The "Clinton Cackle": Hillary Rodham Clinton's Laughter in News Interviews

The “Clinton Cackle”: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Laughter in
News Interviews

Tanya Romaniuk
York University

       This paper discusses a previously undescribed phenomenon in broadcast news inter-
views, namely the practice of interviewees laughing in response to an interviewer’s question
prior to providing a substantive response. Specifically, it does so through an investigation
of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (HRC) use of laughter in news interviews during her 2007
campaign for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Drawing on a
conversation analysis framework, I consider two dimensions of HRC’s laughter: first, the
retrospective dimension, arguing that HRC’s laughter acts as an implicit commentary on
the interviewers’ questions, which also functions to undermine them; second, its prospective
consequences—how laughter establishes a relevant context for a responsive next action.
Ultimately, I demonstrate how both dimensions are relevant in varying degrees and given
particularized features of the interactional context. Furthermore, it offers some important
implications for subsequent analyses of laughter in broadcast news interviews as well as
other interactional contexts.

                                  Introduction

       This paper offers a discussion of a previously undescribed phenomenon in
broadcast news interviews (BNIs), namely the practice of interviewees laughing
in response to an interviewer’s question prior to providing a substantive response.
Specifically, it does so through an investigation of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (HRC)
use of laughter in news interviews during her campaign for the Democratic nomina-
tion for President of the United States. HRC’s laughter received some short-lived
media attention, following a brief segment on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, which
aired on September 25, 2007. During this segment, Stewart likened HRC to a robot
with a robotic voice saying, “Humorous remark detected – prepare for laughter
display.” A number of journalists and political commentators then offered their
perspectives on what The New York Times columnist Patrick Healy coined the
“Clinton Cackle.” Frank Rich, a liberal columnist for the same newspaper, said
the laugh seemed to be her campaign’s way of responding to complaints that she
is ‘too calculating and controlled’ and compared it to Al Gore’s long kiss with
his wife Tipper during the Democratic National Convention in 2000. At the same
time, presidential scholar Stephen Hess of George Washington University said
HRC’s ability to laugh indicated she was becoming more comfortable as a candi-
date. These and other comments are what led me to take a closer look at HRC’s
laughter; however, the practice that I uncovered and its dimensions that I describe
can no doubt be found in the talk of other interviewees, an issue I will return to in
Crossroads of Language, Interaction, and Culture
© 2009, Regents of the University of California 		                        Vol. 7, pp. 17-49

18 Romaniuk

my concluding remarks.
      The data set, from which the examples will be drawn, consists of over 20 oc-
currences of HRC’s laughter in 9 news interviews broadcast and collected between
September and December 2007. A complete list of interviews, including a descrip-
tion of the interviewers, programs, networks and original airdates, is provided in
Table 1. The data has been transcribed using transcription conventions commonly
used in studies of conversation analysis (see Appendix A).

Table 1: List of News Interviews with HRC
 Interviewer              Program            Network        Date
 Chris Matthews
                          Hardball           MSNBC          September 16 2007
 (CM)
                          Good Morning
 Diane Sawyer (DS)                           ABC            September 18 2007
                          America
                          Face The
 Bob Schieffer (BS)                          CBS            September 18 2007
                          Nation
 Joe Scarborough
                          Morning Joe        MSNBC          September 18 2007
 (JS)
                          Fox News
 Chris Wallace (CW)                          FOX            September 24 2007
                          Sunday
                          Fox Morning
 Steve Doocy (SD)                            FOX            December 17 2007
                          News
                          The Today
 David Gregory (DG)                          MSNBC          December 17 2007
                          Show
                          The Early
 Harry Smith (HS)                            CBS            December 17 2007
                          Show
 George Stephanopo-
                          This Week          ABC            December 30 2007
 lous (GS)

      The objective of this paper is to analyze representative examples of HRC’s
laughter using a conversation analysis framework (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998; ten
Have, 1999), with the goal of showing how the laughter’s meaning can be under-
stood by the actions it accomplishes as well as the responsive actions it makes
relevant. This attention to action requires a consideration of the local, sequential
environments in which the laughter occurs (Glenn, 2003). As such, I consider two
dimensions of laughter, or what HRC’s laughter seems to be ‘doing’ in response
to an interviewer’s talk. First, I consider the retrospective function of laughter.
That is, whenever HRC laughs at something in an interviewer’s prior question,
the laughter acts as an implicit commentary on that question, or some aspect of it.
A related issue concerns what types of questions get treated as laughable, as they

Clinton Cackle 19

are not evidently ‘humorous.’1 A common feature of the examples discussed here
is that HRC produces laughter at a point in which the interviewer has leveled, or
has begun to level, some form of criticism against her. Given this environment,
I argue that her laughter functions to undermine the criticisms embodied in the
interviewer’s talk and I distinguish cases that respond to interviewer’s questions
after they are complete, from those that respond to in-progress components of
questions such as statement prefaces. The second function of laughter I describe
concerns its prospective consequences—that is, how laughter establishes the
relevance of responsive laughter from recipients (cf. Jefferson, 1979). The ret-
rospective dimension of laughter deals primarily with the issue of what is being
laughed at, and the prospective dimension generally concerns what the subsequent
interactional consequences of laughter are once it has been produced. Although
this second dimension of laughter has received some attention in the analysis of
‘ordinary’ conversation (Glenn, 2003; Jefferson, 1984), it has not been considered
in a context in which interactional roles are severely constrained by institutional
mandates.2 Thus, I also analyze how interviewers generally resist the pressure to
laugh in this particular interactional context, noting some important exceptions
and differences depending on whether the views being expressed are those of
the interviewers themselves or some third party. Ultimately, the analysis seeks to
demonstrate how both the retrospective and prospective dimensions of laughter in
this context appear to be relevant in varying degrees in each case. Furthermore, it
offers some important implications for subsequent analyses of laughter in as well
as other interactional contexts.

