter; however, the practice that I uncovered and its dimensions that I describe can no doubt be found in the talk of other interviewees, an issue I will return to in

Crossroads of Language, Interaction, and Culture © 2009, Regents of the University of California Vol. 7, pp. 17-49

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my concluding remarks. The data set, from which the examples will be drawn, consists of over 20 oc-

currences of HRC’s laughter in 9 news interviews broadcast and collected between September and December 2007. A complete list of interviews, including a descrip-tion of the interviewers, programs, networks and original airdates, is provided in Table 1. The data has been transcribed using transcription conventions commonly used in studies of conversation analysis (see Appendix A).

Table 1: List of News Interviews with HRC

Interviewer Program Network DateChris Matthews (CM) Hardball MSNBC September 16 2007

Diane Sawyer (DS) Good Morning America ABC September 18 2007

Bob Schieffer (BS) Face The Nation CBS September 18 2007

Joe Scarborough (JS) Morning Joe MSNBC September 18 2007

Chris Wallace (CW) Fox News Sunday FOX September 24 2007

Steve Doocy (SD) Fox Morning News FOX December 17 2007

David Gregory (DG) The Today Show MSNBC December 17 2007

Harry Smith (HS) The Early Show CBS December 17 2007

George Stephanopo-lous (GS) This Week ABC December 30 2007

The objective of this paper is to analyze representative examples of HRC’s laughter using a conversation analysis framework (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998; ten Have, 1999), with the goal of showing how the laughter’s meaning can be under-stood by the actions it accomplishes as well as the responsive actions it makes relevant. This attention to action requires a consideration of the local, sequential environments in which the laughter occurs (Glenn, 2003). As such, I consider two dimensions of laughter, or what HRC’s laughter seems to be ‘doing’ in response to an interviewer’s talk. First, I consider the retrospective function of laughter. That is, whenever HRC laughs at something in an interviewer’s prior question, the laughter acts as an implicit commentary on that question, or some aspect of it. A related issue concerns what types of questions get treated as laughable, as they

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are not evidently ‘humorous.’1 A common feature of the examples discussed here is that HRC produces laughter at a point in which the interviewer has leveled, or has begun to level, some form of criticism against her. Given this environment, I argue that her laughter functions to undermine the criticisms embodied in the interviewer’s talk and I distinguish cases that respond to interviewer’s questions after they are complete, from those that respond to in-progress components of questions such as statement prefaces. The second function of laughter I describe concerns its prospective consequences—that is, how laughter establishes the relevance of responsive laughter from recipients (cf. Jefferson, 1979). The ret-rospective dimension of laughter deals primarily with the issue of what is being laughed at, and the prospective dimension generally concerns what the subsequent interactional consequences of laughter are once it has been produced. Although this second dimension of laughter has received some attention in the analysis of ‘ordinary’ conversation (Glenn, 2003; Jefferson, 1984), it has not been considered in a context in which interactional roles are severely constrained by institutional mandates.2 Thus, I also analyze how interviewers generally resist the pressure to laugh in this particular interactional context, noting some important exceptions and differences depending on whether the views being expressed are those of the interviewers themselves or some third party. Ultimately, the analysis seeks to demonstrate how both the retrospective and prospective dimensions of laughter in this context appear to be relevant in varying degrees in each case. Furthermore, it offers some important implications for subsequent analyses of laughter in as well as other interactional contexts.

Laughter as Communicative Action

Despite commonly held beliefs about laughter, human beings do not laugh uncontrollably or randomly; rather, laughter occurs in orderly and systematic ways (Glenn, 2003). The majority of studies on laughter has tended to treat it as a response to external or internal stimuli rather than as a systematic, even strategic, form of communicative behaviour. Since Jefferson’s (1979) pioneering work on the organization of laughter in interaction, however, a number of conversation analytic studies have considered laughter as a communicative action, which is influenced by and contributes to social interaction (Edwards, 2005; Glenn, 2003; Haakana, 2001, 2002; Jefferson, 1984, 2007; Jefferson, Sacks, & Schegloff, 1987; Wilkinson, 2007). Such research has been carried out in a range of interactional contexts and has consistently demonstrated how laughter is a ‘systematically produced, socially organized activity’ (Jefferson et al., 1987: 152).

An important component of recognizing some of the social and communica-tive aspects of laughter is to consider it not exclusively as responding to humor but as marking its referent as laughable. Given that locating a precise laughable can prove analytically challenging, I follow an early observation by Sacks (1992: 745) that ‘laughing is the sort of thing that, when it’s done it will be heard as tied to the last thing said’. In this view, paying particular attention to where laughter

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occurs is crucial, in that the location of laughter can provide retrospective index-ing of the laughable (Glenn, 1989: 147). What one laughs at – or, put differently, what causes laughter – is an important dimension to consider in any analysis of laughter. At the same time, the issue of how laughter is responded to by recipients – or, its prospective consequences – is also worthy of attention. Adelswärd (1989: 118) argues that both of these dimensions of laughter may be relevant in particular instances of laughter to varying degrees, depending on the specific context. Indeed, what initiates laughter and how it is received are both complex issues that require close attention to the specific interactional context and the particulars of each in-dividual case of laughter. When such close attention is paid, it is clear that much human laughter occurs independent of humorous stimuli, or at least its connection to a humorous source is often not direct or explicit (Partington, 2006). Common characterizations of individuals’ laughter as ‘nervous’, ‘insincere’, or even ‘wicked’ suggest that there is something more to it than simply the perception of humor (Glenn, 2003: 23). Schenkein (1972: 344) argues, for example, that some of the interactional activities speakers can perform by way of laughter include conveying the non-seriousness of their previous utterance, or proffering (dis)affiliation, while hearers may likewise use laughter to demonstrate hearership or understanding of a speaker’s proposition, or to display (dis)affiliation. Though social approaches of laughter vary, one view of particular interest for the purposes of this paper treats individuals as ‘rule-orienting social beings who actively produce laughter at par-ticular moments in order to accomplish particular ends’ (Glenn, 2003: 3). Although some work has been done on the use of laughter and its accomplishments within particular institutional domains such as medical encounters (Haakana, 2001, 2002) and legal and workplace contexts (Adelswärd, 1989), the use of laughter in news interviews has not previously been explored.

Broadcast News InterviewsUnlike ‘ordinary’ conversation, the turn-taking system of news interviews

preallocates specific types of turns to speakers with particular institutional identi-ties, so that the institutional roles of interviewer and interviewee are expected to restrict themselves to questioning and answering, respectively (Greatbatch, 1988). Correspondingly, the ‘doing’ of interview is constituted and realized through the participants’ orientation to the interviewer doing questions and the interviewee doing answers (Schegloff, 1988/89). The popular belief that interviewees, and politicians as interviewees specifically, resist interviewers’ questioning is perhaps not surprising considering the adversarial nature of contemporary media interviews:

In news interviews – as well as…other forms of interrogation – journalists are drawn to questions that are unflattering, incriminating, or otherwise hostile in character. If answered straightforwardly, these can inflict damage on a politi-cian’s policy objectives, career prospects, and personal reputation…to avoid [such negative] consequences, interviewees may be motivated to be less than forthcoming in the face of hostile questioning (Clayman, 2001: 403-404).

