Abstract
This study of an incident involving a male Chinese university lecturer and two Thai learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) who were engaged in verbal humor in intercultural classroom communication examined whether two variables, namely the genders and roles of the metaparticipants, caused them to regard the verbal humor in question as an impoliteness act, as well as the metaparticipants’ metapragmatic evaluations regarding the humor. A further aim was to examine whether the cited incident affected the student-teacher relationship from the metaparticipants’ perspectives. In total, 80 Thai EFL learners’ metapragmatic evaluations of the lecturer’s verbal humor were investigated. The chi-square test results revealed that male Thai EFL learners regarded the verbal humor as being impolite significantly more often than the females did; moreover, the participants were more likely to regard the verbal humor as an impoliteness act when they were the direct targets than when they were witnesses. The factors that led the metaparticipants to regard the verbal humor as being successful or a failed attempt revealed that the metaparticipants who regarded the attempt as being impolite were mainly influenced by the Thai culture. Furthermore, almost half of the participants indicated that they would have some short-term negative affect following the incident. Accordingly, lecturers should be more careful when creating verbal humor in which their students are the direct targets in intercultural classroom communication. Lecturers should also avoid using words with negative connotations.
Keywords
Introduction
Verbal humor, which refers to a speaker’s intentional use of language to create amusement, has mainly been studied in sitcoms, standup comedy, and classroom discourse produced by teachers (Attardo, 2020; Møller Jensen & Dam, 2023). Verbal humor takes various forms, such as jokes, teasing, and wordplay (Alemi et al., 2021; Moalla & Amor, 2021); although verbal humor has different functions, such as maintaining rapport in relationships, several studies have revealed that hearers may not appreciate certain types of verbal humor, such as disparagement, thus resulting in impoliteness (Andreea et al., 2023; Moalla, 2015). Therefore, studying how certain types of verbal humor are interpreted as impoliteness in a situational context is useful for avoiding impoliteness.
Impoliteness acts have mainly been studied in the field of pragmatics (Davies, 2018), but metaparticipants’ metapragmatic evaluations of an impoliteness act have recently received increasing attention. Metaparticipants are people who “who take part in the interaction vicariously, such as television audiences or viewers of comments on social media platforms” (Haugh, 2024, p. 218). Metapragmatic evaluations can elicit each metaparticipant’s rationale, thus revealing their different ideologies regarding an impoliteness act (Haugh, 2024). However, few studies have focused on different metaparticipants’ metapragmatic evaluations of verbal humor in relation to impoliteness in classroom discourses when the teacher and students with different Asian cultural backgrounds are engaged in intercultural communication while using English as a lingua franca (ELF).
In line with the focus in the field of psychology, impoliteness acts involving teachers and students may lead to perlocutionary effects, including affective issues for the students (Culpeper & Haugh, 2021; Mohan, 2023). This issue should be considered in student-teacher relationships, since a close student-teacher relationship promotes both students and teachers’ well-being, particularly regarding their affective connection (Roshanbin et al., 2022; Xie et al., 2022).
Accordingly, the present research was conducted based on an incident that occurred in intercultural communication between a male Chinese university lecturer and two Thai learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in an EFL classroom at a university in Thailand. Other student participants were involved as metaparticipants to elicit their metapragmatic evaluations of the incident in question. The aims were to examine whether the variables of gender and the roles of the metaparticipants caused them to regard the attempted verbal humor as impolite, and to examine the metaparticipants’ metapragmatic evaluations regarding whether the verbal humor in question was an impoliteness act. The last aim was to examine whether the cited incident affected the student-teacher relationship from the metaparticipants’ perspectives. The three research questions (
Incident Used in This Research
Before the literature review section, it is essential to illustrate the incident that was used in this research. The Chinese lecturer and the two Thai EFL students described the same incident separately to the researcher from their own perspectives in face-to-face conversations. Subsequently, the researcher and the three participants who were directly involved in the incident revised the versions of the incident to generate an objective version and to avoid the participants’ subjective views being included in the description of the incident in the further analyses. The incident is described in (1) below:
(1) The Chinese lecturer, Po, tended to use verbal humor while teaching English in the classroom. One Thai EFL learner, Tew, who had had Po as a lecturer in different EFL classes for two semesters, was frequently the target of Po’s verbal humor. According to Tew, he aimed to have a close relationship with Po and liked Po’s humorous style of teaching. Hence, he had never had any problems with being the target of Po’s verbal humor. In fact, Tew sometimes liked to joke with Po, indicating that they had a close student-teacher relationship. By contrast, another Thai EFL learner, Ti, who had never been the direct target of Po’s verbal humor, stated that he did not completely understand Po’s verbal humor for two reasons: First, his English proficiency limited his understanding of Po’s verbal humor and, second, he did not find some of Po’s verbal humor to be amusing because he thought that Thai people would not make jokes in the same way as Po did.