Laughter as Communicative Action
      Despite commonly held beliefs about laughter, human beings do not laugh
uncontrollably or randomly; rather, laughter occurs in orderly and systematic
ways (Glenn, 2003). The majority of studies on laughter has tended to treat it as a
response to external or internal stimuli rather than as a systematic, even strategic,
form of communicative behaviour. Since Jefferson’s (1979) pioneering work on the
organization of laughter in interaction, however, a number of conversation analytic
studies have considered laughter as a communicative action, which is influenced
by and contributes to social interaction (Edwards, 2005; Glenn, 2003; Haakana,
2001, 2002; Jefferson, 1984, 2007; Jefferson, Sacks, & Schegloff, 1987; Wilkinson,
2007). Such research has been carried out in a range of interactional contexts and
has consistently demonstrated how laughter is a ‘systematically produced, socially
organized activity’ (Jefferson et al., 1987: 152).
      An important component of recognizing some of the social and communica-
tive aspects of laughter is to consider it not exclusively as responding to humor
but as marking its referent as laughable. Given that locating a precise laughable
can prove analytically challenging, I follow an early observation by Sacks (1992:
745) that ‘laughing is the sort of thing that, when it’s done it will be heard as tied
to the last thing said’. In this view, paying particular attention to where laughter

20 Romaniuk

occurs is crucial, in that the location of laughter can provide retrospective index-
ing of the laughable (Glenn, 1989: 147). What one laughs at – or, put differently,
what causes laughter – is an important dimension to consider in any analysis of
laughter. At the same time, the issue of how laughter is responded to by recipients
– or, its prospective consequences – is also worthy of attention. Adelswärd (1989:
118) argues that both of these dimensions of laughter may be relevant in particular
instances of laughter to varying degrees, depending on the specific context. Indeed,
what initiates laughter and how it is received are both complex issues that require
close attention to the specific interactional context and the particulars of each in-
dividual case of laughter. When such close attention is paid, it is clear that much
human laughter occurs independent of humorous stimuli, or at least its connection
to a humorous source is often not direct or explicit (Partington, 2006). Common
characterizations of individuals’ laughter as ‘nervous’, ‘insincere’, or even ‘wicked’
suggest that there is something more to it than simply the perception of humor
(Glenn, 2003: 23). Schenkein (1972: 344) argues, for example, that some of the
interactional activities speakers can perform by way of laughter include conveying
the non-seriousness of their previous utterance, or proffering (dis)affiliation, while
hearers may likewise use laughter to demonstrate hearership or understanding of
a speaker’s proposition, or to display (dis)affiliation. Though social approaches of
laughter vary, one view of particular interest for the purposes of this paper treats
individuals as ‘rule-orienting social beings who actively produce laughter at par-
ticular moments in order to accomplish particular ends’ (Glenn, 2003: 3). Although
some work has been done on the use of laughter and its accomplishments within
particular institutional domains such as medical encounters (Haakana, 2001, 2002)
and legal and workplace contexts (Adelswärd, 1989), the use of laughter in news
interviews has not previously been explored.

Broadcast News Interviews
       Unlike ‘ordinary’ conversation, the turn-taking system of news interviews
preallocates specific types of turns to speakers with particular institutional identi-
ties, so that the institutional roles of interviewer and interviewee are expected to
restrict themselves to questioning and answering, respectively (Greatbatch, 1988).
Correspondingly, the ‘doing’ of interview is constituted and realized through the
participants’ orientation to the interviewer doing questions and the interviewee doing
answers (Schegloff, 1988/89). The popular belief that interviewees, and politicians
as interviewees specifically, resist interviewers’ questioning is perhaps not surprising
considering the adversarial nature of contemporary media interviews:

      In news interviews – as well as…other forms of interrogation – journalists are
      drawn to questions that are unflattering, incriminating, or otherwise hostile in
      character. If answered straightforwardly, these can inflict damage on a politi-
      cian’s policy objectives, career prospects, and personal reputation…to avoid
      [such negative] consequences, interviewees may be motivated to be less than
      forthcoming in the face of hostile questioning (Clayman, 2001: 403-404).

Clinton Cackle 21

       Clayman (2001) goes on to explain that politicians thus face a dilemma when
being interviewed: they are expected to adhere to the specialized turn-taking system
by answering the interviewer’s questions, and wish to be seen as cooperative and not
evasive; however, they do not want their reputations to be damaged. Consequently,
politicians have developed a range of strategies for overtly and covertly resisting
the negative outcomes of interviews, both within the interaction and in subsequent
media coverage, and scholars have documented many of these strategies in previ-
ous work (Clayman, 2001; Clayman & Heritage, 2002b; Harris, 1991). Given that
previous researchers have suggested that the act of laughing can convey a variety
of actions other than being humorous – such as being apologetic, derisive, social,
evasive, or conveying anxiety, joy or even ignorance (Foot 1977, cited in Glenn,
2003: 23) – prefacing substantive responses to interviewers’ questions with laughter
may be viewed as one strategy interviewees can use in attempting to deal with the
challenging nature of such questions. In the case of HRC, at least, it appears she
treats laughter as an ‘interactional resource’ (Adelswärd, 1989).3

“Doing” Laughter
       In order to consider the retrospective function of HRC’s laughter, it is neces-
sary first to consider the nature of the interviewers’ questions that precede it. As
Steensig & Drew (2008: 7) point out, an apparently simple but crucial fact about
asking a question is that ‘it is not an innocent thing to do’. In keeping with the
adversarial nature of news interviews outlined above, interviewers’ questions are
often of a disaffiliative nature; that is, they perform actions such as challenging,
reproaching, complaining, criticizing, disagreeing, and so on (Steensig & Drew,
2008). The first example illustrates this kind of disaffiliative questioning, and
comes from an interview on Fox News Sunday’s ‘Choosing the President’. The
interview took place in September 2007, during a week in which HRC participated
in a series of news interviews on all the major television network stations. During
Fox’s special series, Chris Wallace (CW), long-time American journalist known
for his confrontational style, interviewed each of the six Democratic candidates
on a number of important campaign issues including the Iraq War and the Bush
administration, Republican criticisms of the Democrats’ campaigns, and health care
reform. In extract 1, CW begins the interview by suggesting that he and HRC are
experiencing ‘an interesting bit of karma’ talking on the one-year anniversary of
an interview he conducted with her husband, former President Bill Clinton (BC).
Following this statement and without establishing any context, he shows a video
clip from the interview in which BC says to CW: “you did Fox’s bidding on this
show; you did your nice little Conservative hit job on me”. The video footage then
cuts off abruptly and returns to a view of both CW and HRC on a split screen4
(shown in Figure 1) throughout CW’s first question (lines 1-3, extract 1) and the
beginning of HRC’s response (lines 5-7).

