Available via license: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Content may be subject to copyright.
THE LANGUAGE OF JOKES
IN THE DIGITAL AGE
In this accessible book, Delia Chiaro provides a fresh overview of the language
of jokes in a globalized and digitalized world. The book shows how, while on the
one hand the lingua-cultural nuts and bolts of jokes have remained unchanged
over time, on the other, the time-space compression brought about by modern
technology has generated new settings and new ways of joking and playing with
language. The Language of Jokes in the Digital Age covers a wide range of set-
tings from social networks, emails and memes, to more traditional fields of film
and TV (especially sitcoms and game shows) and advertising. Chiaro’s consid-
eration of the increasingly virtual context of jokes delights with both up-to-date
examples and frequent reference to the most central theories of comedy.
This lively book will be essential reading for any student or researcher working
in the area of language and humour and will be of interest to those in language and
media and sociolinguistics.
Delia Chiaro is currently Professor of English Language and Translation at the
University of Bologna’s Department of Interpreting and Translation and President
of the International Society of Humor Studies. She has published widely on a
number of intercultural issues regarding humour and has given numerous keynote
lectures at international conferences around the world. A member of the Editorial
Boards of the Mouton journal Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
and the John Benjamins journal The Israeli Journal of Humor Research: An
International Journal, Chiaro is also Associate Editor of the “Topics in Humor”
book series for John Benjamins.
THE LANGUAGE
OF JOKES IN THE
DIGITAL AGE
#like #share #lol
Delia Chiaro
An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the
support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched (KU). KU is
a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open
Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is
9781315146348. More information about the initiative and links to the
Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org.
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2018 Delia Chiaro
The right of Delia Chiaro to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.
com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non
Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-415-83518-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-83519-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-14634-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781315146348
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK
In memory of Christie Davies,
A great scholar and a true friend.
FIGURES
1.1 Ping-pong-punning below the line (part 1) 11
1.2 Ping-pong-punning below the line (part 2) 13
1.3 A traditional joke in the form of a meme and conveyed as a tweet 20
1.4 Intertextual humour online 20
3.1 Examples of the term “giggling” emerging as an unsuitable
impulse to display publicly 71
3.2 Examples of the terms “children”, “schoolchild”, “childish” and
“childlike” collocated with the term “giggle” 72
3.3 Example of the adjective “cheap” collocated with the term “giggle” 72
3.4 Examples of the terms “woman”, “woman’s” and “women”
as collocates of the term “giggle 72
3.5 Examples of the terms “girls”, “girlish”, “schoolgirl” and “girly”
as collocates of the term “giggle” 73
3.6 Examples of “man”, “boys” and “father” as collocates of the
term “giggle 73
3.7 Examples of some collocations of the term “cackle” 74
3.8 Examples of some collocations of the term “guffaw” 75
3.9 Source: http://9gag.com/gag/6854629/-when-women-pack-vs-
when-men-pack-true-or-not 101
3.10 Source: https://plus.google.com/108531052526575991056/posts/
WnjH2b4xXjc 102
3.11 Source: http://cavemancircus.com/2012/02/09/the-female-vs-
male-dictionary/ 103
3.12 Source: https://ellebeaver.com/2014/05/13/human-brain-analysis-
men-vs-women-with-jack-uppal-a-breakdown/. 104
3.13 Source: http://community.dipolog.com/media/male-vs-female-
brain.226/ 104
Figures ix
3.14 Source: http://mylipsissealed.blogspot.it/2010_06_25_archive.html 104
3.15 Women and men’s remote controls 111
4.1 Ping-pong-punning below the line (“muesli”) 127
4.2 Ping-pong-punning below the line (“nuts”) 128
4.3 Ping-pong-punning below the line: Brexit portmanteaux 1 129
4.4 Ping-pong-punning below the line: Brexit portmanteaux 2 130
4.5 Ping-pong-punning below the line: Brexit portmanteaux 2 130
4.6 Ping-pong-punning below the line (“confectionary”) 132
4.7 Ping-pong-punning below the line 133
4.8 Ping-pong-punning below the line (“Bake off”) 135
4.9 Examples of “hashtaggery” 136
4.10 Manipulation of an image macro 140
4.11 Sharing “deep purple” 141
4.12 Queen Elizabeth II photobombing Australian hockey players’
selfie 143
4.13 A selection of internet memes that parody Italian hand gestures 146
4.14 A selection of internet memes that compare “human” body parts
to “Italian” body parts 147
4.15 A selection of internet memes regarding Italian military 148
4.16 Countryballs 149
4.17 A selection of lolcat memes 150
4.18 An example of osmotic meme transference 153
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
While writing this book, life got seriously in the way on more than one occasion.
That is because I wrote it at a crossroads in my life. Looking after the children
was gradually being replaced by looking after the elderly, not an amusing task.
As Bette Davis famously said, “Growing old isn’t for sissies”. Neither is looking
after the elderly as it gives you a glimpse into what is yet to come. A good sense
of humour really helps. Writing was often sandwiched between teaching, flying
around Europe and generally running around like a headless chicken, but I got
there in the end.
I would like to thank many people who have contributed both directly and
indirectly to this book.
First, my thanks go to the crew at Routledge. I am especially indebted to Louisa
Semlyen and Laura Sandford – thank you for your endless patience and for not
giving up on me. Thank you also to all the people in London and Oxford involved
in the actual production of the book, especially Editorial Assistant Hannah Rowe
for being at hand with her ever-ready promptness. Thank you also to proofreader
Kay Hawkins and to Rachel Singleton in Exeter. Back in Italy, thank you to Piero
Conficoni for assistance regarding IT glitches and anything concerning number
and size of pixels.
Thanks also to Giuseppe Balirano, Giuseppe De Bonis, Janet Bing, Federico
Gaspari, Giselinde Kuipers, Moira Marsh, Don Kulick and Will Noonan for
responding to my frequent demands and providing insightful comments whenever
I asked. I owe my gratitude also to my nerdy students, Marco Bruno, Giovanni
Laghi and Vito La Banca for their attempts at introducing me to millennials’
humour. All in vain guys, I still don’t get it.
Thank you to all “The Graun” BTL contributors who I first admired from afar
on Wednesdays (“Rhikdays”) until I finally had the courage to join in the fray.
You are too many to mention, but among the punning leaders thank you most of
Acknowledgements xi
all Eidos3, Daleaway, Scottish Wildpuss and the one and only king of the castle
AnglophileDe.
Special thanks go to Jessica Milner Davis for always being there with sound
advice and to the late Christie Davies for his help and guidance, but especially
for making me laugh with his endless tirades and for throwing political correct-
ness to the four winds. Christie, you will be sorely missed. I know that nobody
is indispensable, but you will be irreplaceable to humour scholars around the
world. Thanks to Debra Aarons, my brilliant friend, for her meticulous editing
and endless support. I am so glad you didn’t do law, Debra, and that you stuck to
linguistics instead. Thank you for being there at the antipodes. Do you ever sleep?
My gratitude also to Nikita Lobanov and Anthony Mitzel, my eastern and west-
ern political correspondents and experts on everything, but especially humour,
preceded by the word “ALT”. Thank you Chiara for putting up with my rants.
Finally, yet most importantly, comes my family. Thanks to my brother Joe
(molto famoso) for providing me with an endless supply of scatological humour
from his source of UK tabloids (the names of which I had best not mention)
and his fixation on that childhood joke regarding two flies that still makes him
giggle. And of course, a big thank you goes to my husband Pippo and our three
daughters Jessica Jane, Rebecca Rose and Clarissa Clare for their endless care
and support.
INTRODUCTION
At this moment in time, many people inhabit two worlds. One is the world as
we know it, the “real” world that we inhabit and that physically surrounds us.
The world that we can touch and feel. The other is a more distant world in the
material sense, namely the world online with which we engage via technology.
While these two worlds are very separate, there is also a huge amount of overlap
between them. With each day that passes, we are able to carry out more and more
everyday functions that were once restricted to the real world, online. Many of
these functions are commercial in nature like shopping, calling a cab or ordering a
meal, but others belong to the sphere of interaction in which, among other things,
we can convey our feelings, attitudes and emotions. Undeniably, the virtual world
overseen by the internet is, at least for the present, limited to sight and sound – the
world online is, in effect, one that is language driven and mediated by an alpha-
numeric keyboard. In other words, if in reality immediate interaction involves
speech and hearing, online it principally revolves around writing and reading. So,
while we straddle both domains doing some things in one sphere and others in
another, or doing some of both in either, communicating with other individuals is
a constant feature of one and the other. And it would seem, at least intuitively, that
a substantial amount of this communication and more generally of content online
is humorous in its intent.
While I write this introduction, wherever I turn, cybernetically speaking, it
would seem that the language of jokes surrounds me. Each time I check my
mobile phone, I expect to receive at least one witty message via WhatsApp, or
Messenger and if I venture onto social media, I find innumerable examples of
humour that people post and share on diverse platforms. Suffice it for someone
in the public eye to show his or her true colours by means of a verbal gaffe
and a Twitter storm will surely follow – a hurricane that will certainly contain
a fair amount of verbal irony and comic imagery. This vast amount of verbal
DOI: 10.4324/9781315146348-1
2 Introduction
and non-verbal play is reminiscent of my childhood. Those halcyon days that
seemed only to be interrupted by fits of playground giggling at another child’s
performance of a joke or of a silly, often “rude” gesture, gradually to be replaced
in puberty and adolescence by the more daring, but equally amusing content of
salacious wit and laughter provoking games like consequences. Who could have
imagined that in less than half a century that that playground silliness would be
replicated in a virtual space where grown-ups could engage in ludic comity for
the entire (real) world to see?