The incident occurred in an EFL classroom in which the focus was on arguments. While Po was attempting to explain the power of using language to argue, instead of simply providing examples, Po used Tew as the target of his verbal humor when uttering the discourse below:
“Let’s say if right now we are in a court, where Tew is a criminal as he looks like one, his lawyer not only needs to provide evidence but must use language to argue for Tew’s innocence.”
While Po was teasing Tew by stating that he looked like a criminal, Tew, as well as many other Thai EFL learners in the classroom, responded by laughing. By contrast, Ti did not find any aspect of the utterance to be humorous and thought that Po was being extremely impolite by calling Tew a criminal since Ti regarded the utterance as an insult to his classmate. Ti had a more negative affect toward Po following this attempt at verbal humor.
Literature Review
Impoliteness
Although face is regarded as the central issue in impoliteness, previous research has largely ignored the distinction between the internal face and the external face (Bousfield, 2008). Most studies have highlighted the external face of the face-threat recipient who is the direct target of an impoliteness act initiated by the face-threat initiator (Pan, 2024, 2025a). The external face must be co-constructed in interactions through the use of language (House & Kádár, 2023; Khazraie & Talebzadeh, 2020), including the positive external face, which is a “desire for approval” in social interactions with others, and the negative external face, which is a “desire to be free from [the] imposition” of others (Bousfield, 2008, p. 42). However, the internal face, as the inherent expectation of how one should be treated by others, must be established by each interactant to meet the standard of an individual’s positive and negative external faces (Terkourafi, 2024). For example, Tew, the potential face-threat recipient in this incident, wanted to have a close relationship with the lecturer, Po. Based on this presupposition, Tew’s internal face drove him to have numerous interactions with Po in which Tew’s positive external face had met his expectations since Po had indeed had many conversations with him in the classroom in which there were many instances of Po’s use of verbal humor with Tew as the target. By contrast, as a face-threat witness who was not the direct target of an impoliteness act (Pan, 2024), Ti expected that each student would be treated in the same way by all the lecturers according to the perspective of Thai culture. When Ti felt that the lecturer had insulted his classmate Tew, Ti’s internal face was also violated (Haugh, 2024). In this regard, the individual’s internal face is important as a source or rationale for evaluating whether a social or discursive behavior is impolite.
In addition, the contention of the first and second orders of impoliteness has been maintained for some time (Terkourafi, 2024). First-order impoliteness focuses on the views of the interactants who were directly involved in an impoliteness act, while second-order impoliteness emphasizes the scientific study of impoliteness based on certain impoliteness theories (Koike et al., 2022; Pan, 2022, 2025a). Both first and second orders of impoliteness have attempted to answer one question: What is impoliteness? Hence, both orders use different perspectives to reveal individual’s impoliteness acts (Koike et al., 2022; Su & Lee, 2022). In this sense, the orders should not be regarded as being completely distinct in impoliteness, but rather as different scientific methods for studying impoliteness from two perspectives (House & Kádár, 2023). In this regard, several studies have highlighted the metapragmatic evaluations of different metaparticipants to reveal impoliteness from the ontological perspective (Culpeper & Haugh, 2021; Khazraie & Talebzadeh, 2020). The metapragmatic evaluation of impoliteness entails the discussion of an impoliteness act from metaparticipants’ perspectives (Davies, 2018). In addition, metaparticipants’ rationales for their metapragmatic evaluations “can systematically draw out their ideological roots,” particularly those of the metaparticipants (Haugh, 2024, p. 216). For example, studies of different netizens’ comments regarding an American-Taiwanese person insulting a local Taiwanese bus driver systematically revealed their rationale for treating this event as an impoliteness act; one of the main rationales for this assessment was the use of the English language, which was not the language that the local Taiwanese people used (Su & Lee, 2022). Accordingly, the ontology of impoliteness is naturally extended based on the metapragmatic evaluations of the metaparticipants.
Thus far, little research has focused on events that occur in daily life to initiate discussions with different metaparticipants in studies of impoliteness, including interactions between students and teachers (Andreea et al., 2023). A few studies have found that verbal humor could cause impoliteness (Møller Jensen & Dam, 2023; Pan, 2025b); hence, different students were included as metaparticipants in the present research to elicit their metapragmatic evaluations of the incident discussed in (1).
Verbal Humor
Verbal humor occurs frequently in interactions in certain cultures, such as teasing in American culture (Alemi et al., 2021). Incongruity is central to creating a successful attempt at verbal humor in which there are two opposing scripts in the discursive behavior (Attardo, 2020). In (1), incongruity is reflected by the core word “criminal,” which resulted in the two opposing scripts: CRIMINAL/NOT CRIMINAL. In this example, the basis of the incongruity was the use of language based on the general theory of verbal humor (Moalla & Amor, 2021).
