Joke as Narrative Text and Instrument for Developing an Understanding of Interpersonal Relationships

Abstract

Not every instrument involved in professional or everyday interaction with others allows one to move in the zone of proximal development in a communicative partnership. Despite a wide range of such work tools, for the most part they are of directive, expert format. The need to find psychotechnic means adequate to cooperative relations draws our attention to comic instruments (humor), namely to one of its forms – joke. Bringing joke into our communication with others appears a kind of tactics that allows partners to make certain statements about necessary things or actions from equal positions, without restricting each other’s freedom, making their intensions, values and meanings clear, while retaining an opportunity to correct their judgments and actions. Explanatory opportunities of the cultural-historical concept and narrative approach in psychology, as well as the ideas incorporated in the method of stage-by-stage formation of action, allow us to consider joke as a means of narrative understanding of the interpersonal relationships.

Keywords

• understanding interpersonal relationships
• humor
• laughing action
• orientation
• joke
• narrative