Humour at work. A comparative perspective

The paper aims to provide a comparative analysis of institutional talk in two companies a Romanian and a joint one - by studying the uses of humour in these two different workplaces. The paper is divided into two parts a theoretical framework and the analysis of the data collected in the two companies. The criteria on which the analysis is based are: the function of humour, the humorous genre used, the butt of jokes, the number of participants involved and whether laughter is uptaken or not. The analysis focuses on the way in which the employers in the two companies resort to humour and draws conclusions related to differences in terms of organizational culture existing in these two companies.