Humor 24–4 (2011), 371–398 0933–1719/11/0024–0371 DOI 10.1515/HUMR.2011.023 © Walter de Gruyter “Double-speak” at the White House: A corpus-assisted study of bisociation in conversational laughter-talk ALAN PARTINGTON Abstract In this paper, I consider whether the theory of bisociation, the sudden shift from one script (or narrative outline), or language mode or register to another, frst developed in relation to joke humor, can help shed light on other forms of laughter-talk (defned as the talk preceding and provoking, intentionally or otherwise, an episode of laughter), particularly that observed in one form of (semi-)spontaneous discourse, namely White House press briefngs. Two corpora of briefngs transcripts were compiled, one from the Democrat era and one from the subsequent Bush administration, and the laughter bouts, along with their contexts and information on speaker and audience kinesics, were collected and transferred into separate laughter fles. Not only was it found that several different forms of bisociation play an important role in brief- ings laughter-talk, but also that these forms are employed to attempt to achieve an intriguing variety of particular rhetorical argumentative aims, from criti- cizing the President to threatening an opponent’s face to winning audience affliation. Corpora have only rarely been used to investigate participants’ interaction in discourse and still less in studies of laughter-talk or humor interaction. This paper, therefore, is intended as a contribution to the nascent interdisciplinary feld of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). Keywords: Bisociation; corpus linguistics; group identity; laughter; narrative outline; register. AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR