badinage

badinage \bad-n-AHZH\, noun:

Light, playful talk; banter.

Ken was determined to put the cares of the world behind him and do what he loved best -- having a few celebrity friends round and enjoying an evening of anecdote and badinage over a bottle or two of vintage bubbly and some tasty cheese straws.
-- Bel Littlejohn, "My moustache man", The Guardian, March 24, 2000

The badinage was inconsequential, reduced to who knew whom and wasn't the weather glorious in St. Tropez, or the Bahamas, Hawaii, or Hong Kong?
-- Robert Ludlum, The Matarese Countdown

Hope was the great comic actor of the 1940's, an original whose persona often transcended lame scripts. He can still get you with his gangly physicality, his many shades of discomfort, fear or lechery, the trademark gurgle, the off-handed badinage with Crosby and the luckless romancing with any number of sham femme fatales.
-- Gary Giddins, The Hope We Should Remember, New York Times, 3-Aug-03

Badinage comes from French, from badiner, "to trifle, to joke," badin, "playful, jocular."