Candidates’ humour and the construction of co-membership in job interviews

In this article, we draw on audio-recordings of authentic job interviews to explore the various ways in which candidates use humour to establish, confirm or claim co-membership with the recruiter. We not only analyze whether these humorous comments are successful, but also how candidates use humour to construct various identities. We found that the humorous comments are all oriented to the construction of personalized – instead of professional – identities and that their success could be related to the various discourse types in which they occur. Overall, humour may contribute to the construction of multi-dimensional identities for candidates