22 Romaniuk

Figure 1: k-he Heh Heh (line 5)

(1) Fox News Sunday (September 24 2007): question by Chris Wallace
1 CW: Senator taw:lk about Conservative hit jobs, right-wi:ng
2     conspiracies, wh↑y do you: and the President have such a
3     hyper-partisan view of politics.
4     (0.3)
5HRC:→k-he Heh Heh heh heh heh heh h↑eh .hh £well Chris if you
6     had uh walked even a day in our shoes over the last
7     fifteen years I’m sure you’d understand.£ .hh
8     but y’know the real goal for our country right now is to
9     get beyo:nd uh partisanship and uh I’m £sure trying to
10    do my part£ .hh because we’ve got a lot of se:rious
11    problems that uh we’re trying tuh deal with
12    this week I rolled out my: American health choices plan…

       In this example, CW begins at line 2 with a direct and ‘accusatory’ form
of hostile question design (‘wh↑y do you:…’) (Clayman & Heritage, 2002a). As
Sacks (1992: 4-5) noted in his first lecture, why-type questions seek an account of
something the questioner deems worthy of explanation. The justification for this
question comes from the immediately prior video footage with Bill Clinton, and
CW’s repetition of his phrase ‘Conservative hit job’ in line 1. He then expands on this
phrase by making reference to ‘right-wing conspiracies’ (lines 1-2), an expression
associated with HRC, originating from an interview in 1998 when she was asked
about her reaction to the Lewinsky scandal. In combination with ‘hit jobs’, then,
these expressions combine to formulate the negative characterization of HRC’s and
her husband’s views as ‘hyper-partisan’ (line 3). This question is presuppositionally
negative5 in that the wording presumes that their views are in fact hyper-partisan,
a quality considered undesirable in politics due to its association with partiality
and made extreme by the qualifying prefix ‘hyper-’ (note also CW’s production of
this qualifier with emphatic stress on the first syllable). The end of this turn con-
structional unit (TCU) – indicating a possible turn transition point, or transition
relevance place (TRP) (cf. Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974) – is marked by
the completion of the why-type question as the first part of a question-answer adja-

Clinton Cackle 23

cency pair, which sets up the expectation for a second-pair part, that is, a response
(Schegloff, 1968). Less than 3-tenths of a second later,6 HRC prefaces her response
with an initial laugh burst producing eight consecutive distinct open-mouthed laugh
pulses (line 5). What is it, then, that HRC seems to be managing by ‘doing laughter’
at this juncture? If we consider the dimension of laughter as a ‘retro-sequence’
(cf. Schegloff, 1995 cited in Wilkinson, 2007), then its sequential placement (im-
mediately following the interviewer’s question) indicates that HRC locates some
aspect of CW’s turn as its source (e.g., ‘hyper-partisan’), thus treating his ques-
tion as something laughable. Immediately following the final laugh particle, she
produces a pre-continuation inbreath followed by the discourse marker ‘well’ (line
5), which is commonly used to indicate that the speaker is about to say something
that may conflict with the content of the previous speaker’s utterance (Schiffrin,
1987). In further orienting to the dispreferred nature of her response (Pomerantz,
1984), it is interesting to note that HRC then addresses the interviewer by first name
(‘Chris’), a highly recurrent practice that speakers employ when expressing ‘deeply
felt opinions and personal feelings, particularly when such opinions or feelings are
oppositional in character’ (Clayman, 2001: 441). Similarly, in an analysis of politi-
cal news interviews in Australia, Rendle-Short (2007) finds that politicians tend to
use address terms in dispreferred environments, particularly when responding to a
specific line of unwanted questioning. In fact, she argues that a politician’s use of
an address term at the beginning of a dispreferred response serves as a mechanism
to maximize interactional distance between the question and its answer, a typical
feature of dispreferred responses. Furthermore, she suggests the use of personal
address terms operates on a social level as well. That is, by referring to the journalist
using his/her first name, Rendle-Short (2007: 1518) argues, the interviewee orients
to having a familiar, first-name relationship with the journalist, which mitigates the
dispreferred nature of the response and thus minimizes the social distance between
the interviewee and journalist. Why might a politician engage in such a practice?
The author argues that it is essentially an issue of power—while the journalist has
‘power’ in terms of occupying the institutionally sanctioned interactional role of
questioner, a politician also occupies a powerful institutional role, and one way of
indexing that power in a particularly adversarial environment is through the use of a
journalist’s first name. Returning to the first example, HRC engages in this practice
as part of constructing a dispreferred response, prior to adding a characterization of
her own: ‘if you had uh walked even a day in our sho:es over the last fifteen years
I’m sure you’d understand’ (lines 5-7). Interestingly, the way in which she phrases
this utterance actually accepts to some extent the terms of the question. Still, it is
uttered through a smile voice, which continues to display the prior turn as laugh-
able, while at the same time suggesting that the interviewer lacks the appropriate
knowledge or experience to understand how such a perception might exist in the
first place. Following this statement, HRC further indicates her disagreement with
CW’s negative characterization more overtly by refocusing the question, implying
that CW is in fact wasting time by focusing on partisanship; she knows what the

24 Romaniuk

real goal for their country is, namely, getting ‘beyo:nd partisanship’ (lines 8-9).
Moreover, she ascribes agency to herself by shifting away from speaking on behalf
of both her and her husband and toward focusing on what she is doing (lines 9-10).
This portion of the response is also expressed through a smile voice reinforcing the
challenge she has constructed up to this point. To summarize, her response not only
challenges the interviewer’s capacity to know what is being presupposed by the
question, but by prefacing it with laughter, she retrospectively casts the question
as inapposite, thus marking disaffiliation from it (Heritage, 1998). Additionally,
by laughing before the production of a dispreferred response, I would argue that
the laughter is hearable as part of doing disagreement.
       The second example in which to discuss the retrospective dimension of laugh-
ter comes from an interview on Hardball, a talk show on MSNBC, one week before
HRC’s interview with Chris Wallace. Though conducted in a similar format, this
particular excerpt differs slightly in that the question posed by American political
satirist, Bill Maher (BM), has clearly been rehearsed.

(2) Hardball (September 16 2007): question by Bill Maher
13 BM:Senator Clinton. .phh A:ll the senators here except Senator
14      Obama .hh voted for the Iraq War resolution in 2002, .hh
15      saying that their decision was based on intelligence that
16      they believed to be accurate at the time. .hh
17      in other words (.) George Bush fooled you. .phh
18      Why should Americans vote(sh) for someone who can be fooled
19      by George Bush.
20    		          (1.0)
21 HRC:→hehe hah hah hah hah hah hah hah .hhh well, Bill it was £a
22      ↑little more c(h)omplicated than that£ uh:m I sought out expert
23      uh=opinions from a £wi:de variety of sources.£ .h Uh
24      people insi:de and outside the government, uh people in my
25      husband’s administration. .hh uh and I think it is fair to
26      say that uh at the time (.) I made it very clear I was against
27      a preemptive war

       At the beginning of this excerpt, BM produces a prefaced question (lines 13-
16), which contains a statement preceding the question proper. Prefaced questions
are commonly used in news interviews to provide background information for
the interviewee and overhearing audience as well as to contextualize the question
(Clayman & Heritage, 2002a). In this example, the prefatory statement provides
a context that allows for the reformulation that follows (line 17). Specifically,
BM explains that HRC, among all her Democratic opponents (except Obama),
voted for legislation that allowed the Bush administration to go to war with Iraq
(lines 13-14). He also introduces the senators’ reasons for voting in the manner
they did; that is, ‘their decision was based on intelligence that they believed to be
accurate at that time’ (lines 15-16). Without this background information, BM’s

Clinton Cackle 25

direct question ‘Why should Americans vote for someone who can be fooled by
George Bush’ (lines 18-19) would appear extremely hostile because it would lack
a sufficient basis for such a negative proposition. As Clayman & Heritage (2002a:
188) point out, interviewers must design their questions in such a way as to ‘strike
a balance between the journalistic norms of impartiality and adversarialness’. In
this instance, then, the statement preface is an essential resource that allows for
BM to set the context (that is, HRC’s vote) and then reformulate that context into
a critical proposition (‘George Bush fooled you’). Specifically, he introduces the
reformulation with the lexical phrase ‘in other words’ (line 17), and then paraphrases
the first preface statement (representing HRC’s words) in his own words: ‘George
Bush fooled you’ (line 17). By reformulating the preface statement in this way, the
proposition is transformed into a politically damaging one, on which he bases his
final direct, hostile question (lines 18-19). BM completes this final question with a
falling intonation on the last syllable ‘Bush’, marking the end of the first-pair part
to a question-answer adjacency pair. Again, HRC prefaces her response with a unit
of laughter, this time composed of nine distinct pulses (line 21), therefore treating
the interviewer’s question as embodying a perspective to be laughed at, and thus,
disagreed with. The post-laugh position is again occupied by a pre-continuation
inbreath, followed by the discourse marker ‘well’, which orients to the dispreferred
nature of her response and signals disagreement with the interviewer’s reformula-
tion. In addition, HRC makes use of the recurring interviewee practice of referring
to the interviewer by first name (‘Bill’), which frequently occurs within a TCU as
part of the dispreferred nature of a response (Rendle-Short, 2007). She then sug-
gests that BM’s question offers a simplified version of the event under considera-
tion. Again, this commentary on the question is expressed through a smile voice,
contributing to the marking of its content as something laughable: ‘it was £a little
more complicated than that£’ (lines 21-22). Rather than answering the question as
to why Americans should vote for her, HRC instead responds to the reformulated
prefatory statement (line 17), offering a lengthy explanation of her perspective on
the decision (lines 22-27, further response has been omitted from the transcript).
It is also worth noting how she incorporates other participants into that decision
(lines 22-25), putting forth the suggestion that she was not the only one, and even
experts were ‘fooled’, to use BM’s terminology.
       In these two excerpts, I have considered the retrospective dimension of
laughter in cases where HRC produces laughter at the completion of an inter-
viewer’s question, or a TRP, before providing a substantive response. While it
is interesting to note that, in both cases, the interviewers’ questions are critical
or hostile toward HRC, I do not wish to suggest that HRC always responds to
challenging questions in this way; rather, it is one way in which she responds to
challenging questions. Also worthy of mention is the striking similarity of the
form of these laughter-prefaced responses. In both cases she first produces a series
of distinct laugh particles, which treat the prior turn as laughable, and frames the
ensuing challenge. Then, she makes use of specific lexical markers to orient to

26 Romaniuk

the dispreferred nature of her response, signaling her disagreement with the prior
utterance and providing commentary that challenges the terms of the question and
the questioner’s ability to know or understand what is being presupposed by the
question. This second element of her response is produced through a smile voice
in both instances, which prosodically reinforces the non-seriousness of the ques-
tion. She then displays a marked shift – prosodically and discursively – to answer
the question, or at least to present herself as ‘answering’. In these instances, then,
HRC’s laughter functions as an implicit commentary on the prior question, one
that retrospectively treats the question (or some aspect of it) as laughable, and thus
undermines the criticism embodied in it.
       The retrospective dimension of laughter can also be considered in the next
examples, where HRC’s laughter does not occur at a TRP (that is, after the com-
pletion of the first-pair part of an adjacency pair), but rather occurs within the
interviewers’ TCU, specifically during prefaces to questions. The first of these
examples is taken from another interview that occurred during HRC’s September
media blitz, when she had announced her plan to provide universal healthcare for
every American.

(3) Good morning America (September 18 2007): question by Dianne
Sawyer
28 DS: let’s uh ask some questions from a couple of angles=we
29      can: now, the Re↑publicans as you know were out in fo:rce
30      saying first of all you’ve t[alk[ed a[bou[t .hhh [incr[easing [taxes]
31 HRC:→                            [heh[hheh[heh[hehheh [heh [heh [°heh°]
32 DS: =on those wh[o make[two hun[dred[fifty[thousand do]llars to pay for it,
33 HRC:→               [h h [h h         [h h [h h [h h °uh°-]
34 DS:            also reducing waste to pay for it,
35      but th↑ey say (.) for instance (.) medicare is already (.) sixteen
36      trillion dollars over what has been funded .hh and it’s gonna cost
37      a l↑ot more than you say and here are some of the Republicans.