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Clayman (2001) goes on to explain that politicians thus face a dilemma when being interviewed: they are expected to adhere to the specialized turn-taking system by answering the interviewer’s questions, and wish to be seen as cooperative and not evasive; however, they do not want their reputations to be damaged. Consequently, politicians have developed a range of strategies for overtly and covertly resisting the negative outcomes of interviews, both within the interaction and in subsequent media coverage, and scholars have documented many of these strategies in previ-ous work (Clayman, 2001; Clayman & Heritage, 2002b; Harris, 1991). Given that previous researchers have suggested that the act of laughing can convey a variety of actions other than being humorous – such as being apologetic, derisive, social, evasive, or conveying anxiety, joy or even ignorance (Foot 1977, cited in Glenn, 2003: 23) – prefacing substantive responses to interviewers’ questions with laughter may be viewed as one strategy interviewees can use in attempting to deal with the challenging nature of such questions. In the case of HRC, at least, it appears she treats laughter as an ‘interactional resource’ (Adelswärd, 1989).3

“Doing” LaughterIn order to consider the retrospective function of HRC’s laughter, it is neces-

sary first to consider the nature of the interviewers’ questions that precede it. As Steensig & Drew (2008: 7) point out, an apparently simple but crucial fact about asking a question is that ‘it is not an innocent thing to do’. In keeping with the adversarial nature of news interviews outlined above, interviewers’ questions are often of a disaffiliative nature; that is, they perform actions such as challenging, reproaching, complaining, criticizing, disagreeing, and so on (Steensig & Drew, 2008). The first example illustrates this kind of disaffiliative questioning, and comes from an interview on Fox News Sunday’s ‘Choosing the President’. The interview took place in September 2007, during a week in which HRC participated in a series of news interviews on all the major television network stations. During Fox’s special series, Chris Wallace (CW), long-time American journalist known for his confrontational style, interviewed each of the six Democratic candidates on a number of important campaign issues including the Iraq War and the Bush administration, Republican criticisms of the Democrats’ campaigns, and health care reform. In extract 1, CW begins the interview by suggesting that he and HRC are experiencing ‘an interesting bit of karma’ talking on the one-year anniversary of an interview he conducted with her husband, former President Bill Clinton (BC). Following this statement and without establishing any context, he shows a video clip from the interview in which BC says to CW: “you did Fox’s bidding on this show; you did your nice little Conservative hit job on me”. The video footage then cuts off abruptly and returns to a view of both CW and HRC on a split screen4 (shown in Figure 1) throughout CW’s first question (lines 1-3, extract 1) and the beginning of HRC’s response (lines 5-7).

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figure 1: k-he Heh Heh (line 5)

(1) fox News Sunday (September 24 2007): question by Chris Wallace 1 CW: Senator taw:lk about Conservative hit jobs, right-wi:ng 2 conspiracies, wh↑y do you: and the President have such a 3 hyper-partisan view of politics.4 (0.3)5HRC:→k-he Heh Heh heh heh heh heh h↑eh .hh £well Chris if you 6 had uh walked even a day in our shoes over the last 7 fifteen years I’m sure you’d understand.£ .hh 8 but y’know the real goal for our country right now is to 9 get beyo:nd uh partisanship and uh I’m £sure trying to 10 do my part£ .hh because we’ve got a lot of se:rious 11 problems that uh we’re trying tuh deal with12 this week I rolled out my: American health choices plan…

In this example, CW begins at line 2 with a direct and ‘accusatory’ form of hostile question design (‘wh↑y do you:…’) (Clayman & Heritage, 2002a). As Sacks (1992: 4-5) noted in his first lecture, why-type questions seek an account of something the questioner deems worthy of explanation. The justification for this question comes from the immediately prior video footage with Bill Clinton, and CW’s repetition of his phrase ‘Conservative hit job’ in line 1. He then expands on this phrase by making reference to ‘right-wing conspiracies’ (lines 1-2), an expression associated with HRC, originating from an interview in 1998 when she was asked about her reaction to the Lewinsky scandal. In combination with ‘hit jobs’, then, these expressions combine to formulate the negative characterization of HRC’s and her husband’s views as ‘hyper-partisan’ (line 3). This question is presuppositionally negative5 in that the wording presumes that their views are in fact hyper-partisan, a quality considered undesirable in politics due to its association with partiality and made extreme by the qualifying prefix ‘hyper-’ (note also CW’s production of this qualifier with emphatic stress on the first syllable). The end of this turn con-structional unit (TCU) – indicating a possible turn transition point, or transition relevance place (TRP) (cf. Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974) – is marked by the completion of the why-type question as the first part of a question-answer adja-

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cency pair, which sets up the expectation for a second-pair part, that is, a response (Schegloff, 1968). Less than 3-tenths of a second later,6 HRC prefaces her response with an initial laugh burst producing eight consecutive distinct open-mouthed laugh pulses (line 5). What is it, then, that HRC seems to be managing by ‘doing laughter’ at this juncture? If we consider the dimension of laughter as a ‘retro-sequence’ (cf. Schegloff, 1995 cited in Wilkinson, 2007), then its sequential placement (im-mediately following the interviewer’s question) indicates that HRC locates some aspect of CW’s turn as its source (e.g., ‘hyper-partisan’), thus treating his ques-tion as something laughable. Immediately following the final laugh particle, she produces a pre-continuation inbreath followed by the discourse marker ‘well’ (line 5), which is commonly used to indicate that the speaker is about to say something that may conflict with the content of the previous speaker’s utterance (Schiffrin, 1987). In further orienting to the dispreferred nature of her response (Pomerantz, 1984), it is interesting to note that HRC then addresses the interviewer by first name (‘Chris’), a highly recurrent practice that speakers employ when expressing ‘deeply felt opinions and personal feelings, particularly when such opinions or feelings are oppositional in character’ (Clayman, 2001: 441). Similarly, in an analysis of politi-cal news interviews in Australia, Rendle-Short (2007) finds that politicians tend to use address terms in dispreferred environments, particularly when responding to a specific line of unwanted questioning. In fact, she argues that a politician’s use of an address term at the beginning of a dispreferred response serves as a mechanism to maximize interactional distance between the question and its answer, a typical feature of dispreferred responses. Furthermore, she suggests the use of personal address terms operates on a social level as well. That is, by referring to the journalist using his/her first name, Rendle-Short (2007: 1518) argues, the interviewee orients to having a familiar, first-name relationship with the journalist, which mitigates the dispreferred nature of the response and thus minimizes the social distance between the interviewee and journalist. Why might a politician engage in such a practice? The author argues that it is essentially an issue of power—while the journalist has ‘power’ in terms of occupying the institutionally sanctioned interactional role of questioner, a politician also occupies a powerful institutional role, and one way of indexing that power in a particularly adversarial environment is through the use of a journalist’s first name. Returning to the first example, HRC engages in this practice as part of constructing a dispreferred response, prior to adding a characterization of her own: ‘if you had uh walked even a day in our sho:es over the last fifteen years I’m sure you’d understand’ (lines 5-7). Interestingly, the way in which she phrases this utterance actually accepts to some extent the terms of the question. Still, it is uttered through a smile voice, which continues to display the prior turn as laugh-able, while at the same time suggesting that the interviewer lacks the appropriate knowledge or experience to understand how such a perception might exist in the first place. Following this statement, HRC further indicates her disagreement with CW’s negative characterization more overtly by refocusing the question, implying that CW is in fact wasting time by focusing on partisanship; she knows what the

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real goal for their country is, namely, getting ‘beyo:nd partisanship’ (lines 8-9). Moreover, she ascribes agency to herself by shifting away from speaking on behalf of both her and her husband and toward focusing on what she is doing (lines 9-10). This portion of the response is also expressed through a smile voice reinforcing the challenge she has constructed up to this point. To summarize, her response not only challenges the interviewer’s capacity to know what is being presupposed by the question, but by prefacing it with laughter, she retrospectively casts the question as inapposite, thus marking disaffiliation from it (Heritage, 1998). Additionally, by laughing before the production of a dispreferred response, I would argue that the laughter is hearable as part of doing disagreement.

