That match was “a bit like losing your virginity”. Failed humour, face and identity construction in TV interviews with professional athletes and coaches

This paper explores the under-researched topic of failed humour in the context of public-facing media interactions. While most previous pragmatics research has focused on the support strategies employed by conversational partners when classifying humour attempts as successful or failed, this paper acknowledges that in public facing media interactions, the participation framework is more complex, raising interesting questions about how and to what extent humour can be seen to succeed or fail. Employing a socio-pragmatic approach, we aim to highlight the complexity of humour in public-facing interactions, by drawing on media interviews with professional athletes and coaches. Our analysis illustrates how humour attempts can simultaneously succeed and fail with different members of the broader participation framework. However, our particular focus is the implications of failed humour in this context on identity construction. Considering that an attempt at humour is also an attempt to make certain identity claims, any humour that fails has potentially detrimental effects on identity construction. This is perhaps more problematic in public-facing media interactions, where failed humour is particularly face-threatening and may challenge the public image of those who attempted the humour