Verbal humor has been studied in intercultural communication, such as business meetings involving people from different countries (Møller Jensen & Dam, 2023; Tsakona, 2020) and classroom discourse between teachers and students who do not share the same nationality (Bell, 2009; Embalzado & Sajampun, 2020). Although verbal humor has a range of positive effects in classroom teaching and learning, such as a relaxed classroom atmosphere and assisting in explaining the content of the lesson, students may not fully understand or appreciate teachers’ attempts at verbal humor. Alemi et al. (2021) found that certain amusing comments and teasing on the part of teachers whose intentions were to decrease the students’ nervousness and to lighten the classroom atmosphere could not be completely comprehended by certain students. This phenomenon may be due to students’ low English proficiency.
Many Thai students may not appreciate a non-Thai teacher’s verbal humor because they have rarely been exposed to verbal humor in classrooms since “humor is not considered as a conventional teaching methodology as Thai classrooms typically command decorum and respect toward the teacher” (Embalzado & Sajampun, 2020, p. 18). In (1), Tew and some of the other students started to laugh following Po’s attempt at verbal humor; this indicated that these Thai EFL learners appreciated Po’s situational verbal humor because laughing is considered to be a typical sign of successful verbal humor (Bell, 2009; Lu’mu et al., 2023). By contrast, not only did Ti not comprehend the situational verbal humor, but he also interpreted it as an insult to his classmate, leading to the failure of Po’s attempt at verbal humor. Failed attempts at verbal humor in intercultural communication can be due to different reasons: Apart from the limitation of the students’ English proficiency levels, cultural differences and individual’s different social roles in verbal humor can be significant causes of failed attempts at verbal humor (Moalla, 2015; Pan, 2025b). Iranian, Thai, and Tunisian EFL learners have misinterpreted English teachers’ different types of humor, such as disparagement, banter, and satire, due to cultural differences, as well as due to the differences in individual understandings of their own cultures (Alemi et al., 2021; Bell, 2009; Moalla & Amor, 2021). In (1), the Thai EFL learners who laughed at Po’s verbal humor had the same Thai culture as Ti. Their different reactions to the same attempt at verbal humor reflected their individual understandings of Thai culture. In addition, Po’s social role was as a university lecturer; based on Ti’s understanding of Thai culture, a teacher should not tease students (Andreea et al., 2023).
Studies of attempts at verbal humor that are considered to be impolite and which involve teachers and students in EFL classrooms are rare. The incident described in (1), which began with an attempt at verbal humor on the part of a university lecturer who did not share the same culture as the Thai students and led to a judgment of impoliteness from a face-threat witness, is worth examining to determine the Thai metaparticipants’ different metapragmatic evaluations of this incident. Furthermore, as impoliteness acts have perlocutionary effects that can cause affective problems for the interactants (Walker & Graham, 2021), the effects of impoliteness on teacher-student relationships were also examined in this research.
Student-Teacher Relationships
The closeness of student-teacher relationships has been studied in the field of psychology. Several studies have focused on pre-tertiary student-teacher relationships in which the students and the teachers did not share the same culture (Roorda & Bosman, 2022; Roshanbin et al., 2022). In line with the studies of impoliteness, the distinction between the teachers’ and the students’ viewpoints caused affective problems for both groups (Walker & Graham, 2021). Affective problems refer to negative emotions that occur when “disagreements related to interpersonal emotional incompatibilities [are] induced by differing personalities and values” (Xie et al., 2022, p. 2). Accordingly, a teacher’s perceived impoliteness act may cause students to experience negative emotions; as Ti stated, he experienced a more negative affect toward Po following the attempt at verbal humor in the incident described in (1). As is known, utterances “produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience” (Austin, 1975, p. 101). Hence, an impoliteness act also has the potential to elicit a negative perlocutionary effect toward either the face-threat recipient or toward the face-threat witness. Previous research has primarily focused on the impoliteness act itself, whereas its affective effect has been largely ignored. This is mainly due to the focus on discursive impoliteness from the linguistic perspective (Bousfield, 2008); however, an impoliteness act includes not only discursive behavior, but also social behavior and psychological cognition.
Notwithstanding, some students’ negative affects toward a teacher or a teacher’s behavior may not be entirely rational; as university students are usually aged between approximately 18 and 23, they are young people who are entering adulthood and who may still have certain irrational beliefs about themselves or others (Chan & Sun, 2021; Warren & Hale, 2016). Irrational beliefs are rigid and extremely negative responses to negative situations (Warren & Hale, 2016); they are “illogical,”“inconsistent with reality,” and are “the major factor leading to emotional and behavioral disorders” (Chan & Sun, 2021, pp. 827–828). Students’ irrational beliefs may also lead to fallacies in their evaluations, as fallacies are the opposite of rationales. Since few studies of impoliteness have focused on university-level Thai EFL learners’ affects following an impoliteness act initiated by a university lecturer in an EFL classroom, the metaparticipants’ affects regarding this incident were examined as an interdisciplinary field of impoliteness and psychology in this research.