The second example in which to discuss the retrospective dimension of laugh-ter comes from an interview on Hardball, a talk show on MSNBC, one week before HRC’s interview with Chris Wallace. Though conducted in a similar format, this particular excerpt differs slightly in that the question posed by American political satirist, Bill Maher (BM), has clearly been rehearsed.

(2) Hardball (September 16 2007): question by Bill maher 13 BM: Senator Clinton. .phh A:ll the senators here except Senator 14 Obama .hh voted for the Iraq War resolution in 2002, .hh 15 saying that their decision was based on intelligence that 16 they believed to be accurate at the time. .hh 17 in other words (.) George Bush fooled you. .phh 18 Why should Americans vote(sh) for someone who can be fooled 19 by George Bush. 20 (1.0)21 HRC:→hehe hah hah hah hah hah hah hah .hhh well, Bill it was £a 22 ↑little more c(h)omplicated than that£ uh:m I sought out expert 23 uh=opinions from a £wi:de variety of sources.£ .h Uh 24 people insi:de and outside the government, uh people in my 25 husband’s administration. .hh uh and I think it is fair to 26 say that uh at the time (.) I made it very clear I was against 27 a preemptive war

At the beginning of this excerpt, BM produces a prefaced question (lines 13-16), which contains a statement preceding the question proper. Prefaced questions are commonly used in news interviews to provide background information for the interviewee and overhearing audience as well as to contextualize the question (Clayman & Heritage, 2002a). In this example, the prefatory statement provides a context that allows for the reformulation that follows (line 17). Specifically, BM explains that HRC, among all her Democratic opponents (except Obama), voted for legislation that allowed the Bush administration to go to war with Iraq (lines 13-14). He also introduces the senators’ reasons for voting in the manner they did; that is, ‘their decision was based on intelligence that they believed to be accurate at that time’ (lines 15-16). Without this background information, BM’s

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direct question ‘Why should Americans vote for someone who can be fooled by George Bush’ (lines 18-19) would appear extremely hostile because it would lack a sufficient basis for such a negative proposition. As Clayman & Heritage (2002a: 188) point out, interviewers must design their questions in such a way as to ‘strike a balance between the journalistic norms of impartiality and adversarialness’. In this instance, then, the statement preface is an essential resource that allows for BM to set the context (that is, HRC’s vote) and then reformulate that context into a critical proposition (‘George Bush fooled you’). Specifically, he introduces the reformulation with the lexical phrase ‘in other words’ (line 17), and then paraphrases the first preface statement (representing HRC’s words) in his own words: ‘George Bush fooled you’ (line 17). By reformulating the preface statement in this way, the proposition is transformed into a politically damaging one, on which he bases his final direct, hostile question (lines 18-19). BM completes this final question with a falling intonation on the last syllable ‘Bush’, marking the end of the first-pair part to a question-answer adjacency pair. Again, HRC prefaces her response with a unit of laughter, this time composed of nine distinct pulses (line 21), therefore treating the interviewer’s question as embodying a perspective to be laughed at, and thus, disagreed with. The post-laugh position is again occupied by a pre-continuation inbreath, followed by the discourse marker ‘well’, which orients to the dispreferred nature of her response and signals disagreement with the interviewer’s reformula-tion. In addition, HRC makes use of the recurring interviewee practice of referring to the interviewer by first name (‘Bill’), which frequently occurs within a TCU as part of the dispreferred nature of a response (Rendle-Short, 2007). She then sug-gests that BM’s question offers a simplified version of the event under considera-tion. Again, this commentary on the question is expressed through a smile voice, contributing to the marking of its content as something laughable: ‘it was £a little more complicated than that£’ (lines 21-22). Rather than answering the question as to why Americans should vote for her, HRC instead responds to the reformulated prefatory statement (line 17), offering a lengthy explanation of her perspective on the decision (lines 22-27, further response has been omitted from the transcript). It is also worth noting how she incorporates other participants into that decision (lines 22-25), putting forth the suggestion that she was not the only one, and even experts were ‘fooled’, to use BM’s terminology.

In these two excerpts, I have considered the retrospective dimension of laughter in cases where HRC produces laughter at the completion of an inter-viewer’s question, or a TRP, before providing a substantive response. While it is interesting to note that, in both cases, the interviewers’ questions are critical or hostile toward HRC, I do not wish to suggest that HRC always responds to challenging questions in this way; rather, it is one way in which she responds to challenging questions. Also worthy of mention is the striking similarity of the form of these laughter-prefaced responses. In both cases she first produces a series of distinct laugh particles, which treat the prior turn as laughable, and frames the ensuing challenge. Then, she makes use of specific lexical markers to orient to

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the dispreferred nature of her response, signaling her disagreement with the prior utterance and providing commentary that challenges the terms of the question and the questioner’s ability to know or understand what is being presupposed by the question. This second element of her response is produced through a smile voice in both instances, which prosodically reinforces the non-seriousness of the ques-tion. She then displays a marked shift – prosodically and discursively – to answer the question, or at least to present herself as ‘answering’. In these instances, then, HRC’s laughter functions as an implicit commentary on the prior question, one that retrospectively treats the question (or some aspect of it) as laughable, and thus undermines the criticism embodied in it.

The retrospective dimension of laughter can also be considered in the next examples, where HRC’s laughter does not occur at a TRP (that is, after the com-pletion of the first-pair part of an adjacency pair), but rather occurs within the interviewers’ TCU, specifically during prefaces to questions. The first of these examples is taken from another interview that occurred during HRC’s September media blitz, when she had announced her plan to provide universal healthcare for every American.

(3) Good morning America (September 18 2007): question by Dianne Sawyer28 DS: let’s uh ask some questions from a couple of angles=we 29 can: now, the Re↑publicans as you know were out in fo:rce 30 saying first of all you’ve t[alk[ed a[bou[t .hhh [incr[easing [taxes]31 HRC:→ [heh[hheh[heh[hehheh [heh [heh [°heh°]32 DS: =on those wh[o make[two hun[dred[fifty[thousand do]llars to pay for it, 33 HRC:→ [h h [h h [h h [h h [h h °uh°-]34 DS: also reducing waste to pay for it, 35 but th↑ey say (.) for instance (.) medicare is already (.) sixteen 36 trillion dollars over what has been funded .hh and it’s gonna cost 37 a l↑ot more than you say and here are some of the Republicans.

((clip played in which Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, comments on HRC’s new healthcare plan: ‘it’s a European-style socialized medicine plan, that’s where it leads, and that’s the wrong direction for America’ – frame shifts to Republican candidate, Rudolph Guiliani, also providing commentary on HRC’s healthcare plan: ‘this is essentially the Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton ap-proach, which is let’s see if we can build socialized medicine’))

38 DS: can you re:a↑listically keep it at a hundred and te:n (.) bi:llion?39 (1.3)40 HRC:absolutely. and y’know my question for:: (.) uhm (.) 41 my uh frie:nds on the other side is=well what is their answer fo::r (.)42 uhm mo:ving our country forward toward quality affordable healthcare 43 for everyone.

