Doldrugs,
I've used 'banter' I think about half a dozen times in 168 posts—which is roughly 0.038% of my posts.
And I've used jocular less, as I prefer more the phonetic attributes of words like jocose, jest, and jovial. I must say how thankful I am to be proficient in such a semantically nonpareil language, in terms of its rich and profound vocabulary. I wouldn't see how I'd cope if, rather than having the verbal diversity and lexicographic depth of, say, Arabic, Sanskrit, Bengali, French, and English, I could only communicate in Pirãha, Hawaiian, Ojibwe, or Rotoka! The magnificence of English resides in that its 250,000-2,000,000 (depending on whom one asks) lexemes is such that one's oration is only limited by their own ability, their semantic dexterity, and not the dearth of lemmas, morphemes, idioms, and so on the language limits them to employ.
You should be grateful to know English; one can express themselves with infinite phraseology. As mellifluous and magniloquent, as stilted and pedantic or as simplistic and colloquial as they desire. I truly wish more Anglophones used their spectacular language less carelessly. Stephen Fry concurs, at least.