Methodology
Participants
In addition to the three participants who were directly involved in the incident that was discussed in (1), 80 Thai EFL learners were involved as metaparticipants in this research. All the metaparticipants were raised in the Thai culture and had never been long-term residents in any other countries. Their English proficiency level was intermediate based on their valid scores for an English examination, such as TOEIC, and according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR; Council of Europe, 2020). The intermediate-level Thai EFL learners were chosen for two reasons: First, previous research on verbal humor in intercultural communication has focused on advanced-level EFL learners (Bell, 2009), whereas intermediate-level EFL learners have rarely been studied. Moreover, having an intermediate level of English proficiency is the general requirement for Thai university students according to the Thai education policy (Pan, 2024). Therefore, the metapragmatic evaluations of the participants involved in this research could represent those of Thai EFL learners at the undergraduate level.
All the metaparticipants were students who were enrolled in Year 1 to Year 4 at a public university in Bangkok, Thailand; their average age was 20.4 years. None of them knew the three participants who were directly involved in the given incident; this ensured that none of the metaparticipants provided subjective evaluations due to having personal acquaintance with Po, Tew, or Ti. The 80 metaparticipants consisted of 40 male participants (50%) and 40 female participants (50%) according to their biological sex on their Thai identification cards and their self-identifications based on social gender.
Data Collection
After receiving permission from Po, Tew, and Ti, each metaparticipant was given the written version of the incident described in (1). Although the researcher did not provide further explanations about the script in (1), the metaparticipants were allowed to confirm any information related to their evaluations. For example, several metaparticipants attempted to confirm whether the lecturer, Po, used verbal humor frequently in the classroom and whether Tew had not previously expressed any discomfort about being the target of Po’s verbal humor. The researcher responded to these questions objectively based on Po’s, Tew’s, and Ti’s claims. After reading the script in (1), each metaparticipant discussed the described incident with the researcher. Following previous research, these conversations were not considered to be formal interviews, since the purpose of the conversations was to understand each participant’s metapragmatic evaluation and their rationale in relation to this incident (Davies, 2018; Haugh, 2024); thus, the discussions were regarded as casual conversations between each metaparticipant and the researcher. Compared to interviews, casual conversations could make the metaparticipants feel more relaxed; hence, more information could be elicited from them.
In the conversations, the researcher asked each metaparticipant whether they considered Po’s verbal humor to be a successful attempt or an impoliteness act from two different perspectives, namely as the direct target of the verbal humor from Tew’s perspective and as a witness to the verbal humor from Ti’s perspective, to elicit answers to
Data Analysis
Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used in this research. Since the two independent variables, gender and role, as well as the dependent variable, namely the evaluation of Po’s verbal humor, formed a nominal scale of measurement, a chi-square test was implemented by applying the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS Mac OS) to answer
Six steps in TA.
The first three steps were the decoding steps. The metaparticipants’ metapragmatic evaluations were first transcribed for the analysis. Since the metaparticipants’ spoken data were not subjected to any linguistic analyses, the researcher transcribed the spoken data by taking the individual words as units and excluding any fillers and redundancies, such as “uh.” To ensure the reliability of the transcription, the researcher sent the transcriptions to each corresponding metaparticipant to confirm that each transcription conveyed each metaparticipant’s meaning correctly. No discrepancies between the metaparticipants and the transcriptions was found. The inductive approach in TA was used to fully decode the keywords, since no predetermined theme should be proposed before the participants’ viewpoints are fully understood (Braun & Clarke, 2022). Based on the keywords that were identified via recurrent readings, the researcher classified each metaparticipant’s response into the corresponding category according to their metapragmatic evaluations and rationales. Once the different factors had been confirmed, they were conceptualized and developed to form the conceptual model. In addition, two coders selected the keywords and followed the coding steps to ensure the complete identification and comprehension of the keywords and the coding steps. Both coders searched for keywords that could answer
Results
Results of the Chi-Square Test
Table 1 below illustrates the chi-square test results of the correlation between gender and perspectives regarding Po’s verbal humor when the metaparticipants were either the direct targets or the witnesses.
Chi-Square Results of the Correlation Between Gender and Perspectives Regarding Po’s Verbal Humor.
A chi-square test of independence was conducted to examine the correlation between the gender of the metaparticipants and their perspectives regarding Po’s verbal humor. When they were the direct targets of Po’s verbal humor illustrated in (1), the test result indicated that there was a significant correlation between the genders of the Thai metaparticipants and their perspectives regarding the humor (sig. = .025, df = 1, p < .05). According to the descriptive data presented in Table 1, the male Thai metaparticipants regarded Po’s verbal humor in (1) as an impoliteness act when they were face-threat recipients significantly more often compared to the female metaparticipants. By contrast, when they were witnesses to Po’s verbal humor in (1), the test result indicated that there was no significant correlation between the genders of the Thai metaparticipants and their perspectives regarding the humor (sig. = .799, df = 1, p < .05). The majority of both male and female Thai metaparticipants regarded Po’s verbal humor in (1) as successful verbal humor rather than regarding it as an impoliteness act when they were the witnesses.
Table 2 below illustrates the chi-square test results for the correlation with roles when the male and female metaparticipants were direct targets or witnesses to Po’s verbal humor, respectively.