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At the beginning of excerpt 3, the interviewer, Diane Sawyer (DS), has already asked HRC some information-seeking questions about her healthcare proposal. At line 28, DS shifts the agenda by projecting an action that she will ‘ask some ques-tions from a couple of angles.’ Unlike the first two examples, when DS begins a first preface to her question, here she places a degree of distance between herself and the more overtly critical remarks she goes on to describe by ascribing them to some of HRC’s opponents, namely the Republicans (line 29). At this point, DS has not yet offered any commentary on their behalf; she has only mentioned that the Republicans were ‘out in force’. Given the conflicting relationship between Democrats and Republicans, HRC could likely infer that what follows will be a negative assessment, and it is this inference which may account for the placement of the laughter. The point at which DS is about to describe arguments put forward by HRC’s critics on their behalf (immediately following ‘first of all’, line 30) marks the onset of HRC’s production of a laugh unit consisting of eight consecutive laugh pulses (line 31). This does not mark a TRP for HRC to begin her response, as DS had just indicated that she was beginning a series of arguments put forth by the Republicans (‘first of all’). Moreover, this unbroken unit of laughter actually occurs across the first part of the Republicans’ criticism of HRC’s health plan, ‘you’ve talked about .hhh increasing taxes’ (line 30). As DS continues to take her turn at talk (line 32), HRC produces an extended exhalation at line 33, which is hearable as a sigh, especially given the slight vocalization at its end (°uh°).

Given that the turn-taking system of conversation displays a strong prefer-ence for one party talking at a time (Sacks et al., 1974), and that the normative interactional framework for news interviews is question-answer sequences, it is interesting to consider how HRC is able to negotiate these constraints through her use of laughter during the interviewer’s turn. Because laughter is not turn organized, its occurrence is not restricted to particular places, such as post-question completion, as answers generally are in the context of news interviews (Sacks, 1992: 745). Con-sequently, HRC’s production of laughter in an environment in which the interviewer has exclusive rights to talk (line 31) enables her to operate on that talk while it is being produced instead of waiting until the question is completed. DS only reaches the end of her question (line 38) after a video clip has been played, which shows Republican candidates, Mitt Romney and Rudolph Guiliani, independently offering criticisms of her plan (e.g., that it is a form of ‘socialized medicine’; that it is ‘the wrong direction for America’; that Hillary Clinton is associated with controversial documentary filmmaker, Michael Moore). Once HRC begins to respond to this question by turning it back on her opponents (or, ‘friends’ as she puts it; line 41), her laughter can be understood as having provided a particular stance toward the Republicans and their criticisms, which treats her opponents and their opinions as laughable. Here she displays this stance during the interviewer’s question preface, further mitigating the force of the critique embodied within it since her laughter occurs while it is being produced.

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There is, of course, another relevant dimension of laughter that has not been discussed in relation to any of the examples presented thus far, namely its prospective consequences. In the first study of the organization of laughter in talk-in-interaction, Jefferson (1979) considered the relationship between laughter and some of its possible consequences. Specifically, she argued that laughter had the capability of generating a sequence in interaction, which could be heard as an invita-tion to recipients to laugh in response. Furthermore, she posited that the production of laughter did not always result in recipients accepting the invitation to laugh; rather, she suggested that there were a range of options recipients could draw upon in responding. For example, recipients could accept the invitation (i.e., produce laughter following the invitation); they could decline the invitation (i.e., provide post-invitational speech over or following the laughter); or they could remain silent.7 This third option, however, was not considered sufficient for declining a laugh invitation; rather, Jefferson (1979: 83) maintained that a recipient must actively decline to laugh in order to terminate the relevance of responsive laughter. This invitational quality of laughter that Jefferson initially described is perhaps better understood today as a general prospective consequence of laughter—the production of laughter establishes the relevance of responsive laughter by a recipient.

While this prospective dimension of laughter has been explored in relation to some conversational activities (e.g., what Jefferson (1984) calls ‘talk about trou-bles’), the context of news interviews presents at least two additional issues that have not been addressed in previous work. The first of these issues concerns the fact that BNIs are characterized by a participation framework (Goffman, 1981) that differs from ‘ordinary’ conversation. Given that news interview talk is expressly produced for a broadcast audience—‘the primary, if unaddressed, recipients of the talk’ (Heritage, 1985: 100)—an interviewee’s production of laughter may not neces-sarily establish the relevance of responsive laughter for the interviewer as much as it does for the audience. That is, in the majority of cases, if an interviewer laughed in response to an interviewee’s laughter, which is produced during an interviewer’s question, such laughter would probably be treated by the participants – and heard by the overhearing audience – as problematic. After all, interviewers generally design their questions to be taken seriously by interviewees. In any case, regardless of whether an interviewer treats an interviewee’s laughter as an alignment-seeking invitation, the overhearing audience may nevertheless treat it as such, and therefore laugh along themselves from the comfort of their living rooms. The second issue of relevance here relates to another general feature of news interviews—the notion that interviewers are expected to project a neutralistic stance (Clayman, 1992). Clayman (1988, 2006) and other researchers (Greatbatch, 1988; Hutchby, 2006) have found that a common practice in BNIs is for interviewers to display—or ap-pear to display—this position of ‘formal neutrality’ by formulating questions that reference the views, attitudes, or concerns of others, be they particular groups, individuals or the general populace (Clayman & Heritage, 2002b: 120). As such, if an interviewer maintains a neutralistic posture in the course of asking a question in

which an interviewee produces laughter, it seems more likely that the interviewer might provide responsive laughter, or that responsive laughter from the interviewer is of possible relevance.

Returning to excerpt 3, then, with these issues in mind, HRC’s laughter within the interviewer’s question preface can be seen, at least to some extent, as establish-ing the relevance of responsive laughter from the broader audience (lines 30-31). Given that DS has begun to express the views of some third party (namely, the Republicans), it is also possible that HRC’s laughter seeks an affiliative response from the interviewer. So, how DS treats this laughter is interactionally relevant. When HRC begins to laugh during the first part of the Republicans’ criticism of her healthcare plan, DS is looking down at some papers on her desk (shown in Figure 2). Once HRC begins to laugh during ‘t[alk[ed’, the interviewer takes a deep inbreath (shown in Figure 3) and then lifts her head and gaze to HRC, as if to say ‘I am going on with this question if you don’t mind’ (Figure 4).8 Throughout DS’s production of the question preface, DS does not hold HRC’s gaze; rather, she faces downward (shown in Figures 2 and 3). Interestingly, once HRC begins laughing, DS raises her head to look directly at HRC and carries forward with the laugh-declining question, thus, terminating the relevance of laughter. This is achieved without delay, as DS pursues the topic of the question preface and does not acknowledge HRC’s laughter. Instead, she looks up at HRC with a facial ex-pression that not only conveys that she will continue, but that casts a look at HRC as if to say ‘hey now, you know my job is to stay neutral’. Despite the fact that DS terminates the relevance of laughter immediately, HRC still manages to ori-ent to the laughability of the Republicans’ views while they are being presented, which also serves to challenge the seriousness of the question preface and treats the Republicans themselves as laughable.

Figure 2: first of all you’ve t[alk[ed a[bou[t (line 30)

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figure 3: you’ve t[alk[ed a[bou[t.hhh (line 30)

figure 4: [incr[easing [taxes] (line 30)

The next example, which demonstrates how the issues of responsive laughter and journalistic neutrality are relevant to and consequential for the interaction, comes from an interview on December 17, 2007 with Harry Smith (HS) on The Early Show.9 At the time of the interview, HRC had just received an endorsement from the Des Moines Register, the local daily morning newspaper of Des Moines, Iowa. This was a significant moment for her campaign as one of her opponents, Barack Obama, had become increasingly popular in the polls, and the Iowa Caucuses—considered the first major electoral event of the nominating process—were scheduled for January 3, 2008. Prior to this segment, HS had just reproduced a portion of the endorsement, which explained how it was unfortunate that many Americans still hold negative perceptions of HRC as a result of her failed attempt at health care reform in the 1990s. He then asked whether HRC felt she still had to overcome such perceptions, but her response did not deal with this issue. Instead, she explained that the most important thing for her was to keep pushing forward and to continue to make positive changes in peoples’ lives. Given that she did not adequately address the issue of negative perceptions, the interviewer proceeds with a follow-up prefaced question, reproduced in excerpt 4.

