Conversational Analysis in Linguistics documents what is happening in conversational transaction, referring to dialogue notation. This offers an objective account for analysis within the framework of sociolinguistics. For me, the process of editing is a form of analysis, although the notation is subjective.
I respond to the footage firstly by editing for humour, looking for more comic potential. Some of the humour theorists, in the International Society for Humor Studies are linguists too. They will tell you that humour is also subject to structures and dynamics that can be mapped and measured.
The process of editing can make sense of interaction in a way that it not understood during the interaction. We don’t have the time to reflect while we are performing. And watching their own performances can be fascinating, surprising or disillusioning (?) to performers. One of the tactics of the performance is to create confusion and so editing is a process of unknotting the tangle. We begin to see what sense the participants were trying to make. I am also looking for a certain blindness or deafness that is self-imposed in order to generate comedy. This achieved by all participants here, and it is enhanced by the mediation and obscure aspects of Zoom, and of the remote phone call.
This workshop with 3rd Age Theatre (a group set up by Collective Encounters, Liverpool) and revealed the technical obstacles that prevents participants keeping in step in a way that is normally achieved in everyday dialogue. Dissonance created laughter. In this recording June and Margaret perform a double act where one asks serious questions, while the other interrupts with descriptions of the café owner. Margaret asks who he is, why he has dressed as clown and who has kissed ‘him’. June insists that the character is female, offering a flattering description of the make up and costume.
Margaret is prompted to speak in accented English as a substitue for French, which she says she doesn't know. June can say 'Bonjour' and not much more, but Margaret is admiring. It's a beautiful conversation. Attempting to be understood, Margaret speaks English with some Italian or Spanish ‘Si, Si’, she says, and she adds a Romance version of her own name - ‘Mar-gar-ita’.
Here we are again. It's familiar situation: two local people faced with a foreign other. June and Margaret declare that they are Scousers and try to help each other, but their attempts, confounded by technology, only get worse. It's a delightful descent into non-sense.
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