“It's just a bit of cultural […] lost in translation”: Australian and British intracultural and intercultural metapragmatic evaluations of jocularity

•This paper analyses a jocular comment and its intracultural and intercultural evaluations.•The study combines reality television discourse and qualitative interview data.•In Australian and British cultural contexts jocularity is much appreciated.•The Australian interviewees make culture-specific distinctions in the use of humour.•The British primarily concentrate on jocularity-related benefits in interaction.

This paper explores evaluations of attempts at humour and reactions to them by participants and non-participants in a jocular interaction. There are two levels of analysis: (1) the instigator's jocular comment and the target's reaction to it, taken from the reality television gameshow Big Brother Australia 2012, and (2) the Australian and British interviewees' (non-participants') intracultural (inside one's own cultural context) and intercultural (from another cultural context) evaluations of the comment and the reaction to it. It is true that jocularity in both cultural contexts is highly appreciated and tends to produce a laughing (or at least not a confrontational) reaction, which shows one's ability to laugh at oneself and not take oneself too seriously. However, there are particular differences in intracultural and intercultural evaluations. For instance, while it was noticed that the Australian interviewees tend to make culture-specific remarks about how different their own and British understanding of humour is, the British interviewees try to avoid cultural or collective references and rather focus on jocularity-related benefits in interaction.