The main aim of this paper is to investigate speech pauses and gestures as means to engage the audience and present the humorous message in an effective way. The data consist of two speeches by the USA president Barack Obama at the 2011 and 2016 Annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. The success of the message is measured in terms of the immediate audience response. The analysis of the multimodally annotated data indicates that silent speech pauses structure and emphasise the discourse, and often precede the audience response. Only few filled pauses occur in these speeches and they emphasise the speech segment which they follow or precede. We also found a highly significant correlation between Obama’s speech pauses and audience response. Obama produces numerous head movements, facial expressions and hand gestures and their functions are related to both discourse content and structure. Characteristics for these speeches is that Obama points to individuals in the audience and often smiles and laughs. Audience response is equally frequent in the two events, and there are no significant changes in speech rate and frequency of head movements and facial expressions in the two speeches while Obama produced significantly more hand gestures in 2016 than in 2011. An analysis of the hand gestures produced by Barack Obama in two political speeches held at the United Nations in 2011 and 2016 confirms that the president produced significantly less communicative co-speech hand gestures during his speeches in 2011 than in 2016.
Jens Allwood, Joakim Nivre, and Elisabeth Ahls´en. 1992. On the semantics and pragmatics of linguistic feedback. Journal of Semantics, 9:1–26.
Jens Allwood, Loredana Cerrato, Kristiina Jokinen, Costanza Navarretta, and Patrizia Paggio. 2007. The mumin coding scheme for the annotation of feedback, turn management and sequencing. Multimodal Corpora for Modelling Human Multimodal Behaviour. Special Issue of the International Journal of Language Resources and Evaluation, 41(3–4):273–287.
Salvatore Attardo and Lucy Pickering. 2011. Timing in the performance of jokes. Humor - International Journal of Humor Research, 24(2):233–250.
Salvatore Attardo, Lucy Pickering, and Amanda Baker. 2011. Prosodic and Multimodal Markers of Humor in Conversation. Pragmatics and Cognition, 19(2):224–247.
William O. Beeman. 1999. Humor. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 9(1/2):103–106.
Magdalena Bilá. 2014. A Comparative Analysis of Silent Pauses and Rate of Articulation in the Discourse of Sitcom. Discourse and Interaction, 7(1).
Paul Boersma and David Weenink, 2009. Praat: doing phonetics by computer. Retrieved May 1, 2009, from http://www.praat.org/.
D.S. Boomer and A.T. Dittman. 1964. Speech rate, filled pause and body movement in interviews. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 139:324–327.
B.L. Butterworth and U. Hadar. 1989. Gesture, speech, and computational stages: A reply to mcneill. In Psychological Review, volume 96, pages 168–174.
Justine Cassell, Catherine Pelachaud, Norman Badler, Mark Steedman, Brett Achorn, Tripp Becket, Brett Douville, Scott Prevost, and Matthew Stone. 1994. Animated conversation: rule-based generation of facial expression, gesture & spoken intonation for multiple conversational agents. In Proceedings of the 21st annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, pages 413–420. ACM.
Justine Cassell. 2000. Embodied conversational interface agents. Communications of the ACM, 43(4):70–78.
W.L. Chafe. 1987. Cognitive Constraint on Information Flow. In R R. Tomlin, editor, Coherence and Grounding in Discourse, pages 20–51. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Hebert H. Clark and Jean E. Fox-Tree. 2002. Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking. Cognition, 84:73–11.
Alex Clayton. 2007. The body in Hollywood slapstick. McFarland.
Marilyn M. Cooper. 2011. Rhetorical agency as emergent and enacted. College Composition and Communication, 62(3):420–449.
Danielle Duez. 1982. Silent and non-silent pauses in three speech styles. Language and Speech, 25(1):11–28.
S. Duncan and D.W. Fiske. 1977. Face-to-face interaction. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ.
Anna Esposito and Antonietta M. Esposito. 2011. On Speech and Gesture Synchrony. In Anna Esposito, Alessandro Vinciarelli, Klara Vicsi, Catherine Pelachaud, and Anton Nijholt, editors, Communication and Enactment - The Processing Issues, volume 6800 of LNCS, pages 252–272. Springer-Verlag.