In April 2017, a well-known American airline had overbooked its seats. One
passenger, a surgeon, refuses to give up his seat and is violently dragged off the
carrier by airline officials. Another passenger films the incident on her phone,
posts the video online and within minutes, the newsworthy incident becomes pub-
lic knowledge. Within very little time, the internet is buzzing with parodies and
humorous memes regarding the incident. “Fly the friendly skies”, reads a parody
of an ad for the airline carrier with a close up of the bleeding face of the doctor who
was dragged off the plane, and another reads “Not enough seating, prepare for a
beating”. One of the scores of parodic videos states, “If you weren’t afraid to fly
before you will be afraid to fly now. We put the hospital in hospitality”. Anything
and everything can now be made public in real time, and anything and everything
can be ridiculed soon after. In addition, humorous material online related to disas-
trous incidents such as the one involving the surgeon dragged off an aircraft, rather
than diminishing the impact of the actual incident, adds to its gravity.
We are living in turbulent times – pun intended. On 29 March 2017, as British
Prime Minister Theresa May triggered Article 50, the first step towards the UK’s
withdrawal from the European Union, both old and new media announced the
news, often in a style that was entrenched in humour. The very lexicon of this
socio-economic divorce is bursting with witty portmanteaux such as Brexit(ers),
Bremain(ers) and Bremoaners – not to mention the more sensational term
“Brexshit”. Old media, such as newspapers, as is traditional in Britain, adopted
puns for their headlines. Broadsheets opted for quite sophisticated visual word-
play with maps of the EU – The Guardian front page sported a colourful jigsaw
of Europe with the piece of the puzzle where the UK should be, missing and The
i chose a cut-out map of Europe with scissors that were cutting out the UK. As
for the tabloids, The Sun’s headline read “Dover & Out” and The Daily Express,
“Dear EU we’re leaving you”. These same newspaper headlines in the online
version of the newspapers activated wordplay from members of the public who
responded with numerous remarks. “I was expecting ‘bye-ee’ from The Sun”
posted a reader of The Guardian online, “Or EUR DUMPED” wrote another,
followed by, “We’ve been fuck Dover” and “Surely Ben Dover?”1 BTL –
“below the line” – is the space where readers can post comments immediately
beneath articles in online newspapers, and in these spaces for free comments,
wordplay abounds as readers let off steam. And, as is to be expected, there can
be a lot of anger underlying much political humour posted BTL.
Introduction 3
The hoi polloi may not be able to do much about the political strategies of those
who govern them, but jokes provide a safety valve for them to highlight the erring
ways of their leaders. Furthermore, in a joke they can say what they like, after all,
they are “only joking”. Or are they? And the internet has provided a playground,
a place to share silliness, that often contains more than a grain of truth about those
who govern the planet.
In addition, as I write, Donald Trump, as the 45th President of the USA, is being
continually held as the target of hundreds, if not thousands, of parodies on social
media platforms. These parodies come in many forms. They may be visual paro-
dies in the form of static illustrations or image macros or memes that may consist of
a combination of visual and verbal play or else they may be in the form of gifs and
video-clips in which users ridicule President Trump and his governing entourage.
Meanwhile, Trump’s supporters retaliate with equally sharp and witty repertoire.
Behind the painted smile of these invisible online comedians, repeatedly, they are
making a serious point.
The overall feeling is that humour is most at home online. I really cannot
remember the last time anyone actually told me a joke. But day and night family
and friends literally bombard me with a wide selection of humorous repertoire
albeit strictly online arriving in real time on my smartphone. There is so much
witty banter occurring online that actually collecting a valid sample is a daunting
task. While we can easily access hundreds of websites dedicated to jokes, captur-
ing spontaneous repartee from naturally occurring conversation, posts and tweets
would involve complex data mining from the truly huge amount of material that
the World Wide Web contains. Kuipers (2006) suggests that it was in 2001 in the
wake of 9/11 that verbal/visual disaster jokes spread over the internet and gained
ascendency over face-to-face joke-telling. As I was writing this introduction in
the summer of 2017, memetic videos regarding the imminent UK elections were
literally flooding my smartphone. No one told me a joke in this regard face to
face. It would appear that now more than ever, the medium has indeed become the
message. A message that can be shared across geographic boundaries and without
necessarily revealing our true identity.
This book sets out to demonstrate that the language of jokes in terms of words
and syntax is yet to change. Puns are still puns. Satire is still satire and parody
created by the populace gives vent to their feelings about politicians by whom
they are represented as well as regarding socio-economic issues that are beyond
their control. In this sense, welcome to Ancient Greece. What has changed
instead is that we have shifted from slow humour to fast humour. Without going
as far as claiming that we are dealing today with McHumour (without a “u”
perhaps?), it is however true that we live in a fast-moving world online that tires
very quickly of yesterday’s news. The relevance of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest
Proposal still rings true in the 21st century despite our cultural and histori-
cal distance from the “Irish problem”. The question is, will we still be able to
engage with the glut of irony in its many forms that exist in both old and new
4 Introduction
media regarding current socio-political issues 200 years from now? Of course,
we could argue that Swift was a great writer and incomparable to the stand-up
comedians, anchor men and bloggers and vloggers of today. Above all, scripta
manet – literally “writing remains”. What will remain of online content? Or
indeed of so much improvised comedy in both old(er) and new media. One thing
is for certain, just as graffiti was the scrawl of the wild yet represented much
common sense, online humour is similar. It gives voice to those who normally
have no voice. The World Wide Web is a free-for-all where humour abounds.
Moreover, so much of this humour is protest. Serious subjects like globalization
and climate change, inefficient leaders and corruption are satirized and ironized.
Joking allows the man and woman in the street to let off steam. “Save water –
bathe with a friend”, read a graffito in the seventies, while another read “The
Death is an anagram of Ted Heath”. Today there are hundreds of internet memes
supporting a friendly environment, like the image macro of an angry toddler
shaking his wrist saying, “I’m not telling you again, I’m going green”. As for
politics, memes are having a heyday ridiculing in particular the 45th President
of the United States, but simultaneously not sparing any other head of state. Will
this accumulation of humour change things? Probably not but, as Davies asserts
(personal communication), it definitely takes the temperature of a society at a
given moment more than serious discourse could ever hope to do.
This book sets out to look at the language of jokes – and more widely of
humour – especially through three matters that define this moment in time,
namely translation, gender and all that is socially transient.
Those who are part of an English-speaking community are unlikely to be
aware that the rest of the world depends on translation. To an Italian, a Greek
or a Chinese person, news, advertising, a large amount of literature, film, TV
and, of course, the content of the World Wide Web are received through transla-
tion. Alternatively, from someone who has couched their message in a variety of
international English and thus quite diverse from more traditional geographical or
social varieties. It follows that a lot of humour on both old and new media travels
by means of translation which is why I have dedicated a chapter to humour in
translation where humour that is originally in English plays a leading role. How
many Brits or Americans can name a Croatian comedian? Very few, although I
am sure most sentient Croatians have heard of Mr Bean and John Oliver.
Gender is another key term today. The fact that so much humour on the internet
is gender oriented reflects society’s beliefs and attitudes. Whether women and
men come from different planets or simply from different postcodes is the object
of much play and inanity on the web. Absurdity that echoes patriarchal attitudes,
but which also, slowly and surely, mirrors a changing society.
Which brings us to silliness. A vast quantity of stuff with which we engage
on our smartphones is indeed silly in nature. Whether we are looking at a dog
behaving like a human or at the repetitive movement of a well-known personality
encased in a gif, this material is hardly comparable to an essay on quantum physics.
Introduction 5
As with gendered humour, perhaps our engagement with silliness also says some-
thing about society. Certainly, I would hazard a guess that in a doctor’s waiting
room or in a railway carriage people are more likely to be looking at their smart-
phones than reading a book. And much of what we are engaging with online is
transient. We live in a translated, many gendered world that hinges on the tem-
porary. Menus are written on blackboards in chalk; commodities are bought and
quickly consumed to be replaced by newer ones. Today’s meme is quickly lost
within a mountain of other memes that we receive. Online humour is dedicated to
the here and now. Fast humour that is here today and gone tomorrow.
I have dedicated my academic life to the study of humour and I am delighted
to see that so many comedians today have taken it upon themselves to talk more
sense than many (most?) political leaders. Just like Swift, what they say leaves
one thinking about how serious matters actually are. Their irony is clever and
highly charged but alas, they will not change the world. But they do make us feel
good and that we are not alone with our feelings – at least for a short while. Yet
not all comedians have late-night TV shows; most remain unknown. They are the
scores of comedians who hide behind a pseudonym as they create new memes and
share them with others online. They too are the voice of the populace.
The more I read about humour and the more I study it, the more aware I become
of how little I know about it. And if my colleagues at work snigger at this humour
scholar, in the belief that humour is unworthy of scholarship and that, seeing as
we all laugh, they know all there is to know on the subject, my answer is that we
all possess a heart but most of us would be unable to diagnose an anomaly. More
than ever am I convinced of how serious humour truly is. And I dedicate this book
to all the colleagues who over the years have openly laughed at this little humour
scholar. After all, as they say, she who laughs last laughs longest – or simply
hasn’t seen the latest news, or maybe didn’t get the joke.
Note
1 Examples from the thread following article by Chris Johnson “The difference 44 years
make: how the UK press said goodbye to Europe”. Available at: www.theguardian.com/
politics/2017/mar/29/the-difference-44-years-make-how-the-uk-press-said-goodbye-
to-europe. Published and retrieved 29 March 2017.
