Humour in Sports Coaching: ‘It’s a Funny Old Game’ (original) (raw)
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Recent attempts to ‘decode’ the everyday actions of coaches have furthered the case for sports coaching as a detailed site of ‘work’. Adhering to Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological project, the aim of this article is to deconstruct contextual actors’ interactions, paying specific attention to the conditions under which such behaviours occur. The article thus explores the dominant taken-for-granted social rules evident at Bayside Rovers Football F.C. (pseudonym), a semi-professional football club. A 10-month ethnomethodologically informed ethnography was used to observe, participate in and describe the Club’s everyday practices. The findings comprise two principal ‘codes’ through which the work of the Club was manifest: ‘to play well’ and ‘fitting-in’. In turn, Garfinkel’s writings are used as a ‘respecification’ of some fundamental aspects of coaches’ ‘unnoticed’ work and the social rules that guide them. The broader value of this article not only lies in its detailed presentati...
Gender and identity in humorous discourse, edited by Linares-Bernabéu, Esther (ed.), Studien zur romanischen Sprachwissenschaft und interkulturellen Kommunikation, 51-74. Berlin: Peter Lang. ISBN: 978-3-631-84910-1 , 2021
This chapter examines interactions in male-only interactions before, during and after games in a suburban Dublin sports club, providing valuable insights into how cursing and humour facilitates the expression of emotions and projections of identity. Prominent functions relate to identity (e.g. othering) and emphasizing positions in storytelling alongside general emphasis (e.g. "he was fucken outstanding in the last match") and derogatory abuse of others (such as "that referee is a bollox"). Notably cursing is used as a device in jovial abuse ("ah ya fat bastard") and importantly as a form of a verbal offensive move when challenging decisions during games. Another prominent facet of this study is the interaction between cursing and humour: the perlocutionary force of humour is enhanced and amplified when used employed alongside the emphatic functions of cursing.
Wordplay and football: Humour in the discourse of written sports reporting (2017)
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This chapter is a case study describing the coverage of events involving the England football team in the British mainstream print media. It provides a stylistic account of humorous phenomena identified in the media reports, with a focus on wordplay in headlines and the creative use of verbal and visual means on the frontpages of British daily newspapers. The chapter argues that while printed sports reporting does not constitute a genre of humour, the treatment of the subject matter often involves instances verbal and multimodal play that makes the texts lively and entertaining.