35 jointly construct Localness in performance-in-interaction, and both of them see humor in
the discursive construction of Localness. Meanwhile, they also find, negotiate, and re- define Localness through the moment-by-moment discursive flow of humor. In summary,
this study locates and demonstrates the multiplicity of meaning-making in Local comedy, or the humor-ing of the Local.
1.5 Overview of the dissertation
In the next chapter, I discuss data collection and data analysis methods as well as theoretical and practical issues of transcription. Chapters 3-6 present data analyses from
comedy shows, interviews with comedians, and focus group interviews. Chapter 3 is an analysis of live stand-up comedy shows, focusing on the discursive construction of
participation frameworks. Chapter 4 also examines live stand-up comedy shows and deals with active voicing in Hawai‗i Creole and ‗haolefied‘ English. Chapter 5 takes a
sequential approach to illustrate how the comedians deploy other stylized languages in their performances-in-interaction. Chapter 6 investigates interpretive frameworks of
Local comedy shows, based on interviews with comedians and on focus groups with their audiences. Finally, in Chapter 7, I discuss the findings, limitations, and implications of
the dissertation, and I conclude with suggestions for directions for future research.
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CHAPTER 2. METHODOLOGY
2.1 Introduction
This dissertation investigates a culturally-specific highly dramaturgical genre in which comedians use various codes to build interpersonal relationships with their audiences and
entextualize and re-entextualize other semiotic resources to invoke intertextual links and to draw laughter from their audiences.
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The dissertation also investigates the reception of this culturally-specific genre to expand this relatively underdeveloped area in
sociolinguistics. Therefore, my data collection includes obtaining performance and meta- performance data, and bringing them into an explicitly interactional context to
demonstrate the way the comedians and their audiences build their interpersonal relationships in the turn-by-turn flow of comedy, in addition to analyzing how audience
members make sense of this comedic genre that includes multilingual categorial work. This methodological stance also requires me to describe the transcription process to
r epresent the multilingual data that include Hawai‗i Creole.
One of the goals of the dissertation is to illustrate the dynamism of stylization in a highly performative genre. In order to explore such dynamism, I need analytical tools that
allow me to deal with the spontaneity of the performative genre and with the meanings of various codes in Hawai‗i; therefore, I collect data from live stand-up comedy shows and
from other multimedia resources such as comedy CDs and DVDs to analyze these performances-in-interaction. I conceptualize the performances as forms of social
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Laughter is a feature of interaction; however, its sequential implications are beyond the scope of the dissertation.
37 organization in which participants take actions and manage a performance context. I also
see these performances as contexts in which the semiotics of codes are performed and re- entextualized.
Another goal is to investigate the categorial work that is related to the management of actions, context, and intersubjectivity in Local comedy shows; I adopt
membership categorization analysis Sacks, 1979 for examining a shared sense of the participants‘ world. Furthermore, because indexicality and categorization in Local
comedy involve linguistic heterogeneity, I need to justify how I represent language variation, including mock varieties. I utilize conventions from descriptive linguistics to
adopt and modify the transcription conventions of conversation analysis Jefferson, 2004a to mark nuanced style-shifting in the data.
In contrast to the above goals, another goal is to investigate how Local comedy is talked about and interpreted among in-group members. I collect meta-performance data
by interviewing comedians and by conducting focus group sessions with audience members to interweave their categorial work with the live performance data and to
interactionally illuminate a system of indexicals, or the properties of shared knowledge. In the remainder of this chapter, I explain how I proceeded to answer my research
questions through detailing the data collection 2.2.1 and data analysis methods 2.2.2. My research questions motivated a particular methodological direction that would allow
me to explore the indexicality of code and the meaning-making processes among audience members. The chapter also discusses transcription 2.3 procedures at length as
this dissertation seeks to offer new perspectives on the transcription of multiple codes in discourse analytic work.
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2.2 Data
