Negotiating seriousness and playfulness through laughter in Italian informal gatherings

This article investigates how participants in informal conversation shift between seriousness andplayfulness, and how these changes are locally achieved through laughter. Drawing onethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (CA), the study offers a detailed examination of a 90-minute video-recorded dinner among three Italian friends. Rather than approaching laughter as a set ofpsychological functions or as an index of emotional states, the analysis focuses on how participantsthemselves display orientations to seriousness and non-seriousness in the unfolding of a conversation.The paper shows, through three excerpts, how laughter retrospectively transforms potentially delicateactions into playful ones, how it contributes to the collaborative establishment of humorous frames, andhow it is mobilized to negotiate alignment in storytelling. Through this analysis, the study demonstratesthat laughter is a sequentially placed and a multimodally coordinated practice through which participantspublicly configure their interactional stance. While limited to a single event, the analysis offers insightsinto the fine-grained machinery through which Italian speakers in informal conversation manage stanceand relational intimacy.