Chi-Square Results for the Correlation Between the Roles and the Perspectives Regarding Po’s Verbal Humor.
A chi-square test of independence was conducted to examine the correlation between the metaparticipants’ roles and their perspectives regarding Po’s verbal humor. With regard to the male metaparticipants, the test result indicated that there was a significant correlation between the roles of the male metaparticipants and their perspectives regarding Po’s verbal humor (sig. = .001, df = 1, p < .05). The male participants regarded Po’s verbal humor in (1) as an impoliteness act when they assumed the role of the direct target of Po’s verbal humor significantly more often than they did when placing themselves in the role of witnesses to Po’s verbal humor. Regarding the female metaparticipants, the test result indicated that there was no significant correlation between the roles of the female metaparticipants and their perspectives regarding Po’s verbal humor (sig. = .237, df = 1, p < .05). Most of the female metaparticipants regarded Po’s verbal humor as a successful attempt at humor both when they were the direct targets and when they were witnesses to Po’s verbal humor.
Metapragmatic Evaluations that Regarded Po’s Verbal Humor as Being Successful
In this section, the metaparticipants’ metapragmatic evaluations will be elaborated according to evaluations that regarded Po’s verbal humor as a successful attempt versus those that considered it to be as an impoliteness act. The metapragmatic evaluations of Po’s verbal humor as being successful will be presented first.
As the direct targets of Po’s verbal humor, Table 1 above shows that 38 of the metaparticipants regarded Po’s verbal humor as successful, including 14 male (37%) and 24 female (63%) metaparticipants. In these metaparticipants’ responses, 32 of them (84%) used the word “funny” to classify Po’s verbal humor in (1), while the word “interesting” was also used by 11 of them (29%), as demonstrated in (2) below.
(2) Participant 19: It’s funny, a funny joke. This teacher is doing this very often. Obviously, he has a sense of humor, so it’s not like impolite. It’s just an example to explain something else, not saying I’m a real criminal.
In example (2), the first reason that the metaparticipants who regarded Po’s verbal humor to be successful was that Po frequently used different types of verbal humor in EFL classes. This indicates that someone’s frequent use of verbal humor was an important signal when these metaparticipants evaluated Po’s situational verbal humor (Davis & Hofmann, 2023). According to these metaparticipants, Po’s sense of humor, as illustrated in (2), revealed his personality and influenced his teaching style in the classroom (Moalla, 2015). In addition, the aim of the use of this humor was to explain the power of arguments for educational purpose, as also described in (2). Hence, these metaparticipants regarded this situational verbal humor as successful.
Furthermore, 15 metaparticipants provided their views of the word “criminal,” as demonstrated in (3) below.
(3) Researcher: Why do you believe this is a funny joke? Participant 12: Because I don’t believe a teacher would mean that a student is a criminal in a classroom. In this situation, if the teacher means that I’m a criminal, it is even not about impoliteness, but about an accusation, right? Researcher: So, the word “criminal” in this incident does not indicate an accusation to you? Participant 12: No, it’s not. It’s just a joke, obviously.
According to Participant 12’s rationale, since the word “criminal” has negative connotations and a tendency to be used to accuse someone, a lecturer would not use this word with a serious meaning unless the one who had been accused of being a criminal had actually committed a crime. Hence, Participant 12 naturally understood that this lecturer was creating verbal humor by using the word “criminal,” even though Participant 12 was the direct target. This example also reveals that some metaparticipants evaluated the general understanding of being a lecturer based on the use of a word in this situational context to judge whether Po’s verbal humor was actually humorous or was an impoliteness act (Lu’mu et al., 2023). The process in this evaluation combined the cognitive judgment of the essence of a social role, namely how a lecturer should behave when they use a word with a negative connotation, and the situational context to evaluate the extent to which a discursive behavior is usually interpreted as verbal humor or as an impoliteness act (Tsakona, 2020).
As the witnesses to Po’s verbal humor, 30 male participants regarded it as successful; of them, 16 male participants changed their minds when they were in the role of direct targets of Po’s verbal humor to being the witnesses. By contrast, only five female participants changed their minds. Of the 59 participants who regarded Po’s verbal humor as successful when they were the witnesses to Po’s verbal humor, 46 of them mentioned that they thought it was funny to tease their classmates rather than being teased themselves, as in the example in (4).
(4) The researcher: Why did you just change your mind? Participant 46: I feel funny when the teacher says this to others. The researcher: And if you are the target, you don’t feel it’s funny? Participant 46: Yeah, like that. I’m not the target, right? I’m just sitting there and enjoying the joke from this teacher, right? I think it’s pretty funny. The researcher: So, can I understand and confirm with you again, that you think that this would be impolite if you were the target, while it would be funny and successful humor if you were not the target. Participant 46: Yeah, that’s what I think.