1
THE LANGUAGE OF JOKES
Several years on
In 1992, I wrote The Language of Jokes: Analysing Verbal Play, a book that I
look back on with fondness. This book, like many first publications, was the
result of a dissertation, the subject of which, jokes, was meant to be a provoca-
tion and a way of highlighting my being different from my fellow postgraduate
applied linguists who preferred to tackle aspects of language that were suppos-
edly of more pith and moment. Jokes set out to amuse and thus, presumably,
were not worthy of serious consideration, a premise that I wished wholeheart-
edly to challenge. Moreover, if Wittgenstein could claim that “A serious and
good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes”, then
surely the subject was worth pursuing in its own right. Therefore, with the tacit
support of one of the world’s greatest philosophers I went on to dedicate much
time and effort both to the subject of jokes and, by extension, to humour in
general. Today, more than two decades on, I cannot help but smile at my former
naivety. Older and wiser, my attempt at creating a taxonomy in The Language
of Jokes now makes me wince, especially in the face of so many of my betters
who had also produced their own classifications – not to mention those who
were still to do so. As far as taxonomies went, I was in the company of those
devised by scholars such as Richard Alexander 1997; Walter Nash 1985; Walter
Redfern 1984; Graeme Ritchie 2004 and many others. Recently, linguist Debra
Aarons, also inspired by Wittgenstein’s well-known remark, produced a book
in which she illustrates how “many crucial concepts of linguistics” are illus-
trated entirely through jokes (2012: 1) simultaneously demonstrating how, on
a technical level, jokes exploit every possible option available in a language to
humorous ends. However, in The Language of Jokes in the Digital Age, I will
be dealing neither with taxonomies nor with detailed analyses of verbal humour.
Neither will I attempt to insert a joke or a gag into a linguistic category or to
DOI: 10.4324/9781315146348-2
The language of jokes: several years on 7
explain its underlying mechanisms as I had done previously. Instead, my aim
is to look at jokes on a wider, macroscopic level and examine their place in
contemporary society.
The question that I set out to address in this book is whether the language of
jokes has changed since the 1990s. If it is true that the past is a foreign country,
so much has changed and so rapidly between the close of the 20th century and
the first two decades of the 21st that the answer at first sight must surely be yes,
jokes have indeed changed. After all, like everything else in life, change simply
happens; it is inevitable. As we become older, along with the world that surrounds
us, we change; similarly, both as individuals and as members of a wider society,
our language and our tastes change too. It therefore makes perfect sense that jokes
and especially the language in which they are couched should change along with
everything else. If language has changed since the 1990s, which it has, then it
must follow that the language in which the jokes are cast has also changed. The
geopolitical changes that have occurred since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989,
coupled with the onset of digitalized communication that allows us to interact
in real time with people on the other side of the planet, have had a considerable
effect in all areas of life. Massive shifts in population have rendered inner cit-
ies multilingual with an increasing number of bilingual and bicultural residents,
while, in the meantime, English has become a truly global language. Not only has
English strengthened its position as a vehicular language in the traditional areas
of science, technology, commerce and trade, but it has also firmly established
itself as the foremost language of emails, texting and, above all, social network-
ing. It is becoming increasingly clear that the English language dominates both
the real and the virtual world of the World Wide Web. Furthermore, technology
now plays a significant role in our daily lives. For instance, there has been a sig-
nificant shift in the way we use mobile phones. If at first we used mobiles in the
same way as we used landline phones, i.e. to speak to someone at a distance albeit
while we were on the move, now speaking on a mobile has been largely replaced
by texting and above all, instant messaging. It would appear that texting, sort of
speech in writing, has replaced much oral communication via mobile technology.
It may well be that it is mainly the elderly who use mobile phones to actually
speak to someone, while younger people prefer to text. In fact, the use of texting
via “smart” phones that are in fact, actually pocket-sized computers, highlights
several language changes as this modality relies on the use of short cuts where
acronyms replace words and emoji and emoticons can replace whole sentences.
Texting, sending emails, posting messages on social media – these are all means
of communicating that privilege reading and writing rather than speech and lis-
tening. So, it would seem that such virtual communication has restored a certain
status to the written word that was seemingly lost previously with the prominence
of landline telephony and media such as TV and radio. What I aim to examine in
this volume is whether these changes have had any effect on jokes, and if so, in
what way. The answer to my quest may well turn out to be surprising.
8 The language of jokes: several years on
Jokes and humorous discourse
Although the title of this book refers to the language of jokes, discussion will
not be limited to the joke form alone. While being perfectly aware that jokes
may well be the most studied form of verbal humour by linguists, psycholo-
gists, philosophers and many other kinds of researchers, in all likelihood jokes
are the least common form of verbal humour. It is more likely that instances
of verbal humour occur in books, articles and newspaper headlines, as good
lines in film, theatre and television, or as quips, asides and wisecracks in eve-
ryday conversation rather than within the framework of the joke form proper.
Furthermore, in the 21st century, a joke is likely to be embedded in a virtual
post, in a tweet or else circulated by means of a smartphone via instant mes-
saging. Most probably, the reason why the joke has traditionally been the most
researched form of verbal humour is simply the ease of collectability. Apart
from collections of jokes in book form and those performed by professional
comedians, there are entire websites dedicated to jokes. In fact, googling the
word “jokes” alone results in 257 million hits, compared to 4.97 million for
“quips” and a mere 199,000 for “witty asides”.1 This volume instead sets out
to explore diverse areas of verbal humour, which while including jokes, will
not exclude other forms of non-serious discourse ranging from witticisms and
one-liners to “ping-pong-punning”, i.e. sequences of semantically related puns
produced by different participants in a conversation (Chiaro 1992: 113), and to
internet memes and beyond. What follows are some operational definitions that
aim to put some order in the intricate web that embraces what I shall loosely
label “humorous discourse”.
Humour
Jokes and humour are natural companions. However, while we all know what
humour is, the concept itself is not only difficult to pin down, but also to unequiv-
ocally define. It is unlikely that there is or has ever been an eminent philosopher
or intellectual who has not attempted to produce a definition of humour (for an
extensive overview, see Attardo 1994). As with other complex concepts such as
intelligence, identity and art, humour is multi-faceted and consequently yields a
multitude of definitions, in keeping with its intricate nature. To wit: according to
psychologist Rod Martin, humour “may be viewed as a form of mental play com-
prising cognitive, emotional, social and expressive components” (2007). Another
way of conceptualizing humour is found in one of the most prominent theories
of humour, Incongruity Theory, which follows in the tradition of a set of ideas
long ago proposed by the philosophers, Aristotle and Kant. Additionally, this
theory incorporates a cognitive aspect in the production and reception of humour.
Incongruity Theory is based upon the ability to recognize incongruity, or what
Koestler called “bisociation” (1964). The recognition of incongruity is certainly
fundamental to the processing of humour, although not all that is incongruous is
necessarily funny.
The language of jokes: several years on 9
Laughter, too, although it may be a response to a playful stimulus, is not an
essential manifestation of either understanding or appreciating a humorous stimu-
lus because it can reflect emotions other than humour (Chafe 2007; Glenn and
Holt 2013; Provine 2000). For example, Provine claims that it is quite common
to laugh because of nervousness or anxiety, although it would appear that most
laughter simply punctuates natural breaks in the conversation (Provine 1996).
Consequently, psychologists of humour have adopted various labels for the emo-
tional reaction to a humorous stimulus. McGhee labels it as simply the “humor
response” (1971); Ruch, however, linking the response to some kind of pleasure or
amusement adopts the term “exhilaration” (1993a) while Martin prefers the word
“mirth” (2007). Even though laughter and smiling may be visible responses to an
amusing stimulus, notably, all three labels avoid including the display of physical
reactions as the sine qua non of humour appreciation, recognizing that humour can
exist in the absence of such reactions. Furthermore, linguist Wallace Chafe points
out that the terms “mirth” and “exhilaration” are limited as they are restricted to
euphoria and pleasure alone, which themselves may not be the essential reac-
tion to humour, neither do they describe other emotional reactions to humorous
stimuli. Chafe therefore opts for the expression the “feeling of non-seriousness”
to describe the sensation that everyone recognizes but cannot be unequivo-
cally described (2007: 1). This raises the question of what “non-seriousness”
actually refers to and what we mean when we use terms such as “amusing” and
“funny”. Something can be “funny ha-ha” in that it is amusing, but it can also be
“funny peculiar” in the sense of odd and strange – incongruous. Thus, we come
full circle as we return to the importance of the role of incongruity, apparently an
essential feature of humour that additionally evokes the recognition of a playful
frame, one of non-seriousness.
To complicate matters further, we should be wary of confusing the notion of
humour with sense of humour. Unlike humour per se, sense of humour is linked
to characteristics of an individual’s personality, and different people have a dif-
ferent sense of humour; in other words, we are not all amused by the same things
or to the same degree. However, not even a person with a very good sense of
humour is likely to be in a permanent state of light-heartedness. Appreciating a
humorous stimulus depends on a combination of both an individual’s personal-
ity and their frame of mind in a certain situation and at a certain moment in time
(see Ruch 1993b).
Openness towards humour is considered to be a positive personality trait.
For example, a person looking for a partner on a dating site will tend to seek
someone with “a good sense of humour”, and there is research that shows that “a
good sense of humour” can enhance marital relationships (Hall 2013; Lauer and
Lauer 1986; Ziv 1988, 2010). So, as well as involving cognition and emotion,
humour also exerts a variety of social functions. Amongst its assorted purposes,
humour can, for example, serve as a societal gelling agent by enhancing affiliation
amongst people; it may alleviate tension in stressful or awkward situations; it can
be a coping strategy. In this view, whatever its function at a given moment, the
10 The language of jokes: several years on
fact remains that humour leads to beneficial effects on people’s minds and bodies.
