The skillful use of joking to achieve characterization, within the essentially male world of the recent American film, Sling Blade, is the focus of this paper. The elusive yet socially highly significant notion of 'sense of humor' is assumed to reveal itself in social practice through joking interaction. For an appropriate analysis of situated discursive practice, I take a broad interpretation of 'joking', within an interactional sociolinguistic framework, to indicate any shift of footing from serious' to 'non-serious', whether signalled proactively or retroactively in the interaction, whether taken up or not by other interlocutors. Characterization is achieved through different styles of joking, representing typifications of gender role behavior within the rural American Southern world of the film. Good ol' boy Bill, the fix-it shop owner, uses typical solidarity joking, including ritualized joking associated with conversational routines, narrative jokes, and teasing or 'ritual insult' joking. Bigoted and abusive 'redneck' Doyle uses joking to express his own hostility, either in the form of sarcasm, or as a retroactive 'cover' for his intentionally insulting remarks. Vaughn, a gay man, uses irony as his main style, symbolic of his veiled gender identity. Karl and Frank, who have the most important emotional bond in the movie in the form of a friendship across generations, engage in the only joking which constitutes a true empathic connection. The main female character, Frank's mother Linda, existing in an essentially male world in the screenplay, operates in a mode of seriousness, participating in joking only by responding as socially required. Her one ambiguous attempt at joking, as a social control move on Doyle, is ineffectual. A narrative dirty joke, first occurring among men at the fix-it shop, is used effectively for characterization when Karl later tries to tell it to Linda in the mistaken belief that it constitutes an appropriate way to be sociable. Billy Bob Thornton, a native of rural Arkansas in the American South, not only wrote and adapted the screenplay for the film (for which he won an Academy Award in 1996), but also directed the film, and portrayed the starring character. The joking styles are analyzed as aesthetic typifications which can be used in the service of characterization. The treatment of joking within Brown and Levinson's (1987) pragmatic framework is critiqued, and a more comprehensive analysis is offered, one which combines the pragmalinguistic and the sociopragmatic. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