It is clear from example (4) that many metaparticipants who changed their evaluations because they were not the direct targets of Po’s verbal humor; thus, Po’s verbal humor was only considered to be successful when they were the witnesses. This was similar to Pan’s (2024) study, in which the face-threat witnesses did not regard an impoliteness act in the same way as the face-threat recipients since the witnesses were not directly involved in the impoliteness act. This result further indicated that the different roles involved in regarding an incident as being either verbal humor or an impoliteness act had a tremendous impact on Thai EFL learners’ evaluations, particularly on the male students’ evaluations.
Furthermore, 18 participants mentioned their English proficiency levels as their rationale, as shown in (5) below.
(5) Participant 37: I think if I’m the target, when the teacher says this to me, I would think it is impoliteness because I will be nervous to talk to the teacher. If my teacher talked to me like this, I don’t know how I would reply. However, if the teacher talks like this to another student, I will think it’s a joke because I will not feel nervous.
Based on example (5), certain metaparticipants would already feel nervous when interacting with a lecturer, let alone when the lecturer used verbal humor. They may not have known how to respond to verbal humor when they were the direct targets. By contrast, they would feel more relaxed when they were the witnesses; thus, they would comprehend and appreciate the verbal humor more when they were relaxed and comfortable (Roshanbin et al., 2022).
To partially answer
Metapragmatic Evaluations Regarding Po’s Verbal Humor as an Act of Impoliteness
In total, 42 metaparticipants regarded Po’s verbal humor as an impoliteness act when they were the direct targets, including 26 male (62%) and 16 female (38%) metaparticipants. Of these 42 metaparticipants, 22 of them considered that the lecturer’s use of the word “criminal” and the entire utterance to be inappropriate, as examples (6) and (7) below demonstrate.
(6) Participant 48: I feel it’s not appropriate to use this word “criminal” to a student or to me. This word is not a good word, so a teacher should not use it even in a joke. Researcher: But sometimes people need to use different words to make a joke. Participant 48: Yeah, I know. But he’s a teacher and I’m a student, yes? If my friend says this to me, perhaps I’m fine. (7) Participant 63: I don’t think it’s that impolite, but to me, a teacher should not say something like “you look like a criminal” to a student because we do not do that in Thai culture. Researcher: But Po is not a Thai lecturer. It was an intercultural communication. Participant 63: But the students are Thai, right? The teacher maybe needs to know that we do not say it in Thai culture.
Although the metaparticipants in both examples above mentioned the inappropriateness of the use of the word “criminal” or of the entire utterance, different rationales were provided. According to the conversation in (6), Po’s verbal humor was considered to be an impoliteness act due to Po’s social role as a university lecturer. As a lecturer, Po’s situational verbal humor was considered impolite, whereas the same verbal humor might be accepted among friends who had the same social status rather than in a student-teacher relationship (Moalla, 2015). In (7), Metaparticipant 63 insisted that the utterance would not be used in Thai culture based on his individual interpretation of Thai culture.
Apart from the reference to Thai culture in (7), 16 participants (38%) also mentioned Thai culture in their rationales, as demonstrated in (8) below.
(8) Participant 65: What can I say? From my understanding, Thai teachers do not use this type of humor or perhaps any humor in the classrooms. They just lecture in the classroom. Perhaps it is Thai culture. So, I am not really used to any humor.
According to example (8), Po’s type of verbal humor was not used frequently by Thai lecturers in Thai classrooms (Embalzado & Sajampun, 2020). Hence, the metaparticipants may not have been familiar with Po’s verbal humor or any type of humor that is frequently used in other cultures.
In addition, nine metaparticipants even considered Po’s verbal humor to be an insult, which was the same as Ti’s viewpoint in (1), as demonstrated in (9) below.
(9) Participant 49: I’m not sure if this is an insult to me or my classmate whether I’m the target or a witness. In Thai culture, we should not joke like this since it looks like disrespect to others.
The perspective of Po’s verbal humor being regarded as an insult was also based on Thai culture in which the metaparticipants were raised and educated. Hence, Thai culture had an enormous impact on the metaparticipants from different aspects, such as their expectations of how a lecturer should behave.
By contrast, only 21 metaparticipants regarded Po’s verbal humor as an impoliteness act when they were the witnesses, which was half of the number of the metaparticipants who regarded Po’s verbal humor as an impoliteness act when they were the direct targets. Apart from the same rationales illustrated above, several metaparticipants provided two other rationales when they were the witnesses, as demonstrated in examples (10) and (11), respectively.
(10) Participant 15: I don’t see this is funny. I feel this teacher likes to criticize students like all the other teachers. The teachers always blame the students to be the bad ones. Researcher: You mean you think this lecturer, Pom was trying to criticize the student by using this verbal humor? Participant 15: Yeah. Not just humor, but teachers like say something to indicate the fault of students. Researcher: Then what’s the fault of Tew in this context? Participant 15: How do I know? Maybe he did something that this teacher did not like. (11) Participant 27: I think it’s not okay because this teacher said it in front of other students. He shouldn’t say it in front of others. If he said it with me privately, I will be okay. Researcher: But what if you and this lecturer have a close relationship, and you both have been in this same situation many times, will you still think this verbal humor is not okay? Participant 27: I don’t think any student and teacher will have this so-called close relationship. We are not going to be friends or family. Teachers will always be on the other side of the students. Researcher: What makes you think of that? Participant 27: My experience.
