270 accounting for who would or would not be able to understand Hawai‗i comedy. In
contrast to th is, ―white washed‖ emerged as a category-bound attribute of being non-
Local. This ideological contrast between Local and non-Local became even clearer when the focus group participants discussed different kinds of multivocal humor. The
participants also st ylized Hawai‗i comedy as affective comedy, talking about the cultural
specificity of Hawai‗i comedy and orienting to Local normativity. The comedians also generated meta-
performance talk to treat being Local as ‗natural,‘ ‗fixed,‘ or ‗expected.‘ In other words, both the focus group participants and the comedians constructed who
non- Locals are by talking about how Locals would interpret Hawai‗i comedy.
7.2 Implications of the study
The dissertation highlighted the interactional function of stylistic variati on in Hawai‗i
comedy. The comedians and their audiences are not only respondents to context, but they are makers of context. They jointly deploy various indexicalities linked to languages
through language ideology and achieve the definition of situations and relationships through style-
shifting between English and Hawai‗i Creole in the moment-by-moment flow of performance-in-interaction. The dissertation, therefore, supports a
multidimensional view of context, performance, and stylization Coupland, 2001 in sociolinguistic studies; situational factors do not determine style in a correlational way.
The data analysis chapters showed that performativity in Hawai‗i comedy is about doing being Local as well as doing being subcategories of Local such as ―PoDagi‖ and
―Japani.‖ At the same time, they showed that Hawai‗i comedy is about doing not being non-Local because treating being Local as the norm means treating being non-Local as
271 deviant. Local can only be defined in relation to what is not Local, and vice versa. These
categories were referred to and were highlighted through category-bound predicates and intertextuality in use. The comedians and their audiences jointly built this ideologically
contrastive relationship between being Local and being non-Local, and this relationship between these categories is the primary source of multivocal humor in Hawai‗i comedy.
The Localnon- Local relationship is highly conventional or ‗expected,‘ but when the
comedians bring this relational conventionality to the fore, it does not make their audiences bored; rather, they respond to it with laughter. Conventionality and creativity
in performance-in-interaction are two sides of the same coin. Not only what is Local but what is ‗humorous‘ is relationally defined in Hawai‗i
comedy. Billig 2005 takes issue with traditional humor research that only examines the good-naturedness of humor, and asserts that mockery or what he refers to as ridicule
has disciplinary and rebellious functions. These functions of humor must be considered in relation to each other because being ‗humorous‘ is possible in relation to being ‗serious.‘
In other words, people are socialized into the meaning of laughter while being socialized into the meaning of non-laughter. Thus, humor research is not about humor, but is about
the social order, as Billig 2005 claims: ―humour and seriousness remain inextricably linked. Neither can abolish the other without abolishing itself
—or without threatening the social order‖ p. 243.
This dissertation, therefore, was not only about comedy but about the social order that was called into being through multivocal discursive practices in this fundamentally
creative genre. Local comedians were skillful language users, context makers, and shrewd observers and performers of the social order, and they achieved intersubjectivity
272 with their audiences, performatively materializing a laughing community. They also
stylized themselves as, and invoked, various socio-dramaturgical characters and manipulated the interpretive frames of th
eir performance. Doing Hawai‗i comedy was defining what is humorous and what is not; at the same time, doing the definition of
humor was stylizing who is Local and who is not. Hawai‗i comedy is a place where linguistic, cultural, and racial line crossing is sanctioned, and in fact, line crossing is the
norm but it co-occurs with line drawing and re-drawing that may reinforce andor subvert the social order. The social order must be discussed in relation to agencycreativity
because Hawai‗i comedy is a stereotypically creative genre within culturally-specific constraints. Creativity is situated ―
in the border line zone of existing hegemonies
‖ Blommaert, 2005, p. 106, emphasis in original, and the driving force of creative
practice is the individual agent. Blommaert conceptualizes two kinds of creativity: local and translocal i.e., innovation; the first type of creativity is assessed and understandable
against normative hegemonic standards ―because it creates
understandable
contrasts with su
ch standards‖ Blommaert, 2005, p. 106, emphasis in original.
7.3 Limitations of the study
