Developing the humour repertoire concept to guide future tourism-humour research

Abstract

The central interest in this study is to develop and position the humour repertoire concept for tourism and leisure research. The term humour repertoire encompasses the totality of a person's abilities and skills to both appreciate and produce humour. Such skills include the individual's ability to tell/retell humorous (travel) stories, jokes from their life and travels, and the ability to see travel and leisure situations as amusing. A framework outlining the role of the humour repertoire is presented and an online empirical study is reported to address selected components of the conceptual scheme. The results show a weak association between humour appreciation and production, indicating that researchers examining humour in tourism need to be careful in building generic implications from selected work. Attention is then given to the multiple social and contextual factors beyond the individual level that need to be considered when assessing humour in diverse tourism contexts. Fresh research directions are indicated by considering the richness of the repertoire framework and links to cognitive schema research.