((clip played in which Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, comments on HRC’s
new healthcare plan: ‘it’s a European-style socialized medicine plan, that’s
where it leads, and that’s the wrong direction for America’ – frame shifts to
Republican candidate, Rudolph Guiliani, also providing commentary on HRC’s
healthcare plan: ‘this is essentially the Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton ap-
proach, which is let’s see if we can build socialized medicine’))

38 DS: can you re:a↑listically keep it at a hundred and te:n (.) bi:llion?
39     (1.3)
40 HRC:absolutely. and y’know my question for:: (.) uhm (.)
41     my uh frie:nds on the other side is=well what is their answer fo::r (.)
42     uhm mo:ving our country forward toward quality affordable healthcare
43     for everyone.

Clinton Cackle 27

       At the beginning of excerpt 3, the interviewer, Diane Sawyer (DS), has already
asked HRC some information-seeking questions about her healthcare proposal. At
line 28, DS shifts the agenda by projecting an action that she will ‘ask some ques-
tions from a couple of angles.’ Unlike the first two examples, when DS begins a
first preface to her question, here she places a degree of distance between herself
and the more overtly critical remarks she goes on to describe by ascribing them
to some of HRC’s opponents, namely the Republicans (line 29). At this point, DS
has not yet offered any commentary on their behalf; she has only mentioned that
the Republicans were ‘out in force’. Given the conflicting relationship between
Democrats and Republicans, HRC could likely infer that what follows will be a
negative assessment, and it is this inference which may account for the placement
of the laughter. The point at which DS is about to describe arguments put forward
by HRC’s critics on their behalf (immediately following ‘first of all’, line 30) marks
the onset of HRC’s production of a laugh unit consisting of eight consecutive laugh
pulses (line 31). This does not mark a TRP for HRC to begin her response, as DS
had just indicated that she was beginning a series of arguments put forth by the
Republicans (‘first of all’). Moreover, this unbroken unit of laughter actually occurs
across the first part of the Republicans’ criticism of HRC’s health plan, ‘you’ve
talked about .hhh increasing taxes’ (line 30). As DS continues to take her turn at
talk (line 32), HRC produces an extended exhalation at line 33, which is hearable
as a sigh, especially given the slight vocalization at its end (°uh°).
       Given that the turn-taking system of conversation displays a strong prefer-
ence for one party talking at a time (Sacks et al., 1974), and that the normative
interactional framework for news interviews is question-answer sequences, it is
interesting to consider how HRC is able to negotiate these constraints through her
use of laughter during the interviewer’s turn. Because laughter is not turn organized,
its occurrence is not restricted to particular places, such as post-question completion,
as answers generally are in the context of news interviews (Sacks, 1992: 745). Con-
sequently, HRC’s production of laughter in an environment in which the interviewer
has exclusive rights to talk (line 31) enables her to operate on that talk while it is
being produced instead of waiting until the question is completed. DS only reaches
the end of her question (line 38) after a video clip has been played, which shows
Republican candidates, Mitt Romney and Rudolph Guiliani, independently offering
criticisms of her plan (e.g., that it is a form of ‘socialized medicine’; that it is ‘the
wrong direction for America’; that Hillary Clinton is associated with controversial
documentary filmmaker, Michael Moore). Once HRC begins to respond to this
question by turning it back on her opponents (or, ‘friends’ as she puts it; line 41),
her laughter can be understood as having provided a particular stance toward the
Republicans and their criticisms, which treats her opponents and their opinions as
laughable. Here she displays this stance during the interviewer’s question preface,
further mitigating the force of the critique embodied within it since her laughter
occurs while it is being produced.

28 Romaniuk

       There is, of course, another relevant dimension of laughter that has not
been discussed in relation to any of the examples presented thus far, namely its
prospective consequences. In the first study of the organization of laughter in talk-
in-interaction, Jefferson (1979) considered the relationship between laughter and
some of its possible consequences. Specifically, she argued that laughter had the
capability of generating a sequence in interaction, which could be heard as an invita-
tion to recipients to laugh in response. Furthermore, she posited that the production
of laughter did not always result in recipients accepting the invitation to laugh;
rather, she suggested that there were a range of options recipients could draw upon
in responding. For example, recipients could accept the invitation (i.e., produce
laughter following the invitation); they could decline the invitation (i.e., provide
post-invitational speech over or following the laughter); or they could remain silent.7
This third option, however, was not considered sufficient for declining a laugh
invitation; rather, Jefferson (1979: 83) maintained that a recipient must actively
decline to laugh in order to terminate the relevance of responsive laughter. This
invitational quality of laughter that Jefferson initially described is perhaps better
understood today as a general prospective consequence of laughter—the production
of laughter establishes the relevance of responsive laughter by a recipient.
       While this prospective dimension of laughter has been explored in relation
to some conversational activities (e.g., what Jefferson (1984) calls ‘talk about trou-
bles’), the context of news interviews presents at least two additional issues that
have not been addressed in previous work. The first of these issues concerns the
fact that BNIs are characterized by a participation framework (Goffman, 1981) that
differs from ‘ordinary’ conversation. Given that news interview talk is expressly
produced for a broadcast audience—‘the primary, if unaddressed, recipients of the
talk’ (Heritage, 1985: 100)—an interviewee’s production of laughter may not neces-
sarily establish the relevance of responsive laughter for the interviewer as much as
it does for the audience. That is, in the majority of cases, if an interviewer laughed
in response to an interviewee’s laughter, which is produced during an interviewer’s
question, such laughter would probably be treated by the participants – and heard
by the overhearing audience – as problematic. After all, interviewers generally
design their questions to be taken seriously by interviewees. In any case, regardless
of whether an interviewer treats an interviewee’s laughter as an alignment-seeking
invitation, the overhearing audience may nevertheless treat it as such, and therefore
laugh along themselves from the comfort of their living rooms. The second issue
of relevance here relates to another general feature of news interviews—the notion
that interviewers are expected to project a neutralistic stance (Clayman, 1992).
Clayman (1988, 2006) and other researchers (Greatbatch, 1988; Hutchby, 2006)
have found that a common practice in BNIs is for interviewers to display—or ap-
pear to display—this position of ‘formal neutrality’ by formulating questions that
reference the views, attitudes, or concerns of others, be they particular groups,
individuals or the general populace (Clayman & Heritage, 2002b: 120). As such, if
an interviewer maintains a neutralistic posture in the course of asking a question in