Humour may not necessarily allow us to live longer, but it will certainly allow us
to live better (Martin 2007: 332), bearing in mind, however, that just as it can calm
and appease, humour also has the power to offend, criticize and control. In this
regard, Billig (2005) suggests that ridicule, an aggressive form of humour, may
well play a part in maintaining social order.
As is obvious, humour also functions as a major form of expression, manifested
in entertainment contexts such as film, television sitcoms, theatrical performances
and stand-up comedy as well as in literary works and the visual arts. The use
of humour is prominent in marketing, advertising and newspaper headlines.
Importantly and noticeably, a significant new location for humour is the World
Wide Web rife with entire sites devoted not only to jokes, but also to comic video
clips and memes. However, what is interesting about much humorous material
online is that so much of it is actually produced by users themselves. During
the first decade of the 21st century, comic PowerPoint presentations frequently
travelled from laptop to laptop in the form of email attachments. Gradually these
comic PowerPoints were generally replaced by amusing video clips, cartoons,
memes and witty chain text messages that are spread (hence the adjective “viral”)
by means of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices – the name of the
popular instant messenger WhatsApp is in itself a play on words.
It is thanks to the technology involved in Web 2.0 that people may now actively
engage with internet content. If at first we had to make do with witty PowerPoint
attachments, now we can create and upload our own clips, gifs, selfies, etc. For
example, YouTube hosts countless videos uploaded by members of the public.
Anyone can produce and post a homemade video on YouTube, just as they may
post a scene they themselves have extracted from a professionally made film or
a TV series or even create a compilation of different scenes by a certain actor or
on a particular topic. And much of what people upload on YouTube appears to
be actually humorous in intent (see Shifman 2011). Of course, these compilations
beg a number of questions. They are not only divorced from the contexts in which
they first appeared, but they are consumed in a different era and this must surely
have an effect of the way they are received.
Similarly, the Facebook platform also allows users to upload and share things
with others, and undoubtedly here too, much of what is created, uploaded and
shared is humorous (Baym 1995; John 2012; Shifman 2007, 2013). The pattern
seems to be that first I, as an individual, find something funny online that may
make me laugh or smile. Second, as I am alone with my laughter, I decide to share
that same object of amusement with others, many of whom will display a “like”
and possibly forward the message to others who will in turn do likewise. So by
forwarding, sharing and stimulating “likes” in others, we somehow create a new
form of collective online laughter.
Back to reality. Finally, and above all, humour is everywhere in our everyday
lives in the form of witticisms that typically pepper many routine interactions.
Apart from jokes themselves, which I will discuss later, much verbal humour
The language of jokes: several years on 11
occurs quite randomly within regular conversation. Unlike jokes that disrupt
ongoing interaction and are performed by those who tell them, witty remarks
occur casually, intertwined naturally, in ongoing discourse. Witty repartee occurs
in a wide assortment of interactions, ranging for example, from a public speaker
trying to warm up and connect with an audience, to an anxious patient at the
doctor’s wishing to make light of a possibly serious symptom. On the internet,
an updated form of ping-pong-punning can be found on forums regarding any
subject whatsoever in which one participant will break away from the discourse
at hand by creating a pun that will be elaborated upon by another participant who
will produce a new pun connected to the first. Next, another participant will join
in with another related pun, another participant with another and so on. An exam-
ple of ping-pong-punning online is illustrated in Figure 1.1, which shows a series
FIGURE 1.1 Ping-pong-punning below the line (part 1)
12 The language of jokes: several years on
of screen shots taken from a thread in The Guardian following an article reporting
a change in the recipe for the shell of a traditional item of confectionary in the UK,
namely Cadbury’s creme eggs.2
Someone triggers a long sequence of puns by posting the comment “I bet it’s
all been masterminded by un oeuf in marketing” and is followed by 15 com-
ments by different participants all containing egg-related puns, with only one
commentator appearing and punning twice in the same thread. What is espe-
cially interesting about ping-pong-punning such as this is the richness and the
variety of linguistic repertoire that is displayed by participants. As we have seen,
the session kicks off with an instance of translation-based target-language ori-
ented wordplay (Delabastita 2005: 166). In fact, while the pun pivots on two
French words, un oeuf, it can only work as such in English where it roughly
sound like “an oaf”. This quip is immediately followed by an accidental-but-
on-purpose reference to “yolks” instead of “jokes” that is in turn followed by
an allusion to “foul play” and another to not wishing to “shell out” for this new
chocolate egg. The fourth poster claims not to be “eggstatic” about the change
while the next person feels “ovoid”. An interesting meta-joke then occurs with
“Not another pun-fest” contradicted by the same participant in the second line
of her post with another instance of translation-based wordplay with “Unoeuf
already”. Puns including “eggistential angst” and “egging on” follow and while
someone attempts to say something serious – well unpunny at least – accusing
the journalist who wrote the article of poor spelling, the complainant’s serious-
ness is ignored and is told that journalists’ heads are likely to be “scrambled”.
There is a first attempt to close the thread with someone accusing someone else
of having “poached” all his or her puns. The response is an offer to provide oth-
ers preceded by “shell I . . .” followed by a totally nonsensical threat of being
“emboiled in a scrambled with that Pundemonium”. Next we have the accusa-
tion, “This thread is a total yolk” followed by the authoritative “Albumen and
women out there need to give it a rest”. Purely nonsensical (but fun), this thread
is a performance of wit and talent. Interestingly, as in real life sessions of ping-
pong-punning, there is something extremely performative about this outburst of
“pundemonia”. It is evident that each contributor is trying to match, if not outdo
the previous one. Moreover, a significant difference emerges between a session
of ping-pong-punning in real life and similar banter online. In real life, ping-
pong-punning consists of a battle of wits in which, as the name suggests, like
the sport itself, speed is as essential as precision. In real life, ping-pong-punning
occurs in real time and puns come in fast with little time to think of a riposte in
between one utterance and the next. If we examine the timeline of the banter in
Figure 1.1, we find that very often quite a long time lapses between one post and
its punning response. In other words, we no longer see the immediacy of the real
life version of banter as contributors have all the time in the world to think of and
construct responses. Although when someone reads the thread, the result is like
being privy to similar conversational play in real life, in effect the thread is far
The language of jokes: several years on 13
more constructed and less immediate than is its real life counterpart. Although
the medium in which this performance occurs is immediate, at the same time
content remains static and (can remain) eternally available. Online ping-pong-
punning is more similar to a drawn out game of chess than ping-pong.
Figure 1.2 illustrates a similar instance of ping-pong-punning extracted from
the same thread but visible further down within the timeline of the text. Although
readers see content of a thread vertically, the timeline is actually haphazard in the
sense that contributions occur quite randomly and at any time. In other words, a
contributor may respond to another contributor at any point at any time within a
thread. Consequently, responses depend on both when the contributor actually
sees ambiguity worth punning about, coupled with the time to create and then
post a response.
Again, we find several instances of punning around the term “egg”, i.e.
“political-correct-egg-ness”; “eggcellent”, “eggsactly”, “eggsporting”, “eggsam-
ple” and “eggsaggerating”. As earlier, someone attempts to call the participants to
order by implying that their wordplay does not involve true punning. “Did you
read about puns in a text book and not really understand?” asks one participant,
but the comment is basically brushed off with a “can you go over the main points
again”, which causes another participant to punningly react with a “Dairy me”.
Evidently, wherever we turn, including serious online newspapers, we are
likely to find instances of verbal humour outside the joke form proper.
FIGURE 1.2 Ping-pong-punning below the line (part 2)
14 The language of jokes: several years on
The joke form
Most probably, the joke form is the part of verbal humour that has been most
widely researched. Chafe remarks that scholars show a preference towards study-
ing jokes and favour them to other forms of verbal humour. In fact, he goes as
far as comparing jokes to fruit flies that “provide a relatively simple model for
genetic studies because of their small size, the ease of raising them in a laboratory,
their short life-cycle, and their possession of only four pairs of chromosomes”
(2007: 99). As well as being easily collectible, jokes are simple, self-contained
units stripped of what Chafe calls the “messiness” of off-the-cuff occurrences
of non-seriousness entwined within serious discourse. Furthermore, joke forms
and formats are also predictable – think of categories such as knock-knock jokes,
elephant jokes, lightbulb jokes, etc. In all these cases, the structure is simple,
repetitive, immediately recognizable and hence easily collectible.
Narratively speaking, joke-telling is comparable to storytelling. First, as with
the traditional narrative structure of stories, many jokes tend to fit into a limited
number of storylines. For example, in the same way that fairy tales favour actions
occurring three times (as in Goldilocks and the Three Bears; Rumpelstiltskin;
Three Billy Goats Gruff, etc.) so do many jokes such as garden-path jokes, Irish
jokes, etc. (Chiaro 1992: 49–58). Second, a story will be typically set apart and
detached from the main flow of the ongoing discourse. A story told during a
conversation, at a dinner party for example, will characteristically interrupt the
general flow to be “performed” by whomever tells it. Moreover, one story will
typically lead to another on a similar subject, perhaps told by another speaker.
People who tell jokes behave in a similar fashion. A joke will interrupt ongoing
conversation and will often be followed by another or more jokes that will be
linked to it in some way either in content or in terms of belonging to the same
genre (Norrick 2000). A single joke may even generate an entire joke-capping
session in which participants tell a string of jokes interconnected by subject mat-
ter (Chiaro 1992: 105–17). A modernized version of joke-capping sessions are
the sequences of puns made by different participants on internet forums, online
threads. etc. (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2, and Chapter 4 in this volume).