Anna Esposito, Karl Erik McCullough, and Frank Quek. 2001. Disfluencies in gesture: gestural correlates to filled and unfilled speech pauses. In Proceedings of IEEE International Workshop on Cues in Communication, Hawai.
Frieda Goldman-Eisler. 1968. Psycholinguistics: Experiments in spontaneous speech. Academic Press, London.
Marco Guerini, Danilo Giampiccolo, Giovanni, Moretti, , Rachele Sprugnoli, and Carlo Strapparava. 2013. The new release of corps: A corpus of political speeches annotated with audience reactions. In Isabella Poggi, Francesca D’Errico, Laura Vincze, and Alessandro Vinciarelli, editors, Multimodal Communication in Political Speech. Shaping Minds and Social Action: International Workshop, Political Speech 2010, Rome, Italy, November 10-12, 2010, Revised Selected Papers, pages 86–98. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg.
J. Hirschberg and C. Nakatani. 1998. Acoustic Indicators of Topic Segmentation. In Proceedings of ICSLP-98,Sidney.
Adam Kendon. 2004. Gesture - Visible Action as Utterance . Cambridge University Press.
Michael Kipp. 2004. Gesture Generation by Imitation - From Human Behavior to Computer Character Animation. Ph.D. thesis, Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany, Boca Raton, Florida, dissertation.com.
R.M Krauss, Y. Chen, and R. F. Gottesman. 2000. Lexical gestures and lexical access: a process model. In D. McNeill, editor, Language and gesture, pages 261–283. Cambridge University Press. RM Maatman, Jonathan Gratch, and Stacy Marsella. 2005. Natural behavior of a listening agent. In Intelligent Virtual Agents, pages 25–36. Springer.
Howard Maclay and Charles E. Osgood. 1959. Hesitation phenomena in spontaneous english speech. Word, 15:19–44.
D. McNeill. 1992. Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. David McNeill. 2005. Gesture and thought. University of Chicago Press.
Costanza Navarretta. 2016. The functions of fillers, filled pauses and co-occurring gestures in danish dyadic conversations. In Linköping University Electronic Press, editor, Postproceedings of the 3rd European Symposium on Multimodal Communication, volume 105, pages 55–61.
Bobbie Oliver. 2013. The Tao of Comedy: Embrace the Pause. Oliver.
C. S. Peirce. 1931. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 1931-1958, 8 vols. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
P. Quaglio. 2009. Television Dialogue. The sitcom Friends vs. natural conversation. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
Matthias Rehm, Yukiko Nakano, Elisabeth Andr´e, and Toyoaki Nishida. 2008. Culture-specific first meeting encounters between virtual agents. In Intelligent virtual agents, pages 223–236. Springer.
Allan Reynolds and Allan Paivio. 1968. Cognitive and emotional determinants of speech. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 22:164–175.
Sherry R. Rochester. 1973. The significance of pauses in spontaneous speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2:51–81.
H. Sacks, E. Schegloff, and G. Jefferson. 1974. A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50(4):696–735.
Luisa Salvati and Massimo Pettorino. 2013. A Diachronic Analysis of Face-to-Face Discussions: Berlusconi, Fifteen Years Later. In Isabella Poggi, Francesca D’Errico, Laura Vincze, and Alessandro Vinciarelli, editors, Multimodal Communication in Political Speech. Shaping Minds and Social Action: International Workshop, Political Speech 2010, Rome, Italy, November 10-12, 2010, Revised Selected Papers, pages 65–74. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Jay Sankey. 1998. Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy. Routledge, New York.
Elisabeth Shriberg. 1994. Preliminaries to a theory of speech disfluencies. Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley.
Eric Weitz. 2012. Failure as success: On clowns and laughing bodies. Performance Research, 17(1):79–87.
