Indexing Membership via Responding to Irony: Communication Competence in Israeli Radio Call-in Shows

Drawing on both Ethnography of Communication and Pragmatics, we investigate the callers’ responses to call-in radio shows to hosts’ ironic utterances. Since irony is indirect, it may pose problems for the participants, and responding to it may be an indicative of speakers’ communicative competence. We associate this competence with the notion of "membering" (Philipsen 1989), thus arguing that by reacting differently to the host’s irony, callers demonstrate different levels of communicative competence. Standard callers have difficulty understanding irony, let alone responding to it. Regular callers, on the other hand, demonstrate higher communicative competence and provide responses, from recognizing the irony to continue the ironic line and create a joint ironic sequence. Thus, whereas standard callers are mere participants in the programs, regular callers act as community members. However, even regular callers succumb to the host’s irony when it is destructive and offensive, showing that communicative competence has its limits.