CiteSeerX - Getting a laugh: Gender, Status, and humor in task discussion. CiteSeerX - Document Details (Isaac Councill, Lee Giles): Humor is a quintessentially social phenomenon, since every joke requires both a teller and an audience. Here we ask how humor operates in task-orientedgroup discussions. We use theories about the functions of humor to generate hypotheses about who jokes, when and in what situations. Then we use event history techniques to analyze humor attempts and successes in six-person groups. Our results combine to suggest an image of joking as a stat