Clinton Cackle 29

which an interviewee produces laughter, it seems more likely that the interviewer
might provide responsive laughter, or that responsive laughter from the interviewer
is of possible relevance.
       Returning to excerpt 3, then, with these issues in mind, HRC’s laughter within
the interviewer’s question preface can be seen, at least to some extent, as establish-
ing the relevance of responsive laughter from the broader audience (lines 30-31).
Given that DS has begun to express the views of some third party (namely, the
Republicans), it is also possible that HRC’s laughter seeks an affiliative response
from the interviewer. So, how DS treats this laughter is interactionally relevant.
When HRC begins to laugh during the first part of the Republicans’ criticism of
her healthcare plan, DS is looking down at some papers on her desk (shown in
Figure 2). Once HRC begins to laugh during ‘t[alk[ed’, the interviewer takes a
deep inbreath (shown in Figure 3) and then lifts her head and gaze to HRC, as if to
say ‘I am going on with this question if you don’t mind’ (Figure 4).8 Throughout
DS’s production of the question preface, DS does not hold HRC’s gaze; rather,
she faces downward (shown in Figures 2 and 3). Interestingly, once HRC begins
laughing, DS raises her head to look directly at HRC and carries forward with
the laugh-declining question, thus, terminating the relevance of laughter. This is
achieved without delay, as DS pursues the topic of the question preface and does
not acknowledge HRC’s laughter. Instead, she looks up at HRC with a facial ex-
pression that not only conveys that she will continue, but that casts a look at HRC
as if to say ‘hey now, you know my job is to stay neutral’. Despite the fact that
DS terminates the relevance of laughter immediately, HRC still manages to ori-
ent to the laughability of the Republicans’ views while they are being presented,
which also serves to challenge the seriousness of the question preface and treats
the Republicans themselves as laughable.

Figure 2: first of all you’ve t[alk[ed a[bou[t (line 30)

30 Romaniuk

Figure 3: you’ve t[alk[ed a[bou[t.hhh (line 30)

Figure 4: [incr[easing [taxes] (line 30)

       The next example, which demonstrates how the issues of responsive laughter
and journalistic neutrality are relevant to and consequential for the interaction,
comes from an interview on December 17, 2007 with Harry Smith (HS) on The
Early Show.9 At the time of the interview, HRC had just received an endorsement
from the Des Moines Register, the local daily morning newspaper of Des Moines,
Iowa. This was a significant moment for her campaign as one of her opponents,
Barack Obama, had become increasingly popular in the polls, and the Iowa
Caucuses—considered the first major electoral event of the nominating process—
were scheduled for January 3, 2008. Prior to this segment, HS had just reproduced
a portion of the endorsement, which explained how it was unfortunate that many
Americans still hold negative perceptions of HRC as a result of her failed attempt
at health care reform in the 1990s. He then asked whether HRC felt she still had to
overcome such perceptions, but her response did not deal with this issue. Instead,
she explained that the most important thing for her was to keep pushing forward
and to continue to make positive changes in peoples’ lives. Given that she did not
adequately address the issue of negative perceptions, the interviewer proceeds with
a follow-up prefaced question, reproduced in excerpt 4.

(4) The Early Show (December 17 2007): question by Harry Smith
44 HS: here’s the thing though.
45      so one of the rubs about your campai:gn:=they say it (.)
46      feels like it’s focus-group driven:, that it’s too: run too
47      tightly, that [.h [people in Iowa don]’t get to see=

Clinton Cackle 31

48 HRC:→            [uheh[hih hih h↑ih hehheh]
49 HS: =e[nough of the [re::al] you::?=
50 HRC:    [.hh             [u(h)h::]     =well th[at’s cert-=
51 HS:                                             [>to run counter to<
52      what you just sai[d=
53 HRC:                      [well that’s certainly not my imp(h)r↑ession.(.)
54 HS:  right (.)
55 HRC: t’s not the first time I’ve disagreed with the p(h)ress=
56 HS:  =k[hhuh
57 HRC:     [and I £p(h)robably don’t think it’s the last time£
58 HS: u[hhn
59 HRC: [.hh I-I am so:: grateful for the support that I have…

       Interestingly, while the interviewer wishes to continue a discussion of nega-
tive perceptions, he does not do so in a hostile or antagonistic manner. Rather, he
begins with a question preface describing one of the ‘rubs’ about HRC’s campaign
(line 45). This is a rather euphemistic expression, considering a word like ‘com-
plaints’, ‘critiques’, or ‘arguments’ could have been used to describe the ensuing
criticisms. The choice of this term lessens the criticism and thus contributes to a
comparatively friendly interaction (compared with excerpts 1 and 2, for example).
Furthermore, before launching into the assertions about her campaign, HS ascribes
them to an anonymous third party (‘they say’, line 45), which could refer to ‘people
in Iowa’ (line 47) but does not necessarily do so (i.e., it could be simply that ‘they’
refers to a different third party, who believes her campaign does not allow people
in Iowa to see the ‘real’ her). In any case, HS offers three critical perspectives on
HRC’s campaign but not in a way that suggests they are his own views. Instead,
he says that ‘they’ say that it ‘feels like’ it is ‘focus-group-driven:’, that it’s ‘run
too tightly’ and that ‘people in Iowa don’t get to see enough of the re::al’ her (lines
45-47; 50). The use of ‘feels like’ also minimizes the force of the critique, as it is
more indirect than the construction would be if it were omitted. In combination
with ‘rubs’, these features highlight the collegial nature of this interaction (again,
compared to excerpts 1 and 2), which helps to establish the relevance of recipient
laughter in this particular case. Moreover, what seems like a series of assertions
(lines 45-50) is actually a declarative question, signaled by the final rising intonation
on the declarative statement (Heritage & Roth, 1995), ‘people in Iowa don’t get
to see enough of the re::al you.’ But HRC does not wait until the end of this TCU
and a relevant TRP to produce a response; instead, she begins to laugh after HS has
introduced two of the criticisms. It is interesting to note that when HS completes
the first criticism, ‘focus-group driven:’, HRC signals her disagreement by nodding
and continues to do so through the entire course of the second criticism ‘ that it’s
too run too tightly.’ HS’s utterance is produced with a continuing intonation contour
and is followed by the complementizer ‘that’, which indicates that there is more to
come. As she has already been signaling disagreement physically (by nodding), it is

