The Pilates method is dedicated to strengthening and lengthening the muscles of the whole body. The rather complex motion sequences are often learnt under the supervision of a trainer in a group setting. Neither the instructions of the trainers nor the communicative acts of the clients merely focus on the position and direction of body parts or other expected task-oriented activities (Stukenbrock 2014). In this talk, I analyse humorous sequences in video-recordings of nearly 30 hours of authentic Pilates sessions with six different trainers (language: varieties of German). The mainly qualitative methodological approach draws from linguistic theories of humour (e.g. Dynel 2013), variationist sociolinguistics (e.g. Tagliamonte 2012) and recent multimodal studies of interactional behaviour, examining resources such as posture, gaze, and gesture (e.g. Deppermann 2013). Some central insights:
- Humour, laughter and banter play an important role in establishing the social cohesion of the group.
- Humorous sequences are often marked by the use of local dialects or other choices of style- and code-shifting or, more generally, phenomena of audience design (Bell 2009).
- Trainers use humorous remarks to lighten the mood, to motivate their clients especially during tough exercises, to make the clients feel comfortable in the group and to establish themselves as charismatic personalities, ultimately facilitating customer loyalty.
- However, the humour is co-constructed and often initiated by the clients.
- The forms of humour are mainly irony and banter (playful teasing). It is also a topic of meta-communication.
- Humour does not only function as a welcome diversion from the exercises but also serves as an educational tool to mediate motor learning (e.g. with metaphors).
Selected References
Bell, Allan. 2009. Language style as audience design. In: Coupland, Nikolas; Jaworski, Adam (eds.): The New Sociolinguistics Reader. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 265–275.
Dynel, Marta (ed.). 2013. Developments in linguistic humour theory. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Deppermann, Arnulf. 2013. Multimodal interaction from a conversation analytic perspective. In Journal of Pragmatics 46 (1):1–7.
Stukenbrock, Anja. 2014. Take the words out of my mouth. Verbal instructions as embodied practices. In: Pragmatics 65:80–102.
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2012. Variationist sociolinguistics. Change, observation, interpretation. Malde: Wiley-Blackwell.