Both examples above demonstrated several metaparticipants’ irrational beliefs when evaluating Po’s verbal humor as impoliteness. The irrational belief in (10) was that teachers always tend to blame their students, while the belief in (11) was that there could not be a close student-teacher relationship. Both irrational beliefs are examples of over-simplification and over-generalization (Chan & Sun, 2021; Warren & Hale, 2016). Different aspects should be considered when students evaluate the qualities of a good teacher and close student-teacher relationships (Xie et al., 2022). The irrational beliefs discussed above indicate that certain Thai EFL learners at universities were in the stage of emerging adulthood, during which irrational beliefs have a negative effect on the evaluations of others’ behaviors (Roorda & Bosman, 2022).
To answer
Affective Effect
In total, 42 metaparticipants (53%) claimed that they would not have negative affect toward the lecturer after the verbal humor incident regardless of whether they were the direct targets or the witnesses. Hence, a total of 38 metaparticipants (47%) would have some negative affect toward the lecturer after the incident when they were the direct targets, comprising 24 male (63%) and 14 female (37%) metaparticipants.
Among the 38 metaparticipants, a total of 25 metaparticipants (66%) considered that the lecturer should respect students by not using students as the target in certain types of humor, such as teasing, as demonstrated in (12) below, while 12 metaparticipants (32%) declared that they thought that the lecturer should adjust their language to consider the feelings of the students and Thai culture, as demonstrated in (13) below.
(12) Participant 16: I would be a bit uncomfortable. A teacher also needs to respect students. So, even when the teacher wants to have some humor with the students, they should also respect students in the jokes. (13) Participant 32: I think I will be not so happy. A teacher sometimes needs to be careful about their language in class. Thai culture teaches us that we say things indirectly, so we don’t say many things in front of others’ face.
As both examples demonstrate, different metaparticipants used the keywords “uncomfortable” and “not happy” to describe their negative attitudes. However, 14 metaparticipants (37%) mentioned that their negative attitudes would not persist because they had been taught to respect and listen to teachers in Thai culture (Embalzado & Sajampun, 2020; Pan, 2024, 2025a). By contrast, 17 metaparticipants (21%) would have some negative attitudes toward the lecturer after the incident when they were the witnesses, comprising 12 male (71%) and 5 female (29%) metaparticipants. They provided the same rationales as illustrated in the two examples above. Moreover, all these participants mentioned that their negative attitudes toward the lecturer would not be extreme and cited the same rationale, namely the influence of Thai culture.
As such, almost half of the metaparticipants would have short-term negative attitudes toward the lecturer after being the direct target of the given verbal humor. Two rationales were given. A university lecturer should respect students and should follow Thai culture in classroom teaching.
Discussion
This research investigated a situational verbal humor created by a university lecturer, Po, to determine whether two variables, gender and role, influenced intermediate-level Thai EFL learners’ views regarding Po’s attempt at verbal humor in intercultural classroom communication. The results for
The metaparticipants’ evaluations revealed their ontology regarding Po’s situational verbal humor. Background information about the humor creator was important in order for the verbal humor to be successful, as examples (2) and (3) revealed. In addition, the situational context was considered to be a crucial factor when evaluating the attempt at verbal humor as being successful (Andreea et al., 2023; Pan, 2025b), as Metaparticipant 12’s responses in (3) showed. Based on the results, the roles of the metaparticipants had an impact on their evaluations. More metaparticipants regarded Po’s verbal humor as being successful when their role was as witnesses. Moreover, as the metaparticipants had limitations in the English language due to their English proficiency levels, the language barrier was a factor in their evaluations (Bell, 2009). Thus, for the intermediate-level Thai EFL learners, a non-Thai lecturer’s successful verbal humor in intercultural classroom communication depended on the lecturer’s personal background and social role within the situational context. Furthermore, due to the language barrier, verbal humor was more likely to be successful if it involved teasing when the Thai learners were simply witnesses.
However, many metaparticipants regarded Po’s verbal humor as being impolite. Many of the metaparticipants believed that lecturers should not utter words that have negative connotations. Furthermore, the metaparticipants believed that certain types of humor did not occur frequently in Thai culture and that traditional Thai classrooms rarely included any verbal humor, as illustrated in examples (7) to (9). Møller Jensen and Dam (2023, p. 138) found that “humor is ‘culture’-bound” and includes “several socio-cultural aspects,” such as ethnicity and nationality. Certain types of humor, such as teasing, can be a double-edged sword because they can be interpreted as either humor or impoliteness (Moalla & Amor, 2021; Pan, 2025b). Hence, Thai culture was an important factor when the metaparticipants evaluated Po’s verbal humor as impolite, as they based their evaluations on their understanding of Thai culture (Pan, 2025b).