(4) The Early Show (December 17 2007): question by Harry Smith 44 HS: here’s the thing though. 45 so one of the rubs about your campai:gn:=they say it (.) 46 feels like it’s focus-group driven:, that it’s too: run too 47 tightly, that [.h [people in Iowa don]’t get to see=

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48 HRC:→ [uheh[hih hih h↑ih hehheh] 49 HS: =e[nough of the [re::al] you::?=50 HRC: [.hh [u(h)h::] =well th[at’s cert-=51 HS: [>to run counter to< 52 what you just sai[d=53 HRC: [well that’s certainly not my imp(h)r↑ession.(.)54 HS: right (.) 55 HRC: t’s not the first time I’ve disagreed with the p(h)ress= 56 HS: =k[hhuh57 HRC: [and I £p(h)robably don’t think it’s the last time£58 HS: u[hhn59 HRC: [.hh I-I am so:: grateful for the support that I have…

Interestingly, while the interviewer wishes to continue a discussion of nega-tive perceptions, he does not do so in a hostile or antagonistic manner. Rather, he begins with a question preface describing one of the ‘rubs’ about HRC’s campaign (line 45). This is a rather euphemistic expression, considering a word like ‘com-plaints’, ‘critiques’, or ‘arguments’ could have been used to describe the ensuing criticisms. The choice of this term lessens the criticism and thus contributes to a comparatively friendly interaction (compared with excerpts 1 and 2, for example). Furthermore, before launching into the assertions about her campaign, HS ascribes them to an anonymous third party (‘they say’, line 45), which could refer to ‘people in Iowa’ (line 47) but does not necessarily do so (i.e., it could be simply that ‘they’ refers to a different third party, who believes her campaign does not allow people in Iowa to see the ‘real’ her). In any case, HS offers three critical perspectives on HRC’s campaign but not in a way that suggests they are his own views. Instead, he says that ‘they’ say that it ‘feels like’ it is ‘focus-group-driven:’, that it’s ‘run too tightly’ and that ‘people in Iowa don’t get to see enough of the re::al’ her (lines 45-47; 50). The use of ‘feels like’ also minimizes the force of the critique, as it is more indirect than the construction would be if it were omitted. In combination with ‘rubs’, these features highlight the collegial nature of this interaction (again, compared to excerpts 1 and 2), which helps to establish the relevance of recipient laughter in this particular case. Moreover, what seems like a series of assertions (lines 45-50) is actually a declarative question, signaled by the final rising intonation on the declarative statement (Heritage & Roth, 1995), ‘people in Iowa don’t get to see enough of the re::al you.’ But HRC does not wait until the end of this TCU and a relevant TRP to produce a response; instead, she begins to laugh after HS has introduced two of the criticisms. It is interesting to note that when HS completes the first criticism, ‘focus-group driven:’, HRC signals her disagreement by nodding and continues to do so through the entire course of the second criticism ‘ that it’s too run too tightly.’ HS’s utterance is produced with a continuing intonation contour and is followed by the complementizer ‘that’, which indicates that there is more to come. As she has already been signaling disagreement physically (by nodding), it is

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at the point when she can anticipate a third criticism (cf. Hutchby, 2006: 150) that she begins to laugh (line 48; Figure 5).10 Similar to the previous example in which the interviewer proceeded to talk thereby terminating the relevance of responsive laughter, here the interviewer physically withdraws from the interactional scene precisely after she begins to laugh (represented in Figures 6-9). In Figure 5, as HRC produces the first distinct laugh particle, the interviewer’s gaze is directed at her and he is physically attentive to this response. After this particle is produced and he continues with ‘people’ he withdraws his gaze and physically begins to withdraw his head as well (Figure 6). By the time he is describing the people he is talking about, that is, those ‘in Iowa,’ he raises his arm as a form of physical deixis refer-encing other Iowans (Figure 7). Once this reference is physically made, he begins to return to her direction (Figure 8), but still does not return his gaze until the end of the laugh unit (Figure 9). This physical action marks a significant withdrawal, and thus, active termination of the relevance of his responsive laughter, whereas in the previous example, the interviewer simply gazed at HRC temporarily. Recall from the previous discussion that an important part of terminating the relevance of laughter requires more than the recipient’s restraint from laughing; a recipient also has to do something to terminate the relevance of laughter. In this particular segment, HS does not align with HRC by producing laughter himself; rather, he, in fact, terminates the relevance of responsive laughter by physically removing himself from the interaction at precisely the point in which she seeks alignment. During this physical withdrawal, he also pursues the topic of his question preface. In this way, the interviewer terminates the relevance of responsive laughter and remains neutral.

figure 5: HS: [.h [people in Iowa don’t] HRC: [uheh[hih hih h↑ih heh heh] (lines 47-48)

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figure 6: HS: [.h [people in Iowa don’t] HRC: [uheh[hih hih h↑ih heh heh] (lines 47-48)

Figure 7: HS: [.h [people in Iowa don’t] HRC: [uheh[hih hih h↑ih heh heh] (lines 47-48)

Figure 8: HS: [.h [people in Iowa don’t] HRC: [uheh[hih hih h↑ih heh heh] (lines 47-48)

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Figure 9: HS: [.h [people in Iowa don]’t HRC: [uheh[hih hih h↑ih hehheh]

While the prospective consequences of laughter in this example have been discussed, the retrospective dimension of laughter can also be considered. After the first-pair part of the question is complete (line 49), HRC provides a verbal reply again indicating an orientation to a dispreferred response ‘well that’s cert-well that’s certainly not my imp(h)r↑ession’ (lines 50; 53) (see excerpts 1 and 2). She continues to display this disagreement by stating ‘it’s not the first time I’ve disagreed with the p(h)ress’ (line 55) and ‘I £p(h)robably don’t think it’s the last time£’ (line 57). Indeed, a common element of HRC’s response following laughter is to produce some form of qualification of the question through a smile voice (as in excerpts 1, 2 and 6), which combines with her laughter to retrospectively cast the previous utterance (i.e., what has been asked or prefaced in asking) as laughable and, as a result, diminishes the question’s seriousness. In fact, in almost all of the examples where HRC laughs, the verbal response that follows her laughter contains initial remarks expressed in this smile voice. This type of verbal response not only displays disagreement with the substance of the question preface (in this case, the remarks of the ‘press’), it also provides the grounds for an understanding of her laughter as highlighting this disagreement (Schegloff, 2007), and projects that particular affective display as relevant. Although other nonvocal forms of embodied action (e.g., facial expressions, nods) can perform a similar function, they are not treated in the same way. That is, her laughter is such a salient feature of the interaction that it is actually able to disrupt the trajectory of the interviewer’s turn in addition to demonstrating its laughability.11 This possibility is demonstrated in the next example, in which HRC participates in an interview with American journalist Bob Schieffer (BS), one week after HRC had announced her plan to provide universal health care ‘for every American’ (see excerpt 5).