Last, similarly to storytelling, joke-telling lies half way between performance
and conversation. Jokes typically occur within a frame in which surrounding
interaction remains on hold throughout its presentation. The joke teller will char-
acteristically interrupt the flow of the interaction, take the floor and narrate a joke
(Sacks 1974, 1978). In place of “Once upon a time. . .” or “Long, long ago. . .”
we may find something like, “There was an Englishman, a Scotsman and an
Irishman” or a variation on the three participants. In other words, when someone
tells a joke, she or he will perform it detached from the rest of the ongoing com-
munication. In terms of Goffman’s (1981) analysis of social settings, the joke
teller literally performs front stage.
Philosopher Simon Critchley asserts that time freezes during the interval of a
joke in that “we undergo a particular experience of duration through repetition
The language of jokes: several years on 15
and digression, of time literally being stretched out like an elastic band” (2002: 7).
While it is well-known that timing is essential in joke-telling – controlling pauses
and hesitations, for example, are vital assets of a good comedian – much of the
success of a joke lies in the contrast between the extension of time during the
build-up of the joke, the setting, and the swiftness and surprise of the final punch.
The General Theory of Verbal Humour
Raskin’s Semantic Script Theory (1984) is the first articulated and developed
theory of verbal humour. Attardo and Raskin further expanded and developed
Sem antic Script Theory into the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH;
1991). According to the GTVH, script opposition is an essential component of
verbal humour. Attardo and Raskin argue that any single occurrence of verbal
humour, i.e. any humorous script, must necessarily consist of two overlapping
scripts, one of which is apparent and at the same time shields another, less notice-
able, script that is not immediately discernible. These two scripts must be in
opposition to each other in order for humour to result. The joke below illustrates
the mechanism of script opposition in verbal humour:
Girlfriend: “Darling, will you give me a ring on our wedding day?”
Boyfriend: “Sure, what is your number?”3
The girl who is asking her boyfriend for a ring on her wedding day clearly desires
a band of gold for the third finger of her left hand. However, the boyfriend’s
reply reveals that the primary script, in which his girlfriend requests a ring, is
in opposition with a secondary script that only becomes clear when we see the
boyfriend’s response. By asking for her telephone number, it is clear that her boy-
friend has interpreted the request “give me a ring” for “give me a phone call/call
me” on [their] wedding day. The boy deliberately or accidentally misinterprets his
girlfriend’s request because the script allows him to do so in that it contains two
perfectly overlapping scripts. The joke is a poor one because the girl clearly states
that the ring is for their (“our”) wedding day and that they will be getting married.
The incongruity lies totally in her boyfriend’s response. The humour – or attempt
at humour – occurs because the overlapping scripts are also in contrast with one
another. The boy’s response highlights the (slight) incongruity of his girlfriend’s
utterance by ignoring the reference to their wedding day. Still, the joke is an exam-
ple of simultaneous overlap and opposition in a single script. These, according to
Raskin and Attardo constitute the essential features of verbal humour.
However, this is clearly a sexist joke that portrays women as being primed and
possibly desperate to marry, with men doing their utmost to avoid falling into
the wedding trap by deliberately misunderstanding requests. Similar chauvinistic
jokes will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.
Attardo develops the GTVH further to speculate that all jokes can be broken
down into six mechanisms known as “Knowledge Resources” (1994). The first
16 The language of jokes: several years on
Knowledge Resource (KR) that is essential in a joke is language (LA). Jokes
consist of words and the LA Resource refers to how words/language are/is used
to create humour.
Why did the cookie cry?
Because its mother was a wafer so long.
Shultz and Pilon 1973
If “was a wafer” did not sound like “was away for” there would be no joke –
it is language that makes the joke possible. Thus, LA is the lowest common
denominator in a verbal joke. The second KR is Narrative Strategy (NA) or the
way a joke is structured – the NA may be a long twisted “garden-path” style
structure, a riddle, a question and answer format, a limerick, etc. Third, all jokes
must have a target (TA) or a butt. Typical targets are people belonging to certain
ethnic groups (e.g. Belgians in French jokes; Irishmen in English jokes, etc.);
mothers-in-law; tightfisted people (e.g. the Scots), politicians, etc. The fourth
KR is Situation (SI) and refers to what the joke is actually about, while Logical
Mechanisms, the fifth KR, point to the incongruity present in the script. Jokes
are often set against a background of improbable places and odd situations; eve-
ryone knows that cookies do not cry and they certainly do not have wafers for
mothers, but for the duration of the joke, disbelief is suspended. The final KR is
Script Opposition (SO).
The essential mechanism of the GTVH account of verbal humour creation is
to highlight the binary perspective created by the overlap of opposing scripts.
Another linguistic theory known as conceptual blending presents us with an
equally useful set of ideas to study verbal humour. Conceptual blending consists
of a “basic mental operation” by which we make sense of things by selecting
from existing knowledge we already possess in order to create new meaning
(Fauconnier and Turner 2002). If we examine a joke as an example of conceptual
blending, rather than seeing it as an incongruity created by two separate oppos-
ing scripts co-existing within a single script, as dictated by the GTVH, we come
up with an amalgam of meaning (see also Bing and Scheibman 2014). Where
the GTVH sees a joke as exposing hidden incongruity, conceptual blending sees
jokes more in terms of a fluid osmosis of meaning.
Form and content
Attardo’s 1994 KRs highlight the interplay that exists between form and
content in a joke. In all probability, SO is the most vital KR for both the
creation and the recognition of verbal humour. Yet sometimes, we simply
do not “get” a joke. Not getting a joke may be due to any number of rea-
sons including limited knowledge of the language to lacking the relevant
world knowledge necessary to understand what is supposedly humorous.
The language of jokes: several years on 17
Nevertheless, we usually know when someone is telling us a joke as people
are likely to introduce it with an expression such as “Have you heard the one
about”, “Listen to this joke” or other words to alert us to some new aspect
of the discourse. Even if the speaker does not signal the arrival of a joke, its
form and content will set it apart from serious discourse. A joke is distin-
guished by its narrative features, notably the implementation of a target and
of situations typical to other jokes. The surprise we get when the “hidden”
script is revealed in the punchline is generated by a combination of inappro-
priateness and unexpectedness that may give us pleasure, a gleeful reaction
or at the very least recognition that its purpose was humorous. According to
Raskin (1984), jokes break the bona fide rules of communication thus warn-
ing recipients to take them lightly. In fact, the makers of jokes deliberately
break Gricean maxims (Grice 1975). A joke is pure invention thus untrue
and ambiguous thus unclear. These features of a joke fly in the face of the
maxims of quality and manner. Many jokes use repetition and lead recipients
up lengthy garden paths so that the features of brevity and conciseness are
markedly absent, flouting the maxims of both quantity and manner. Finally,
jokesters also regularly violate the maxim of relation by ignoring relevance
to any preceding discourse.
However, outside the joke form, verbally expressed humour may be less eas-
ily recognizable. We may not always be aware that we are privy to humorous
discourse when verbal humour is embedded within serious discourse. In fact,
when it is unclear whether the speaker is being serious or whether s/he is joking,
maxims are broken in a more treacherous manner. Several expressions in English
underscore the indefiniteness of non-seriousness – “You must be joking”, “Are
you joking?” and “I’m being perfectly serious” are all utterances that suggest
that the speaker is walking the fine line between serious and non-serious dis-
course. It is certainly troublesome to distinguish an ironic remark from a serious
one if the speaker is wearing a deadpan expression, unless there are contextual
clues, including one’s knowledge of the speaker.
Finally, jokes allow us to talk about many subjects that would be taboo out-
side the play frame of non-serious discourse. In most cultures that we know
of, death, sex and religion are topics normally handled with care and delicacy
in everyday interactions with others. The ambiguity of non-serious discourse
allows us to defy social convention and play with forbidden subjects, as we are
safe within an area in which anything goes precisely because we are only or just
joking. And this, of course, begs the question of whether we are ever indeed
“just” or “only” joking.
Verbal ambiguity
Puns and punning are the essence of verbal ambiguity, even though this is not
readily acknowledged (see Aarons 2012 and Chiaro 1992).
18 The language of jokes: several years on
Jokes about German sausages are the Wurst.
Broken pencils are pointless.
Two fish are in a tank. One turns to the other and asks, “How do you drive
this thing?”
Traditionally, there has been much debate about jokes that play on language
alone and those that play on world or encyclopaedic knowledge (e.g. Hockett
1960), but this dichotomy is surely a false one. All jokes play on language by
virtue of the fact that they are made up of and consist of language itself. The
three jokes above exemplify basic puns that do all indeed play on words, but
they are also pointing at something in the real world. Therefore, while these
rudimentary one-liners are manipulating language, at the same time there is no
escaping that they also denote aspects of reality. However, leaving aside puns
sensu stricto, i.e. in words with more than one meaning such as homonyms,
homophones, homographs and polysemes, the term pun can be stretched to
encompass double entendre based upon diverse forms of linguistic ambiguity
beyond lexis (see Chiaro 1992).
I didn’t like my beard at first. Then it grew on me.
If something or someone grows on me, it means that I gradually accept and find
this pleasurable. However, the expression “to grow on someone” also has a literal
meaning that goes towards creating either the necessary SO and overlap or the
conceptual blending for the script to work as a joke. Interestingly, it is the literal
meaning, i.e. that beards grow on people that is less evident than the idiomatic,
metaphorical meaning. In other words, it is the hidden script that refers to the
growth of facial hair. Strictly speaking, this utterance is not a pun; but it does have
two readings that would classify it as punning or paronomastic in essence.
