Understanding and Identifying Design Opportunities for Facilitating Humorous Interactions in Multilingual Multicultural Contexts

Sharing humor within a team can have various benefits. In multilingual teams, however, it is often challenging for nonnative-speaking members (NNS) of the team to fully understand the humor shared among native speakers (NS). In an interview study with 28 NNS, we identified common sources of confusion in humorous interactions. Our study also revealed that the (mis)alignment of people's assumptions of others' knowledge is key to failed humor and its consequences. NNS felt that NS often assumed everyone shared the knowledge required to understand their humor; thus, cultural references unfamiliar to NNS were a dominant source of confusion. On the other hand, NNS often felt ignorant for not knowing the references required to understand NS humor, as they assumed all the references unfamiliar to them must be generic knowledge known by all NS. We propose design ideas for better alignment of common ground assumptions between NS and NNS to facilitate humor-related communication and alleviate possible negative consequence of failed humor.