(5) Face the nation (September 18 2007): question by Bob Schieffer60 BS: and we’re back now with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton=last 61 week was a big one for you Senator in that you uh rolled out your 62 new: health care plan (.) uh something the uh (.) uh Republicans 63 imme:diately said is going to lead t[o s[ocialized medicine? ]

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64 [he [he he he he he he he]= 65 BS: (.) u[h it would [require among uh] (.) (h)heh=66 HRC:→ [.hh h h [↑Heh he he he °he°] 67 BS: =[it would require] am[ong other things that every American w]ould=68 HRC: [ .h h h h h ] [hheh heh ↑heh I’m sorry Bob He he he]69 BS: =have to: [(.) would] have tuh buy (.) health insurance. you’re 70 HR [.hh uh:-]71 BS: proposing to pay for it-[b]y rolling back some of the Bush= 72 HRC: [right]73 BS: =uh tax cuts .h h↑ow do you force people to buy health 74 insurance Senator?

In this excerpt, BS introduces a question preface in order to set the agenda and provide important background information for the overhearing audience, ‘last week…you rolled out your new: health care plan’ (lines 60-62). When the inter-viewer begins to introduce a critical remark about her plan, he first attributes it to a specific third party, namely, some of her opponents, ‘the Republicans.’ Once he begins to offer their characterization of her plan ‘something the uh (.) uh Republicans imme:diately said is going to lead to’ (lines 62-63), HRC begins to laugh (line 64). In this particular example, HRC’s laughter occurs in the turn recognition space, that is, BS has not yet produced the criticism so she laughs here in anticipation of a negative action (i.e., the Republicans’ response to her health plan). BS is about to offer a critical perspective that the Republicans hold, and by laughing at this juncture, it seems probable that she seeks alignment with him—and the overhear-ing audience—in treating these views as something not to be taken seriously. At the same time, her laughter also functions as an implicit commentary on whatever the Republicans might have to say about her health care plan, one that orients to their remarks as laughable. The first full burst of laughter can be seen across lines 64-66 (‘he he he he he he he he .hh h h ↑eh he he he °he°’), where BS describes the Republicans’ proposition that HRC’s plan will lead to ‘socialized medicine’ (line 63). This unit of laughter may also be divided into two distinct units (‘he he he he he he he he + .hh h h ↑Heh he he he °he°). The onset of the second unit is marked by an inbreath, and subsequent prosody indicating an upgrade to the first unit as she continues to pursue uptake, while the unit-completion is marked by decreased amplitude on the final particle. This division is important for identifying the precise position in which she receives responsive laughter—albeit brief—from the interviewer. BS first begins to display a mild acknowledgement of her affective stance by smiling (shown in Figure 10), which often accompanies a recipient’s responsive laughter (see Haakana, 2002). He then produces a marked inbreath and corresponding outbreath through a single laugh particle (shown in bold in line 65 of excerpt 5 and in Figures 11 and 12 below), as he briefly looks down, away from the viewer (Figure 11). It is immediately following her second burst of laughter that this single laugh particle is produced.

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Figure 10: u[h it would (line 33)

Figure 11: (.) (h)heh= (line 33)

Figure 12: (h)heh= (line 33)

Figure 13: =[it would require] (line 35)

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Figure 14: =[it would require] (line 35)

In addition to causing BS’s temporary suspension of his neutralistic posture, HRC’s laughter also disrupts the trajectory of his turn. Prior to BS’s responsive laughter, the interviewer had begun to describe the requirements of her healthcare plan (‘it would require…’, line 65) for the duration of her second unit of laughter (line 66). This second unit causes such a disruption that the interviewer is forced to restart his turn. At line 67, BS successfully reiterates what he had begun at line 65 (‘it would require among other things…’), which is hearable as a reiteration due to its syntactic parallelism (cf. Clayman, 2006: 234). During this reiteration, HRC then produces another marked inbreath before beginning to produce another unit of laughter. What is striking is that BS laughed following the original formu-lation in line 65, and it is precisely at that same point in the reiteration at line 67 that HRC begins to laugh again (line 68). Having already successfully achieved uptake at this exact point, she tries again, though this time she is not successful. As BS regains composure, he lifts his face and returns his gaze outward (Figures 13 and 14), immediately pursuing the topical issue of his question preface. At this point, seeing that she has not received additional uptake, HRC then offers an apol-ogy, ‘I’m sorry Bob.’ Interestingly, this apology indicates her orientation to the improper interactional move she has conducted by disrupting the trajectory of the interviewer’s turn before he had finished. Again, she refers to the interviewer by first name, in this case reasserting the familiar terms they are operating on. She then produces what appears to be a laugh terminal inbreath at line 70, in overlap with a repeated portion of BS’s utterance (‘would have to’, line 69). Following this, he is able to continue with the rest of the preface to his first-pair part of a question-answer sequence, which marks the end of his TCU, ‘how do you force people to buy health insurance Senator?’ (lines 73-74). Since the question is framed as being motivated by ‘the Republicans’ response, it is possible that HRC seeks responsive laughter from the interviewer – in addition to the overhearing audience – to align with her at the very content being reported. By doing so, she not only challenges the seriousness of the report, but she also receives momentary feedback from the interviewer, which indicates at least a temporary alignment on his part. This example contrasts with the laughter in the first two excerpts, where there was less likelihood that she sought responsive laughter from the interviewers, given that what was be-ing laughed at was something the interviewers had themselves said.

In the analysis offered so far, I have described two dimensions of interviewee laughter in news interviews and have demonstrated the sequentially produced, lo-

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cally responsive character of each dimension. First, I have considered examples of laughter at question completion, or a TRP, where the retrospective function of laughter as a commentary on the prior question is readily apparent. Second, I have discussed cases in which laughter occurs in the course of the interviewer’s turn. Here the laughter also functions as an implicit commentary on the talk that is being produced, treating it as laughable. A number of scholars have noted that, in news interviews, interviewers tend to pose questions that are disaffiliative in nature—this is also apparent in many of the questions exemplified in the preceding examples. As such, HRC’s laughter acts as a preliminary response to the criticisms embodied in these kinds of questions, specifically, as an attempt to undermine their interactional force.

I have also considered the prospective consequences of laughter, particularly how laughter establishes the relevance of responsive laughter from the interviewer and from the overhearing audience. The extent to which laughter provides the rel-evance for a response from the interviewer (in addition to the overhearing audience) relies to some extent on whether the interviewers present particular views as their own or as those of some third party. That is, it seems unlikely that an interviewee would seek affiliative laughter from an interviewer, given that interviewers are ex-pected to display a neutralistic posture. However, when the content of interviewers’ questions are attributed to some other individual or group, interviewers are able to distance themselves from those views and the line of questioning they provoke. It seems possible, at least, that interviewers may be more likely to provide responsive laughter when interviewee laughter occurs in these cases.

In the final example (excerpt 6), at first glance, the interviewer appears to be putting forth views of some third party, which may increase the likelihood of the interviewer providing responsive laughter. However, close attention to the details of the interviewer’s talk, and his response, demonstrate how responsive laughter, at least from the interviewer, is an unlikely occurrence in this case. The interview that this last example comes from occurred the same morning as the interview discussed in excerpt 4, when HRC had just received the endorsement from The Des Moines Register. Prior to this excerpt, the interviewer, David Gregory (DG) began by sug-gesting that HRC’s campaign had lost momentum over the previous six weeks, quoting her husband as saying that it would be a ‘miracle’ for her to win the Iowa caucuses. In her response, HRC disagrees with the idea that her campaign has lost energy and enthusiasm and shifts focus to the endorsement. However, this does not seem to be the direction DG wishes to take, as evidenced by his response.

