Laughter in the White House: The rhetoric of humor in US-American state dinner speeches

In political discourse, White House State dinner speeches constitute a genre that aims at strengthening the bilateral relationship between nations. Among the rhetorical strategies used by US presidents to establish a good international rapport, a significant role is played by humor. Combining political discourse analysis with the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), the present article investigates discursive forms and functions of jocular presidential utterances based on a dataset of 87 state dinner speeches. The study covers oratory by seven US presidents during a time span between the years 1986 and 2025, adopting a qualitative approach. The results are complemented by selected quantitative data concerning the occurrence of laughter in the transcripts. As is demonstrated, presidential humor can be speaker-, hearer-, or other-oriented, referring either to the heads of states as individuals or to the national collectives. Humor mainly fulfills a self-deprecating and affiliative function, thereby underscoring the presidents’ likable personality and the emotional bond between the international allies.