According to Cicero there are “two types of wit, one employed upon facts,
the other upon words” (De Oratore II, LIX, 239–40) (1965: 337) so, unlike the
examples discussed so far, superficially the following joke simply plays on facts:
Two snowmen are standing next to each other in a yard. One says to the
other, “Funny, I smell carrots too”.
So far so good. We all know that snowmen traditionally have carrots for noses.
However, what happens when a reference becomes highly specific in some way?
Many jokes rely on highly specific subject matter that will not be accessible to
all recipients. The jokes that follow are extremely complex. Knowing that snow-
men have carrots for noses is a pretty basic piece of world knowledge; connecting
Mahatma Gandhi or a Scottish football team to a song from the musical Mary
Poppins requires very specific types of encyclopaedic knowledge.
The language of jokes: several years on 19
Because he walked barefoot most of the time, Mahatma Gandhi had several
calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail,
and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. He was a super callused
fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.
Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious
Headline in The Sun, February 2000
The punchline of the Mahatma Gandhi joke does not consist of an exact pun but
of an expression which, when recited quickly, sounds like “supercalifragilisticex-
pialidocious”, the title of a well-known song from the 1964 Disney musical Mary
Poppins. Gandhi’s predilection for bare feet may well have caused calluses –
hence rendering him “super callused” while his continual fasting may have made
him “fragile” as well as causing “halitosis”. Thus “super callused fragile mystic
hexed by halitosis” cleverly sounds like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” while
containing several elements that describe the Indian politician. Similarly, the
headline reported in The Sun newspaper plays on the same song title. In the case of
the headline, the trope is a homeoteuleton or a word with the same or similar end-
ing as another (in this case the (“morpheme”) “-ocious” in the word “atrocious”).
Language and culture are inextricably linked so that those not familiar with
the song will not see or get either joke, and, of course, there is the rub. Over
and above the song, the Mahatma Gandhi joke relies on fairly basic general
knowledge – although a higher level of knowledge with respect to knowing that
snowmen’s noses are made with carrots – but in order to get the headline, the
reader requires extremely specific knowledge. The headline, in fact, is a very
precise reference to Scottish football when Inverness Caledonian Thistle’s (aka
Caley) had beaten Glasgow’s Celtic 3–1 in the third round of the Scottish Cup
football competition.4 This is an obscure reference to those unacquainted with
Scottish football tournaments and above all to those with no historical knowl-
edge of them. At the time of writing, the same wordplay appears in numerous
internet memes targeting 45th President of the USA, Donald Trump. The basic
meme features a close up of President Trump’s face accompanied by the caption
“SUPER, CALLOUS, FRAGILE, RACIST, EXTRA, BRAGGADOCIOUS” in
upper case. The meme went viral and mutated in its journey across millions of
smartphones. For example, Matt Lieberman tweeted the meme and comments,
“If you say it fast enough, Trump’s really quite atrocious” thus parodying the
lyrics of the original song.5 T-shirts and mugs boast variations on the theme
such as “Super Callous Fragile Bigot Extra Braggadocious” and “Super Callous
Fragile Racist not my nazi Potus”. Furthermore, users have generated a variety
of memes featuring Julie Andrews in the persona of Mary Poppins and Trump
disguised as the chimney sweep from the eponymous film with a similar caption.
In all these examples, the recipient must be able to make a number of com-
plex cognitive connections. In a sense, jokes like these are similar to crossword
puzzles – they require working out. While crossword puzzles take time to solve,
The language of jokes: several years on 21
jokes are immediate. Both ideally end in a feeling of satisfaction at having
resolved a conundrum. In a polysemiotic text, such as an internet meme, the
puzzle becomes more complex as recognition of the purely visual elements in
the meme provides further meaning to its verbal content. Cicero encapsulated the
central idea of verbally expressed humour most succinctly when he said, “a witty
saying has its point sometimes in facts, sometimes in words, though people are
most particularly amused whenever laughter is excited by the union of the two”
(II, LXI, 248) (1965: 383).
Joke structure
According to Norrick, jokes are “typically narrative in form” (2000: 169–70).
Excluding formulaic jokes such as “knock-knock” and riddle jokes, Norrick
follows in Hockett’s (1960) footsteps by proposing that jokes are made up of a
three-step structure consisting of a “build-up” that is their main body, a “pivot”
around which “dual meaning potential revolves” and closure with a “punchline”.
He goes on to suggest that Hockett’s notion of pivot not only conforms to Attardo
and Raskin’s GTVH in the sense that it provides overlap and opposition and hence
dual meaning potential, but that it also fits in with Koestler’s notion of bisociation.
As Norrick argues, humour arises from the perception of a single event “in two
self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference”; hence, cogni-
tively, the receiver of a joke is not only linked to its associative context but is
simultaneously bisociated within its frames of reference. Bisociation theory thus
synthesizes and subsumes several other theories such as those of Bateson (1953),
Bergson (1900), Freud (1905) and Fry (1963). The joke that follows illustrates a
typical structure consisting of a build-up, a pivot, closure and a punchline:
An aeroplane was about to crash, there were five famous passengers on
board but only four parachutes left. The first passenger said, “I’m Kobe
Bryant, the best NBA basketball player. The Lakers need me. I can’t afford
to die”. So he took the first pack and left the plane.
The second passenger, Hillary Clinton said, “I am the wife of the former
president of the US. I am also the Secretary of State. For the sake of inter-
national stability, I need a parachute”. She took the second parachute and
jumped out of the plane.
The third passenger, President Barack Obama said, “I’m President of
the United States of America. Our country needs intelligent solutions, and
as a former Harvard Law School professor, I am the only person who can
offer those solutions. Americans can’t afford for me to die”. So he quickly
grabbed the pack next to him and jumped out of the plane.
The fourth passenger was the Pope and he turned to the fifth pas-
senger, a Rabbi and said, “I am old and frail so I don’t have many years
left. As a good Catholic, I will sacrifice my life and let you have the last
parachute”.
22 The language of jokes: several years on
The Rabbi turned to him and said “Thank you but it’s really OK . . . there
are enough parachutes for both of us. America’s most intelligent President
has just taken my Tallit bag”.6
The text opens with a problematic situation – a plane with five well-known pas-
sengers on board is about to crash, but there are only four parachutes. Each of the
first three passengers puts forward an argument as to why they, rather than some-
one else, should get to use a parachute. The structure consists of three identical
iterations, with relevant substitutions.
1. The first/second/third passenger + NAME
2. Said, “I AM + THE REASON FOR THEIR IMPORTANCE ON THE
PLANET”
3. So he/she quickly grabbed the pack next to him/her and jumped out of the
plane.
The build-up consists of the introduction of the three passengers, with the situa-
tion of a lacking parachute as the pivot. The change in structure and closure occurs
with passenger four who, instead of arguing his case for a parachute, offers it to the
fifth passenger, who in turn provides the punchline of the joke. This is a complex
joke as it breaks with the norm of three people in a joke where the third provides
the punchline. However, jokes do not need to be lengthy in order to have a narra-
tive structure. As Norrick points out, one-liners can also exhibit narrative structure:
A panhandler came up to me today and said he hadn’t had a bite in weeks
so I bit him.
Norrick 2000: 171
This one-liner consists of three episodes each narrated in chronological order
couched within three clauses in the past tense. There is a build-up, “A panhandler
came up to me today and said he” a pivot providing ambiguity “hadn’t had a bite
in weeks” followed by the final punchline “so I bit him”. The content is highly
compressed, but lends itself to expansion into a lengthier narration, something
that would be tricky in the case of short formulaic jokes of the Q and A, riddle or
“knock-knock” type:
Q. Why did the banana go to the Doctor? A. Because it was not peeling
well.
While being short and succinct, unlike one-liners, short formulaic joke types like
the above lack cohesive links that create narrative flow. Drawing on a predictable
formula is an important part of joke construction and appreciation, the longer
structure of the aeroplane joke above is also formulaic albeit drawn out at length.
The aeroplane joke contains background information followed by three episodes
The language of jokes: several years on 23
each concluding with a sentence that opens with a conclusive “so” which pro-
vides cohesion while allowing the story to develop. Similarly, the one-liner about
the panhandler consists of three interlocked clauses recounting three events thus
creating a storyline. In order to transform the banana joke into a one-liner with
narrative structure, we simply set up a situation containing the pivot “a banana”,
add the conjunction “and” for cohesion, and place the punchline into an utterance:
A banana went to the doctor and said “Doctor, Doctor I’m not peeling well”.
The repetition of “Doctor” also references the joke to the tradition of (formulaic)
“Doctor, Doctor” jokes:
“Doctor, Doctor my sister here keeps thinking she’s invisible!” “What
sister?”
“Doctor, Doctor everyone keeps throwing me in the garbage”. “Don’t talk
rubbish!”
“Doctor, Doctor, I’ve got amnesia”. “Just go home and try to forget about it”.
Of course, these one-liners could be easily lengthened and restructured to become
lengthier narratives, but they would no longer fall into the same cycle of jokes.
A guy suffering from a miserable cold begs his doctor for relief. The doctor
prescribes pills. But after a week, the guy’s still sick. So the doctor gives
him a shot. But that doesn’t help his condition either. “Okay, this is what I
want you to do”, says the doctor on the third visit. “Go home and take a hot
bath. Then throw open all the windows and stand in the draught”. “I’ll get
pneumonia!” protests the patient. “I know. That I can cure”.7
Humouring the patient as in the one-liners is maintained in this longer joke, but it
is clearly a different joke in terms of structure.
