"Ambulance Thieves, Clowns, and Naked Grandfathers": How PSEs and Their Families Use Humorous Communication as a Sensemaking Device

Using qualitative methods, this study explores humor as an interactional, sensemaking practice and examines how public safety employees (PSEs) and their family members navigate the relationship between work and home. Results from 95 interviews and eight focus groups indicate that both PSEs and their families use humor in productive and unproductive ways and introduce a new way, via Humorous Bilateral Emotional Labor, to understand how humor is used. In addition, a new concept of sensetaking is introduced.