(6) NBC One-on-one on The Today Show (December 17 2007): question by David Gregory (DG)75 DG: so Senator if-if people l[ook at the last (.) six weeks and they might] 76 [ ((cheering in background from video clip)) ]77 question how Hillary Clinton responds to a crisis .hh or how she 78 handles pressure. (.) .hh and they might >point to the fact that you

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79 complain:ed about thee< .h all boys network o[f presi]dential politics in 80 HRC: [((clears throat))]81 DG: the wake of the Philadelphia debate .hh 82 they [would se- [they would see uh] yur-=83 HRC:→ [heh heh heh [huh huh °huh huh°]84 DG: =yur husband complaining about me:dia coverage of you=they’d 85 see your campaign .h raise the past [d ]rug issue (.) and [u ]se by Barack 86 HR: [u-] [e-]87 DG: Obama or question him for .h his ambition (.) an they might say 88 well this is what we really don’t li:ke about politics is that fair:?89 (2.8) 90 HRC:.hhh well I £don’t think that’s at all a:ccurate representation of my 91 campaign:£

At the beginning of this excerpt, HRC is on the receiving end of a lengthy prefatory statement by the interviewer that offers critical interpretations of recent issues related to her campaign (lines 75-88). At a quick glance, such criticisms of her campaign appear to be attributed to a third party (‘people’ in line 75; repeated use of ‘they,’ lines 75, 78, 82, 84, 87). However, there is an important structural difference between the design of this utterance and those that put forth the views of others, as in the previous examples (excerpts 3-5). Comparing this particular third-party reference with another example from excerpt 4 (reproduced below) helps illuminate the difference.

92 HS: one of the rubs about your campai:gn:=they say it (.) 93 feels like it’s focus-group driven:

In this example, HS is clearly presenting the views of others on their behalf: ‘one of the rubs about your campai:gn:=they say it feels like it’s focus-group driven…’ (lines 92-93). That is, X says Y. The subject of the verb is ‘they’ (i.e., not the in-terviewer) so the interviewer is clearly stating something someone else has said, and not expressing his own opinion. In excerpt 6, the question preface begins with the conjunction ‘if’ (‘if people look at the last six weeks they might question how Hillary Clinton responds to a crisis…’), marking the clause as a conditional. That is, if X, then Y. Although ‘people’ are the subject, the structure of the sentence as a conditional presents the information as hypothetical, so the interviewer is offering an opinion of what people ‘might’ think/do. This idea is strengthened by the fact that DG shifts from the more neutral reference to his interviewee as ‘Hillary Clinton’ (line 77) to the more direct references ‘you,’ ‘yur husband’ and ‘your campaign’ (lines 78; 84; 85). The question preface that these references are a part of is also more direct in that he presents the interpretation as ‘fact’ (line 78) (compare with HS’s use of the mitigating ‘feels like’ in the other interview at line 93).

Once DG has begun to launch this direct form of criticism ‘they might point

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to the fact that you complain:ed about the all boys network of presidential politics in the wake of the Philadelphia debate’ (lines 78-81), he signals his intention to continue with an inbreath and begins to offer another critical interpretation by mak-ing reference to the same subject, namely ‘they’ (line 81-82). At this point, HRC begins to laugh. Again, though the precise laughable component cannot be easily discerned due to a brief lag in response time, the point is that HRC treats something as laughable in this turn and does not wait until a TRP to respond. Instead, she produces a brief laugh unit consisting of seven laugh pulses and this is simultane-ous with a small portion of the interviewer’s talk (lines 82-83). The full repetition of the utterance DG began before HRC started to laugh shows that he is in some way responsive to this laughter (‘would se-they would see uh yur’). In this instance though, while her laughter does establish the relevance of responsive laughter from the overhearing audience, it is less likely that she expects the interviewer to affiliate with responsive laughter himself, considering the views expressed are presented as his own. In fact, HRC displays disagreement with what he says and challenges him by laughing during the course of his remarks. Her facial expressions (visibly withholding laughter to the point that she has to clear her throat to contain it, shown in Figure 15, and in the transcript at line 80, and rolling her eyes, as in Figure 16) clearly convey this disagreement with the negative propositions he suggests.

figure 15: network o[f presi]dential (line 73)

figure 16: they’d see your campaign (lines 78-79)

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Interestingly, once DG has formulated these criticisms, he returns to the frame of what people ‘might say’ through direct reported speech; this is marked by the use of the first person plural pronoun ‘we’ (line 88) and a slight shift to a ‘heightened level of animation’ in the delivery of the talk (Holt 1996, cited in Clayman, 2006: 222). At this point, then, the interviewer has returned to distancing himself from the substance of his remarks in the hopes of drawing an adequate response. How-ever, HRC does not respond as though the views reported in his question belong to some other ‘people’. Again, this interpretation becomes clearer by comparing her response with the one in excerpt 4 (reproduced below).

94 HRC: it’s not the first time I’ve disagreed with the p(h)ress=

Prior to this response, the interviewer had only referred to the views of some anonymous third party, ‘they say’, yet here she states that ‘it’s not the first time [she’s] disagreed with the p(h)ress’ (emphasis added). So this example not only shows that the interviewer presents the information as belonging to some third party, but also that the interviewee interprets the question formulation that way (i.e., the perspective he offered is of the press, not the interviewer). By contrast, returning to the current example, HRC responds by saying: ‘I don’t think that’s at all a:ccurate representation of my campaign:’ (lines 90-91). Here, she does not necessarily interpret the prior utterance as someone else’s representation; rather, the deictic pronoun ‘that’ references the previous account, which DG presented as though it was his own opinion. It is also interesting to note that the design of DG’s final questioning component ‘is that fair:?’ (line 88) is one that permits HRC to agree with the proposition of fairness, rather than disagree. Although the preferred response is agreement, to provide an affirmative response would be to acknowledge the criticisms leveled against her, her husband, and her campaign in general. Instead of providing a ‘type-conforming’ response (cf. Raymond, 2003) by answering yes or no, HRC orients to the dispreferred nature of her response signaling disagreement, again, beginning with the discourse marker ‘well’, and continues by producing her response through a smile voice (lines 80-81). Both the structure and content of this disagreement parallel those of her responses in examples (1) and (2), where she challenges the interviewers’ abilities or capacities to know what they claim or to represent her in the ways they do. Similarly, in this example, laughing before producing a dispreferred response also marks it as a preliminary to ‘doing’ disagree-ment. Moreover, HRC’s laughter illustrates the retrospective dimension in that her affective display treats DG’s turn as embodying a perspective to be laughed at (e.g., ‘all boys network’) and disagreed with, and thus, works to undermine the criticisms it embodies. At the same time, HRC’s laughter also provides for the relevance of responsive laughter. However, it seems less likely that the interviewer would laugh in response given that he constructed the question in such a way as to indicate his own point of view. While the overhearing audience may nevertheless align with HRC and provide affiliative laughter in response, the interviewer terminates its relevance by actively pursuing the remainder of the question.