Joke targets
As we have seen so far, jokes work on the element of surprise in the punchline,
a punchline that, ideally, makes us feel good and laugh. It has been proposed
that this feel-good emotion derives from our physical or social distance from the
target of the joke. According to the philosopher Hobbes, we tend to laugh at
others’ misfortunes, feel superior and partake of what he called the “sudden glory”
(1991: 43) of our superiority over the target of the joke. This is a way of express-
ing what is known as the Superiority Theory of Humour. Superiority Theory can
be traced back as far as the Ancient Greeks with Plato reporting, “when we laugh
at the ridiculous qualities of our friends we mix pleasure with pain” (1975: 50)
24 The language of jokes: several years on
and Aristotle claiming that comedy imitates “persons who are inferior” (1970: 23).
Freud considered many jokes to be “tendentious”, arousing feelings that could
be considered conflictual, aggressive and superior (1905). Indeed, slipping on a
banana skin or receiving a custard pie in the face are examples of exploiting the
rudimentary elements of comedy. We can enjoy these things from the safety of a
spectator; in other words, we might find them funny or enjoyable as long as we
are not the victim. Our response therefore emerges from a position of superiority.
We feel good because we feel superior to the victim. Hundreds of jokes focus
upon some kind of underdog or loser. There are stupidity jokes that attribute lack
of intelligence to an outsider; someone who comes from a different part of the
country; otherwise the stupid person may be a woman with blonde hair (from
Essex in UK jokes), a dictator or an engineering student. We also find underdogs
in sex jokes that focus on someone sexually inexperienced or lacking in sexual
knowledge, a cuckold, a gay man or a lesbian. Furthermore, in the category of
sick jokes the target may be babies, disabled people, rape victims or the subjects
of fatalities or disasters.
The work of Christie Davies has been largely dedicated to the study of jokes
and their targets (Davies 1990, 1998, 2002, 2011). His research explores diverse
categories of jokes collected around the world and provides extensive social and
historical reasoning as to why a certain group of people becomes the butt of a joke
cycle. Amongst the categories of jokes examined by Davies, we find ethnic jokes,
stupidity jokes, those about canny people, about politicians, religion and sex, as
well as disaster jokes. Emerging from Davies’ work is that time after time the
punchline involves the stupidity of the person involved. This narrative operates
over and above the target proper, in other words, whether the jokes sets out to
ridicule a politician, an Italian soldier or a mother-in-law. A brief overview of the
most common joke targets appears below, with reference to the work of Davies
for exhaustive historical and social whys and wherefores.
The stupid underdog
The inhabitants of locations known as “Fooltowns” (Davies 1998) have pro-
vided material for jokes stretching too far back for memory. Over the centuries,
city-dwellers have typically scoffed at their rustic, peasant neighbours for their
simplicity, so that just as the Ancient Egyptians made fun of the Nubians,
present day inhabitants of England’s metropolitan areas ridicule people from
Essex – especially the girls. Every centre has its own periphery – its own foolish
country yokel. The English have the Irish; North Americans have the Poles; the
French the Belgians. The list is endless: Davies provides a comprehensive table
of who considers whom stupid (and canny, see below) in several countries around
the world (1998: 2–3). The question to be posed is this: what exactly are we doing
when we make fun of the different other? Davies argues that certain types of eth-
nic humour, particularly those in which the outsider is in some way depicted as an
underdog or inferior by the hegemonic majority, arise from feelings of economic
The language of jokes: several years on 25
or sexual fear in the minds of a consolidated and well-established group that they
then direct against the new peripheral group entering their society.
Thus, it is hardly surprising that migrants are the butt of jokes in many cultures.
In Italy, for example, a country which until recently had a strong tradition of out-
ward migration but little or no internal flow of migrants, the meridionali, namely
southerners who left the poor towns and villages of the South to seek employ-
ment in the affluent cities of the North, became the butt of such jokes. The trait of
stupidity in Italian jokes is frequently pinned onto the carabinieri, one of the coun-
try’s police forces, a profession which has traditionally been heavily populated by
southerners in search of easily available employment. Today, however, while cara-
binieri jokes continue to flourish, those about stupid southerners in general have
been replaced by those regarding manual workers from Asia, Africa and Eastern
Europe. Thus, from peripheral migrants, Italians themselves have now shifted to
inhabit the centre and consequently permit themselves the newly acquired privilege
of becoming the perpetrators of jokes in which new arrivals become the target.
Entire professions can be the butt of stupidity jokes. Davies examines jokes
in which engineers, orthopaedic surgeons and the Marines are targeted, as well
as aristocrats, dictators, lawyers and bankers. Clearly, in many cases these jokes
allow people to vent negative feelings towards a certain category of person from
the safety of “it’s just a joke”:
Why is the Tory party known as the cream of society? Because it’s rich and
thick and full of clots.
How many Conservatives does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None, they
only screw the poor.
Tony and Cherie are at a restaurant. The waiter tells them tonight’s special
is chicken almandine and fresh fish. “The chicken sounds good, I’ll have
that”, Cherie says. The waiter nods: “And the vegetable?” he asks. “Oh,
he’ll have the fish”, Cherie replies.
The first two jokes make fun of the UK Conservative party. The first is traditional
(see Chiaro 1992: 104) linking party members to a ruling class élite that is seen in
the second lightbulb joke as working against the interests of the lower classes. The
third joke makes fun of ex-Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife, Queen’s
Counsel Cherie Booth. What the three jokes have in common is a desire to criticize
British politics and politicians over and above their specific political affiliations.
Canny jokes
According to Davies, stupidity jokes are the largest category of jokes that occur
in different countries, and although the target may vary, the jokes are universal.
Alongside jokes about imbeciles, plenty of popular jokes are about crafty, stingy,
26 The language of jokes: several years on
canny people. While many countries have their own national misers to joke about,
such as the Genoese in Italy and the Armenians in Greece, the Scots and the Jews
appear to be the international butts of canny jokes.
A Scotsman, an Englishman and an Australian were in a bar and had just
started on a new round of drinks when a fly landed in each glass of beer.
The Englishman took his out on the blade of his Swiss Army knife. The
Australian blew his away in a cloud of froth. The Scotsman lifted his one
up carefully by the wings and held it above his glass. “Go on, spit it oot, ye
wee devil” he growled.
Davies argues that canny jokes are the flipside of stupidity jokes and observes
several similarities between the two categories arguing that in both, the contrast
adopted is that “between things mental and physical, whether of the body or of
the earth . . . between mind and matter” (2011: 21). The butt of stupidity jokes are
often those whose occupations are associated with material things, for instance,
those concerning the soil (labourers, country bumpkins, etc.), while the butt of
canny jokes are interested in material or financial gain (misers, lawyers, bankers,
etc.). “There is an interesting asymmetry between the two sets of jokes in that
stupidity is always laughable but intelligence is funny only when it is linked to the
morally dubious acquisition of rewards” (Davies ibid.). The joke below provides
a good example of this argument.
A Scotsman has a prostitute give him oral sex. He is about to ejaculate and
shouts “Swallow and I’ll give you an extra buck!” The prostitute gulps and
answers, “What did you say?” The Scot answers, “Nothing”.
Adapted from Davies 2011: 96
While the tight-fisted Scotsman is undoubtedly targeted, so is the guileless pros-
titute, although in the end, canniness is rewarded as the Scotsman trumps the
woman financially.
Sex
According to the Oxford Dictionary, dirty jokes are “concerned with sex in a lewd
or obscene way” or, as the Urban Dictionary puts it dirty jokes are “to do with
disgusting acts of sexual innuendo or other things people might find grotesque”.8
Yet despite dirty jokes being grotesque and obscene, the very fact of their being
“jokes” renders their “lewd” content laughable. Freud, on the other hand, saw
dirty jokes as being powered by libidinal impulses from which we derive illicit
pleasure (Martin 2007).
As Lord Chesterfield famously said about sexual intercourse, “the pleasure is
momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable”. If Chesterfield’s
attribution of the ridiculousness of the positions the human body adopts when
engaging in sexual activity is general, then it is hardly surprising that jokes about
The language of jokes: several years on 27
sex abound. More than any other joke category, jokes about sex remind us of the
fact that although we are human, we have the bodies of animals. Furthermore,
indelicate jokes concerning sexual acts exemplify transgression from the etiquette
of social discourse in which we tend to avoid such subjects. In that sense, jokes
about sex are an adult version of scatological playground jokes and songs deal-
ing with nudity, defecation, flatulence and urination – aspects of life that are kept
backstage in society. Should someone break wind in a lift, they would be flouting
a social norm that would be seen by some as disgusting and by others as funny,
or possibly a mixture of both. Typical schoolchild humour includes taunts like
“Look up, look down, your pants are falling down!” and the more mischievous
“Why fart and waste when you can burp and taste?” Children joke about what
they know to be unmentionable and so do grown-ups. By doing or saying the
unmentionable, we set ourselves up to be laughed at as disgust becomes entwined
with pleasure.
With examples stretching from the literary works of authors such as Aesop,
Kafka, Swift and Orwell to Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons, philosopher Simon
Critchley provides us with examples of satire in which animals take on human
features (2002: 31). However, Critchley argues that while the animal who becomes
human is endearing and amusing, when the reverse happens and the human
becomes a beast, the effect is one of repugnance. Jokes about sex may well remind
us of the animal within us, if, as argued by Critchley humour functions by “exploit-
ing the gap between being a body and having a body” (2002: 42), which could
explain our mixed feelings of laughter mingled with disgust.
