When husbands die

Joke-telling in an Italian ladies’ club in Chicago

Gloria Nardini

This is a paper about women and language. In it women tell jokes, both individually and collaboratively, which are performances of verbal art. It is also a paper about ethnicity and gender, for in their joke telling, these women meld both discourses in seamless fashion. My analysis of a 2 minute 40 second transcript of “talk as play,” (Coates 151) explicates the powerful identity they fashion for themselves. Both this identity and the fun they have with each other are dependent, of course, upon understanding the context of their club, the Collandia Ladies’ Club.

Keywords: verbal art, joke telling, Italian culture, Bella figura, women and language, gender and ethnicity

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

Published online: 01 March 2000
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.10.1.04nar

References

Bauman, Richard

(1977) Verbal art as performance. Prospect Heights, Il: Waveland Press.

Castiglione, Baldesar

(1967) The book of the courtier. Translated by George Bull. London: Penquin Books.

Coates, Jennifer

(1996) Women talk. Oxford: Blackwell. BoP

Douglas, Mary

(1968) The social control of cognition: Some factors in joke perception. Man 31: 361–376.

Geertz, Clifford

(1973) Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture. In Clifford Geertz (ed.), The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic, pp. 3–30.

Goffman, Erving

(1974) The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor.

Hymes, Dell

(1974) Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. BoP

Nardini, Gloria

(1999) Che bella figura! The power of performance in an Italian ladies’ club in Chicago. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.

Saville-Troike, Muriel

(1982) The ethnography of communication. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. BoP

Tannen, Deborah

(1989) Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. BoP

Turner, Victor

(1987) The anthropology of performance. New York: PAJ Publications.

Full-text

When husbands die

Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Attardo, Salvatore

2005. In Handbook of Pragmatics, ► pp. 1 ff.

Attardo, Salvatore

2008. Semantics and Pragmatics of Humor. Language and Linguistics Compass 2:6 ► pp. 1203 ff.

Attardo, Salvatore

2010. Preface: Working class humor. Humor - International Journal of Humor Research 23:2

Bing, Janet

2007. Liberated jokes: Sexual humor in all-female groups. Humor – International Journal of Humor Research 20:4

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 17 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.