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Article published In:
Art and the expression of complex identities: Imagining and contesting ethnicity in performance
Edited by Valentina Pagliai and Marcia Farr
[Pragmatics 10:1] 2000
► pp. 87–97

When husbands die

Joke-telling in an Italian ladies’ club in Chicago

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: 1 March 2000
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.10.1.04nar
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Cited by (4)

Cited by 4 other publications

Bing, Janet
2007. Liberated jokes: Sexual humor in all-female groups. Humor – International Journal of Humor Research 20:4 DOI logo
Attardo, Salvatore
2005. Humor. In Handbook of Pragmatics, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Attardo, Salvatore
2008. Semantics and Pragmatics of Humor. Language and Linguistics Compass 2:6 ► pp. 1203 ff. DOI logo
Attardo, Salvatore
2010. Preface: Working class humor. Humor - International Journal of Humor Research 23:2 DOI logo

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