32 Romaniuk

at the point when she can anticipate a third criticism (cf. Hutchby, 2006: 150) that
she begins to laugh (line 48; Figure 5).10 Similar to the previous example in which
the interviewer proceeded to talk thereby terminating the relevance of responsive
laughter, here the interviewer physically withdraws from the interactional scene
precisely after she begins to laugh (represented in Figures 6-9). In Figure 5, as HRC
produces the first distinct laugh particle, the interviewer’s gaze is directed at her
and he is physically attentive to this response. After this particle is produced and he
continues with ‘people’ he withdraws his gaze and physically begins to withdraw
his head as well (Figure 6). By the time he is describing the people he is talking
about, that is, those ‘in Iowa,’ he raises his arm as a form of physical deixis refer-
encing other Iowans (Figure 7). Once this reference is physically made, he begins
to return to her direction (Figure 8), but still does not return his gaze until the end
of the laugh unit (Figure 9). This physical action marks a significant withdrawal,
and thus, active termination of the relevance of his responsive laughter, whereas
in the previous example, the interviewer simply gazed at HRC temporarily. Recall
from the previous discussion that an important part of terminating the relevance
of laughter requires more than the recipient’s restraint from laughing; a recipient
also has to do something to terminate the relevance of laughter. In this particular
segment, HS does not align with HRC by producing laughter himself; rather, he,
in fact, terminates the relevance of responsive laughter by physically removing
himself from the interaction at precisely the point in which she seeks alignment.
During this physical withdrawal, he also pursues the topic of his question preface.
In this way, the interviewer terminates the relevance of responsive laughter and
remains neutral.

Figure 5: HS: [.h    [people in Iowa don’t]
          HRC: [uheh[hih hih h↑ih heh heh] (lines 47-48)

Clinton Cackle 33

Figure 6: HS: [.h [people in Iowa don’t]
         HRC: [uheh[hih hih h↑ih heh heh] (lines 47-48)

Figure 7: HS: [.h [people in Iowa don’t]
         HRC: [uheh[hih hih h↑ih heh heh] (lines 47-48)

Figure 8: HS: [.h  [people in Iowa don’t]
        HRC: [uheh[hih hih h↑ih heh heh] (lines 47-48)

34 Romaniuk

Figure 9: HS: [.h [people in Iowa don]’t
         HRC: [uheh[hih hih h↑ih hehheh]

       While the prospective consequences of laughter in this example have been
discussed, the retrospective dimension of laughter can also be considered. After the
first-pair part of the question is complete (line 49), HRC provides a verbal reply
again indicating an orientation to a dispreferred response ‘well that’s cert-well that’s
certainly not my imp(h)r↑ession’ (lines 50; 53) (see excerpts 1 and 2). She continues
to display this disagreement by stating ‘it’s not the first time I’ve disagreed with
the p(h)ress’ (line 55) and ‘I £p(h)robably don’t think it’s the last time£’ (line 57).
Indeed, a common element of HRC’s response following laughter is to produce
some form of qualification of the question through a smile voice (as in excerpts
1, 2 and 6), which combines with her laughter to retrospectively cast the previous
utterance (i.e., what has been asked or prefaced in asking) as laughable and, as a
result, diminishes the question’s seriousness. In fact, in almost all of the examples
where HRC laughs, the verbal response that follows her laughter contains initial
remarks expressed in this smile voice. This type of verbal response not only displays
disagreement with the substance of the question preface (in this case, the remarks
of the ‘press’), it also provides the grounds for an understanding of her laughter
as highlighting this disagreement (Schegloff, 2007), and projects that particular
affective display as relevant. Although other nonvocal forms of embodied action
(e.g., facial expressions, nods) can perform a similar function, they are not treated
in the same way. That is, her laughter is such a salient feature of the interaction
that it is actually able to disrupt the trajectory of the interviewer’s turn in addition
to demonstrating its laughability.11 This possibility is demonstrated in the next
example, in which HRC participates in an interview with American journalist Bob
Schieffer (BS), one week after HRC had announced her plan to provide universal
health care ‘for every American’ (see excerpt 5).

(5) Face the nation (September 18 2007): question by Bob Schieffer
60 BS: and we’re back now with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton=last
61       week was a big one for you Senator in that you uh rolled out your
62       new: health care plan (.) uh something the uh (.) uh Republicans
63       imme:diately said is going to lead t[o s[ocialized medicine? ]

Clinton Cackle 35

64                                          [he [he he he he he he he]=
65 BS: (.) u[h it would [require among uh] (.) (h)heh=
66 HRC:→ [.hh h h       [↑Heh he he he °he°]
67 BS: =[it would require] am[ong other things that every American w]ould=
68 HRC: [ .h h h h h ]          [hheh heh ↑heh I’m sorry Bob He he he]
69 BS: =have to: [(.) would] have tuh buy (.) health insurance. you’re
70 HR              [.hh uh:-]
71 BS: proposing to pay for it-[b]y rolling back some of the Bush=
72 HRC:                         [right]
73 BS: =uh tax cuts .h h↑ow do you force people to buy health
74      insurance Senator?

       In this excerpt, BS introduces a question preface in order to set the agenda
and provide important background information for the overhearing audience, ‘last
week…you rolled out your new: health care plan’ (lines 60-62). When the inter-
viewer begins to introduce a critical remark about her plan, he first attributes it to
a specific third party, namely, some of her opponents, ‘the Republicans.’ Once he
begins to offer their characterization of her plan ‘something the uh (.) uh Republicans
imme:diately said is going to lead to’ (lines 62-63), HRC begins to laugh (line 64).
In this particular example, HRC’s laughter occurs in the turn recognition space,
that is, BS has not yet produced the criticism so she laughs here in anticipation of
a negative action (i.e., the Republicans’ response to her health plan). BS is about
to offer a critical perspective that the Republicans hold, and by laughing at this
juncture, it seems probable that she seeks alignment with him—and the overhear-
ing audience—in treating these views as something not to be taken seriously. At
the same time, her laughter also functions as an implicit commentary on whatever
the Republicans might have to say about her health care plan, one that orients to
their remarks as laughable. The first full burst of laughter can be seen across lines
64-66 (‘he he he he he he he he .hh h h ↑eh he he he °he°’), where BS describes
the Republicans’ proposition that HRC’s plan will lead to ‘socialized medicine’
(line 63). This unit of laughter may also be divided into two distinct units (‘he he
he he he he he he + .hh h h ↑Heh he he he °he°). The onset of the second unit is
marked by an inbreath, and subsequent prosody indicating an upgrade to the first
unit as she continues to pursue uptake, while the unit-completion is marked by
decreased amplitude on the final particle. This division is important for identifying
the precise position in which she receives responsive laughter—albeit brief—from
the interviewer. BS first begins to display a mild acknowledgement of her affective
stance by smiling (shown in Figure 10), which often accompanies a recipient’s
responsive laughter (see Haakana, 2002). He then produces a marked inbreath and
corresponding outbreath through a single laugh particle (shown in bold in line 65
of excerpt 5 and in Figures 11 and 12 below), as he briefly looks down, away from
the viewer (Figure 11). It is immediately following her second burst of laughter
that this single laugh particle is produced.