This finding led to their ontology of impoliteness, in that any discursive behavior that violated Thai social norms would be considered to be impolite. Hence, these metaparticipants had certain expectations regarding how they should be treated in terms of their internal face, including being respected and being spoken to in a polite way based on the expectation of politeness in Thai culture, such as not teasing people (Bell, 2009; Pan, 2025b). However, their expectations were not met when Po created the situational verbal humor, particularly when they were the direct targets. Thus, according to the concept of politeness in Thai culture, their external positive faces were lost (Bousfield, 2008). However, as the different views regarding Po’s verbal humor in this research revealed, individual differences must be acknowledged. In line with Pan’s (2025b) study, in which individual differences pertaining to the creation of verbal humor by EFL learners from different linguacultural backgrounds in intercultural communication were found, individual perceptions of the same example of verbal humor can differ due to different understandings of people’s own cultures and their diverse personal experiences (Møller Jensen & Dam, 2023).
This research not only discussed the relationship between verbal humor and impoliteness that occurred in intercultural classroom communication, but also investigated the impact of using verbal humor on student-teacher relationships. The metaparticipants were identified as having negative affects, including experiencing uncomfortable and unhappy emotions, when they regarded Po’s verbal humor as an impoliteness act. Thus, lecturers’ attempts at using certain types of humor, such as teasing, will lead to students having negative affects, particularly when they are the direct targets of the humor. Students’ negative affects can potentially result in a disconnect between the students and their lecturers, resulting in long-term negative effects on student-teacher relationships (Mohan, 2023; Roorda & Bosman, 2022). Negativity in student-teacher relationships may further lead to students having irrational beliefs in educational settings. As examples (10) and (11) demonstrated, the metaparticipants’ reasons were based on irrational beliefs, which lacked rational support (Chan & Sun, 2021) and stemmed from the students’ previous experiences with various teachers; the students oversimplified and overgeneralized these experiences, which had an extremely negative impact on their evaluations of their current student-teacher relationships.
Based on the metaparticipants’ rationales, the students expected their lecturers to respect them, and lecturers should be aware that certain words should not be used in classrooms. Accordingly, lecturers should be more careful when creating verbal humor in which their students are the direct targets in intercultural classrooms, and should avoid using words that have negative connotations. As Thai culture mandates that people should not say certain things to avoid damaging others’ faces, indirectness is considered to be polite in different types of interactions (Pan, 2022). Therefore, lecturers who teach students who have different linguacultural backgrounds should be trained in cultural awareness to avoid potential impoliteness acts. Both of the abovementioned practical implications will promote good student-teacher relationships based on the lecturer’s role. Given that good student-teacher relationships are mutually constructed, humor should be considered in language pedagogy, as suggested in previous research (Bell, 2009; Pan, 2025b). By including humor in pedagogy, students can learn about different types of humor, understand the positive effects, and accept different types of humor. Since more language teachers are now working in foreign countries in which students from different cultures are learning in the same classroom (Lu’mu et al., 2023), cultural awareness pertaining to humor and politeness should be included in pedagogy. Studies of different cultures, including different beliefs and social norms, can broaden students’ minds and enable them to understand humor in different cultures in depth, while simultaneously making them aware of the issue of impoliteness. A better understanding of humor, impoliteness, and different cultures, will allow students to appreciate their teachers’ verbal humor and promote good student-teacher relationships (Warren & Hale, 2016; Xie et al., 2022).
Conclusion
The findings of the present research supported the importance of the roles that the two variables played in verbal humor and impoliteness in intercultural classroom communication. Since many lecturers use verbal humor in classroom teaching (Alemi et al., 2021), lecturers should consider whether certain forms of verbal humor, such as teasing, are appropriate when the students are the direct targets, as well as the appropriateness of the language used. As the research results showed, cultural and individual differences influenced the perceptions of the same example of verbal humor in intercultural communication. Therefore, in a classroom in which students have different cultures, lecturers should be aware of cultural and individual differences when using verbal humor to avoid potential impoliteness. Nonetheless, students should be given more opportunities to understand verbal humor and its positive effects in pedagogy, which can increase students’ familiarity with different types of humor and increase their cultural awareness. The abovementioned suggestions from both the lecturers’ and the students’ perspectives can maintain harmonious student-teacher relationships and avoid students having a negative affect.
Since the focus in this research was solely on intermediate-level Thai EFL learners’ metapragmatic evaluations of verbal humor, future research should investigate EFL learners who have other linguacultural backgrounds. As impoliteness has rarely been discussed in terms of its perlocutionary effect on interactants, future research should investigate the perlocutionary effect of impolite acts that occur in different contexts.
Footnotes
Ethical Considerations
This research has been approved by the Institutional Review Board of Mahidol University with the approval number: COA No. MU-CIRB 2025/110.0904.
Consent to Participate
Each participant has provided the written consent form.
Author Contributions
Zhaoyi Pan is full responsible for the entire research design and paper writing.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability Statement
Due to the ethical concern, the data used in this research are restricted to the author.