Humour and laughter in PhD oral thesis defences: A multimodal analysis of data from Africa and Asia

Humour and laughter have been identified to play significant functions in interactional situations, and these include emphasising and eliminating power imbalances, building in-group solidarity, affiliating and disaffiliating, signalling turns, and releasing emotional stress. Consequently, they (humour and laughter) have been studied in numerous spoken contexts such as workplace interaction, family, and everyday talk. However, very few such studies have been undertaken in the academic context, particularly, the interaction that occurs during PhD thesis defences which are high-stakes academic interactions. To the best of my knowledge, only Mezek (2018) has explored laughter and humour in PhD vivas. Moreover, existing work on PhD oral defences has focused on the linguistic mode rather than making use of a multimodal analysis. This paper seeks to fill this gap by studying instances of humour and laughter in two video-recorded PhD thesis defences (of about 213 minutes in total) undertaken in Africa and Asia to examine not only how they are multimodally constructed, but also the different functions that they play in these high-stakes academic interactions in the two jurisdictions. To achieve the above, recorded data were analysed multimodally, and results triangulated with findings from interviews from participants subjected to thematic analysis. Findings reveal that humour and laughter are multimodally constructed and play useful functions during such oral examinations including easing tensions. However, in the case of the African context, laughter can also be used as a means of censuring PhD candidates by examiners. The study, therefore, has practical implications for postgraduate education and makes a major contribution to English for Academic Purposes. Additionally, the paper has significance for methodology, as it offers the opportunity to combine multimodality and ethnographic tools in analysing PhD thesis defences.