36 Romaniuk

Figure 10: u[h it would (line 33)

Figure 11: (.) (h)heh= (line 33)

Figure 12: (h)heh= (line 33)

Figure 13: =[it would require] (line 35)

Clinton Cackle 37

Figure 14: =[it would require] (line 35)

       In addition to causing BS’s temporary suspension of his neutralistic posture,
HRC’s laughter also disrupts the trajectory of his turn. Prior to BS’s responsive
laughter, the interviewer had begun to describe the requirements of her healthcare
plan (‘it would require…’, line 65) for the duration of her second unit of laughter
(line 66). This second unit causes such a disruption that the interviewer is forced
to restart his turn. At line 67, BS successfully reiterates what he had begun at line
65 (‘it would require among other things…’), which is hearable as a reiteration
due to its syntactic parallelism (cf. Clayman, 2006: 234). During this reiteration,
HRC then produces another marked inbreath before beginning to produce another
unit of laughter. What is striking is that BS laughed following the original formu-
lation in line 65, and it is precisely at that same point in the reiteration at line 67
that HRC begins to laugh again (line 68). Having already successfully achieved
uptake at this exact point, she tries again, though this time she is not successful.
As BS regains composure, he lifts his face and returns his gaze outward (Figures
13 and 14), immediately pursuing the topical issue of his question preface. At this
point, seeing that she has not received additional uptake, HRC then offers an apol-
ogy, ‘I’m sorry Bob.’ Interestingly, this apology indicates her orientation to the
improper interactional move she has conducted by disrupting the trajectory of the
interviewer’s turn before he had finished. Again, she refers to the interviewer by
first name, in this case reasserting the familiar terms they are operating on. She then
produces what appears to be a laugh terminal inbreath at line 70, in overlap with a
repeated portion of BS’s utterance (‘would have to’, line 69). Following this, he
is able to continue with the rest of the preface to his first-pair part of a question-
answer sequence, which marks the end of his TCU, ‘how do you force people to
buy health insurance Senator?’ (lines 73-74). Since the question is framed as being
motivated by ‘the Republicans’ response, it is possible that HRC seeks responsive
laughter from the interviewer – in addition to the overhearing audience – to align
with her at the very content being reported. By doing so, she not only challenges
the seriousness of the report, but she also receives momentary feedback from the
interviewer, which indicates at least a temporary alignment on his part. This example
contrasts with the laughter in the first two excerpts, where there was less likelihood
that she sought responsive laughter from the interviewers, given that what was be-
ing laughed at was something the interviewers had themselves said.
       In the analysis offered so far, I have described two dimensions of interviewee
laughter in news interviews and have demonstrated the sequentially produced, lo-

38 Romaniuk

cally responsive character of each dimension. First, I have considered examples
of laughter at question completion, or a TRP, where the retrospective function
of laughter as a commentary on the prior question is readily apparent. Second, I
have discussed cases in which laughter occurs in the course of the interviewer’s
turn. Here the laughter also functions as an implicit commentary on the talk that
is being produced, treating it as laughable. A number of scholars have noted that,
in news interviews, interviewers tend to pose questions that are disaffiliative in
nature—this is also apparent in many of the questions exemplified in the preceding
examples. As such, HRC’s laughter acts as a preliminary response to the criticisms
embodied in these kinds of questions, specifically, as an attempt to undermine their
interactional force.
       I have also considered the prospective consequences of laughter, particularly
how laughter establishes the relevance of responsive laughter from the interviewer
and from the overhearing audience. The extent to which laughter provides the rel-
evance for a response from the interviewer (in addition to the overhearing audience)
relies to some extent on whether the interviewers present particular views as their
own or as those of some third party. That is, it seems unlikely that an interviewee
would seek affiliative laughter from an interviewer, given that interviewers are ex-
pected to display a neutralistic posture. However, when the content of interviewers’
questions are attributed to some other individual or group, interviewers are able to
distance themselves from those views and the line of questioning they provoke. It
seems possible, at least, that interviewers may be more likely to provide responsive
laughter when interviewee laughter occurs in these cases.
       In the final example (excerpt 6), at first glance, the interviewer appears to be
putting forth views of some third party, which may increase the likelihood of the
interviewer providing responsive laughter. However, close attention to the details
of the interviewer’s talk, and his response, demonstrate how responsive laughter, at
least from the interviewer, is an unlikely occurrence in this case. The interview that
this last example comes from occurred the same morning as the interview discussed
in excerpt 4, when HRC had just received the endorsement from The Des Moines
Register. Prior to this excerpt, the interviewer, David Gregory (DG) began by sug-
gesting that HRC’s campaign had lost momentum over the previous six weeks,
quoting her husband as saying that it would be a ‘miracle’ for her to win the Iowa
caucuses. In her response, HRC disagrees with the idea that her campaign has lost
energy and enthusiasm and shifts focus to the endorsement. However, this does not
seem to be the direction DG wishes to take, as evidenced by his response.

(6) NBC One-on-one on The Today Show (December 17 2007): question by
David Gregory (DG)
75 DG: so Senator if-if people l[ook at the last (.) six weeks and they might]
76     		                        [ ((cheering in background from video clip)) ]
77      question how Hillary Clinton responds to a crisis .hh or how she
78      handles pressure. (.) .hh and they might >point to the fact that you