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CONCLuSION

This paper has offered a preliminary analysis of interviewee laughter in the context of BNIs. Through an examination of HRC’s laughter in news interviews, I have attempted to describe some of the patterned ways in which laughter occurs, the varying degrees to which its retrospective and prospective functions may be relevant, and some issues that arise as a result of this particular institutional context. Given that the turn-taking system for news interviews is designed for interviewees’ answers to be responsive actions relevant only on the completion of a question (Clayman, 2001), it is illuminating to consider how HRC negotiates this constraint through her use of laughter. Operating on the interviewer’s talk while it is being produced allows HRC to provide implicit commentary on the talk without waiting until question completion, and prior to providing a substantive response. In this way, HRC demonstrates how laughter can be used as an interactional resource for interviewees in the context of news interviews. I should point out that I am in no way suggesting that the contexts described in this paper are the only ones in which HRC makes use of laughter in news interviews, that the particular functions of laughter described here are exclusive to her, or that these are the only functions that laughter performs. Clearly, different uses of and contexts for laughter warrant further investigation. In the context of BNIs, at least, the practice described in this paper is one that other interviewees deploy in similar circumstances. In fact, another example of this practice by a different interviewee occurs in an interaction described in Clayman’s (2001) article on the various strategies interviewees employ in re-sponding to journalists’ tough questions in news interviews (see excerpt 7).12

(7) uS, 5 October 1988, Bentsen-Quayle Debate95 IR: hhhh Senator you have been critici:zed as we all know::96 for your decision to stay out of the Vietnam war:: (0.3)97 for your poor academic record [.hhhhh but more troubling98 DQ: [((laughs)) 99 IR: to so::me are some o’thuh comments that’ve been made by people 100 in your own party. teh .hhh just last week 101 former Secretary of State Hai:::g said that your pi:ck (0.2) 102 was the dumbest call George Bush could[’ve ma:de103DQ: [((laughs))

In this example, the interviewer (IR) employs a familiar form of disaffilia-tive questioning, and the interviewee, Dan Quayle (DQ), produces laughter at two points within that questioning (lines 98, 103). Both laugh particles occur as some form of criticism has been introduced, (e.g., ‘your poor academic record’), each placed in environments similar to those where HRC’s laughter occurred. Given the apparent parallel between these examples, it seems that there is no doubt that laughter is one interactional resource interviewees make use of in order to mitigate

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the force of an interviewer’s adversarial questioning before providing a substan-tive response. While further research into this practice in the context of news interviews is certainly warranted, so too is work in other institutional contexts, in which interactional roles are also shaped and constrained by institutional identities. For example, Adelswärd (1989) found that in job interviews, applicants laughed more frequently than interviewers, just as West (1984) and Hakaana (2001, 2002) both found that patients laughed more often than physicians in medical interviews. While I suspect that it is also more likely that interviewees laugh more often than interviewers in BNIs, this hypothesis, and others concerning the use of laughter in other institutional contexts, is worthy of exploration. Indeed, detailed analyses of laughter and its interplay with other verbal and nonverbal actions lead to a deeper understanding of the range of meanings it can convey in social interaction.

ACkNOWLEDGEmENTS

I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to a number of people who helped me work through many of the ideas presented in this paper at various stages of its develop-ment. In the early stages, thanks especially to the crew at our data sessions at the University of Toronto, and to Dawn Matthews, for sharing her expertise on the transcription of laughter with me. Later on, I received invaluable feedback and support from a number of conference attendees at CLIC 2008, including Steve Clayman, Candy and Chuck Goodwin, Lori Labotka, and Geoff Raymond; and at York, from Susan Ehrlich and Kristina Hollinger. Special thanks to Jack Sidnell for initially encouraging me to pursue this topic and for his continued sup-port in my training in CA. Finally, comments from the journal significantly helped me in thinking about this paper, in particular, and the phenomenon of laughter, more generally. Of course, any remaining problems are my own.

NOTES

1 As Glenn (1989: 147) rightly points out, ‘virtually any utterance or action could provoke laughter under certain circumstances’. While some utterances seem to be designed specifically for inviting laughter (e.g., the telling of a joke, see Sacks, 1989), it is difficult to discern what counts as a laughable or not, and what makes some particular utterance humorous (a term that overlaps but is not synonymous with ‘laughable’) is often equivocal (Glenn, 2003). It seems quite clear that, in the examples presented in this paper, the immediately preceding ut-terance would not be considered humorous by overhearers. It turns out that stud-ies of laughter that deal with humor exclusively are actually of limited relevance in understanding most cases of laughter (Partington, 2006). 2 On the institutionality of broadcast news interviews in Britain, see Greatbatch, (1988), in the United States, see Clayman & Heritage, (2002b), and on broadcast news interviews in general, see Heritage & Greatbatch (1991).3 I would argue that laughter, in this case, should only be seen as a ‘poten-tially powerful’ interactional resource, given that subsequent media coverage

Clinton Cackle 43

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described HRC’s laughter as a ‘cackle’. While other commentaries and their broader ramifications fall outside of the purview of the present discussion, I plan to explore these issues in another paper. 4 As is the case with many news interviews featuring politicians during election campaigns, HRC is not physically co-present in the interaction; rather, she is actually participating in the interview via live broadcast from her home in Chap-paqua, New York.5 See Ehrlich and Sidnell (2006) for a detailed discussion of questions that em-body presuppositions.6 There is actually an approximate 0.7-second delay between CW’s questions and HRC’s responses, most likely the result of a sound transmission problem so I have subtracted this amount for the transcription. 7 This example differs slightly from the cases Jefferson described in that the recipient is also the current speaker, and, in her cases, the laugh units were also offered at post-utterance completion and not within the course of the recipient’s turn.8 In news interview broadcasts in which the participants are not co-present (excerpts 1-3, 5, 6), participants regularly direct their gaze toward the television monitor, which is taken to represent gaze at their co-participant, as in ‘ordinary’ conversation.9 Although the format of this interview differs from all the other examples in that the participants are co-present – sitting in a diner in Des Moines, Iowa – the participation framework still includes the overhearing audience given that it is broadcast on television, so the questions and answers are still produced with that in mind.10 HRC no doubt makes use of these and other kinesic displays (e.g., lateral headshakes, eyeball rolls, etc.), which convey important information about how she understands the interviewer’s talk while it is being produced (Goodwin, 1980); however, a detailed account of such displays and their contribution to the organization of the participants’ actions are beyond the scope of the present paper. 11 I am grateful to Geoff Raymond for making this observation.12 As Clayman (2001: 429) points out, political debates are not officially labeled ‘news interviews’; however, these particular forms of interaction proceed on a similar basis in that moderators or panelists (who are also usually journal-ists) ask questions to candidates just as interviewers do to interviewees in more traditional interview contexts. Despite the fact that Quayle’s use of laughter in this example was not discussed in Clayman’s article, I am exceedingly grateful to Steve for not only drawing my attention to this example but also for allowing me to use it here.

APPENDIx A: TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS

Transcription conventions are based on and slightly adapted from Jefferson (2004)

(.) period in parentheses indicates a brief pause (less than one tenth of a second)

(1.2) numbers in parentheses indicates length of pause in secondsyes. period indicates falling intonationyes, comma indicates continuing intonationyes? question mark indicates rising intonationyes! exclamation mark indicates a particularly animated tone↑yes↓ arrows indicate shifts into especially high or low pitchYES capitals indicate noticeably increased amplitude in speech°yes° superscripted zeroes indicate noticeably decreased amplitude in speechyes underlining indicates emphatic speech (pitch and/or amplitude)= equal sign indicates contiguous speechye- dash indicates a halting, abrupt cutoff[ left bracket indicates the onset of overlapping speech] a right bracket indicates the point at which overlapping utterances

end: colons indicate sound lengthening (the more :: the longer the sound)>yes< inward arrows indicate increased speech that is noticeably faster <yes> outward arrows indicate decreased speech that is noticeably slower(yes) single parentheses indicate transcriber’s best guess ((yes)) double parentheses indicate additional details of the interactional scene( ) empty parentheses indicate indecipherable hh indicates aspirations (the more hs the longer the breath), including laughter.hh indicates inhalations (the more hs the longer the breath)y(h)es h within parentheses indicates within speech aspiration, possibly

laughter£yes£ pound sign surrounding talk indicates smile voice

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Tanya Romaniuk is a doctoral student in Linguistics at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her Master’s thesis focused on the construction of gendered identities in political debates, and her current research interests include discourse analysis; feminist linguistics; political discourse; and issues of language, gender, leadership, power and identity.

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