Although by definition a dirty joke is about some kind of sexual activity, at
the same time it may also be targeting someone’s stupidity. Examining Donald
McGill’s traditional “naughty” seaside postcards, we see that they are mainly
based on saucy double-entendres that usually involve an element of stupidity. A
typical postcard features a bespectacled, intellectual-looking man sitting under a
tree next to a voluptuous woman in a short, tight dress. The man, who is reading
Kim asks the woman if she likes Kipling, to which she replies “I don’t know, you
naughty boy, I’ve never been Kippled”.9 As Aarons points out (2012: 95), there
is also something inherently (and, I would like to add, mysteriously) funny about
the word “Kipling”. Had the gentleman been reading Browning and had he sub-
sequently asked the woman if she liked Browning to which she replied, “I don’t
know, I’ve never been browned” it would no longer have been remotely funny.
As we can see, the joke has a double target; the stupid woman who has never
heard of Kipling but also the naïve man who does not take advantage of the
woman’s (supposed) availability and is therefore considered equally stupid (see
Chapter 3 for a lengthy discussion of humour and gender). As is shown in the
example below, many jokes involving sex, as well as being salacious, simultane-
ously target someone stupid or canny.
Q. Why don’t Essex girls use vibrators?
A. They chip their teeth.
28 The language of jokes: several years on
In his pioneering work on conversation analysis, Harvey Sacks describes the
structural complexities of the following dirty joke:
KEN: You wanna hear muh – eh ma sister told me a story last night . . .
There – There was these three girls. And they were all sisters. And
they were all married to three brothers . . . So, first of all, that night,
theya’re – on their honeymoon – uh, the mother-in-law says – (to
’em) well why don’tch all spend the night here ’an then you can go
on yer honeymoon in the morning. First night th’ mother walks up
th’ first door and she hears this uuuuuuuuuhh!! Second door it’s
HHOOOHH! Third door it is nothing. She stands there for about
twunny five minutes waitin for sumpna happen – nuthin. Next
morning she talks t’ first daughter and she sz – wh how come ya –
how come ya went YEEEEEEAAHAGGH last night ‘n daughter
sez Well it tickled mommy ’n second girl how come ya screamed.
O mommy it hurts hh third girl walks up to her – why didn’ ya say
anything last night. Wyou tol me it was always impolite t’ talk with
my mouth full.
Sacks 1978
Although Sacks was mostly concerned with the structure and performance of the
joke and its effect on the listeners present, its content pivots round the sexual
ingenuity of the three brides and especially the third. The dirty joke is considered
as such because it hints at the practice of fellatio. The joke targets (a) the sexually
naïve and inexperienced daughter – someone unknowing and surprised at what is
happening and (b) the daughter’s literal adherence to her mother’s rules that make
her appear even more foolish. Therefore, although this is a dirty joke, it is a stupid-
ity joke too. Whether we are dealing with a naïve bride or a nosey mother, a canny
Scotsman or a stupid prostitute, a dim-witted woman or a self-absorbed gentle-
man, the sexual element in these jokes takes second place to the idea of someone
either taking or not taking advantage of someone else. This is clearly illustrated in
jokes about cuckoldry in which the adulterer is the “clever” or canny person who
gets away with doing what is wrong and getting one up on his or her partner.
David was seconds away from receiving a vasectomy when his brother and
sister-in-law barged in holding their new-born baby. “Stop! You can’t do
this!” exclaimed the brother. “And why not?” asked David.
“Don’t you want to have a beautiful baby someday? Like my wife and I
have here?” David said nothing.
The brother grew impatient, “C’mon David, I want a nephew. David,
make me an uncle”.
David couldn’t take it anymore. He gave his sister-in-law an apologetic look
and asked his brother, “You’re sure you want a nephew?” “Yes”, the brother
replied. “It would be an honour”. “Well congratulations, you’re holding him”.
The language of jokes: several years on 29
Again, the joke pivots around a sexual relationship that is regarded as taboo in
society. Although the sexual element is not overtly mentioned – the recipient has
to work it out – the target is the cuckolded brother and his non-knowingness.
According to Susan Sontag, the comic is “essentially a theory of non-knowing,
or pretending not to know, or partial knowing” (2004: 92). Jokes about sex, and
especially those about cuckoldry, as well as being tendentious, satisfy the notion
of partial knowing.
Giuseppi walks into work, and he says, “Ey, Tony! You know who’s-a George
Washington?” Tony says, “No, Giuseppi, who’s-a George Washington?”
He says, “Hah! George-a Washington the first-a President of-a United
States. I’m-a go to night school, learn all about-a United States, and become-
a US-a citizen”.
A couple of days later, Giuseppi walks into work and says, “Ey, Tony!
You know who’s-a Abraham Lincoln?” Tony says, “No, Giuseppi, who’s-a
Abraham Lincoln?”
He says, “Hah! Abraham-a Lincoln is-a sixteenth President of-a United
States. I’m-a go to night school, learn all about-a United States, and become-
a US-a citizen”.
A guy in the back of the shop yells, “Yo, Giuseppi . . . you know who
Fishlips Lorenzo is?” He says, “No. Who’s-a Fishlips Lorenzo is?” The guy
yells, “That’s the guy who’s bangin’ your wife while yo’re in night school”.
In a party at a luxurious villa, the host says to his playboy guest, “See the
women in this room? Except for my mother and my sister I’ve been to bed
with them all”. The irritated playboy retorts, “Well then, that means that
between the pair of us we have been to bed with them all”.
These two jokes targeting Italians are both very different yet are both based on
“partial knowing”. The joke about Giuseppe is a joke playing on the target’s
ignorance of his wife’s infidelity. While Giuseppe is at night school where he is
learning about the USA in order to become a citizen, another Italian is cuckold-
ing him. Education is often seen as a prime value for migrants and Giuseppe is
proud that he is going to school and using his head to learn about history. Yet
Fishlips Lorenzo, someone who obviously does not go to school, who does not
use his head but uses his body and physical strength to “bang” Giuseppe’s wife
gets the upper hand. What Giuseppe learns and “knows” from school is negatively
compensated by the goings on that he does not know about in his own home.
Furthermore, this partial knowing is common knowledge to Tony, the third party
who informs Giuseppe. Giuseppe is the target because of his partial or total lack
of knowledge. It is a stupidity joke.
The second joke is an Italian joke that I have translated into English that also
plays on ignorance/stupidity and partial knowing. Above all, the joke plays upon
a value that was once common in Italy regarding the purity of men’s mothers and
30 The language of jokes: several years on
sisters and the fact that through their sexuality, sons and brothers could become
cuckolds as much as they could through their wives’ infidelity. Therefore, while
the host proudly boasts about his sexual conquests, the playboy outplays him by
confronting him with what was previously unknown information regarding his
mother and sister. Thus, the flipside of jokes that align sex with stupidity are jokes
that play on sex and canniness.
When a man asked his widower father why he had married a young nym-
phomaniac whom he could never satisfy, instead of a woman his own age,
the old man said, “Son, I’d rather have ten percent of a good business than
a hundred percent interest in a bankrupt one”.
The canny widower turns an apparently disadvantageous sexual partnership to his
advantage by comparing it to the small yet permanent interests gained by invest-
ing in a flourishing business paralleled to no gains in a bankrupt one. So here
too, success in matters of the mind and finance outstrip manual and/or bodily,
i.e. sexual, concerns.
In mainstream western culture, jokes based on sex generally display an adher-
ence to heteronormative societal rules and attitudes. Although cuckolded males are
often the target, jokes highlight women’s promiscuity while there are entire catego-
ries of jokes that ridicule gay men, lesbians and of course, blondes (see Chapter 3).
Religion
Jokes about religion were extremely common in music hall culture in the UK
which, until the post-war period, focused on the greed and hypocrisy of clerics
(Brown 2006: 128). Similarly, in Roman Catholic Italy, many jokes target nuns
and the issue of chastity, while in English jokes, Irish priests are often depicted as
being drunk. Rather like jokes about sex, those about religion are a delicate subject
matter. In talking about Jewish jokes, Davies discusses the historical and social
reasons for this tradition that is strengthened and perpetuated by Jews themselves
who in their jokes target themselves as well as other religious groups (2011).
An Irish priest is driving down to New York and gets stopped for speed-
ing in Connecticut. The state trooper smells alcohol on the priest’s breath
and then sees an empty wine bottle on the floor of the car. He says, “Sir,
have you been drinking?” “Just water” says the priest, fingers crossed. The
trooper says, “Then why do I smell wine?” The priest looks at the bottle and
says, “Good Lord! He’s done it again!”
Is this joke about religion or is it another canny joke? The crafty priest uses his
wits to disentangle himself from a tricky situation, but clearly, the joke touches
subject matter that might cause offence to some as it could be seen as blasphe-
mous. Jokes about religion, rather like those involving politicians, allow people
The language of jokes: several years on 31
to react against authority albeit only within a verbal play frame. For example,
the allegations of sexual abuse regarding Catholic priests around the world spawned
hundreds of jokes on the internet, yet it is notable that when Conan O’Brien made
the following remark on his talk show, it was ill-received by the Catholic League:
The Pope let two 11-year-old boys ride in the pope mobile with him.
Afterwards the Vatican told the Pope “that’s not the kind of publicity we’re
looking for”.10
The child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is naturally a sensitive subject.
Indeed the suggestion that all priests are paedophiles is as absurd as the one that
claims all blonde-haired women are stupid and promiscuous. However, some peo-
ple may take offence at the suggestion that the head of the Catholic Church could
be perceived as a paedophile. On the other hand, publicly joking about something
as serious as the child abuse scandal resists the strictures of typical mainstream
media discourse and is liberating in this way, despite being simultaneously shock-
ing. Perhaps this is the strongest effect such humour could evoke. Humour is, after
all, in the ears of the beholder.
Disasters
Within minutes of a major disaster, the death of a well-known personality or a scan-
dal involving someone famous, despite being in what many people would consider
bad taste, jokes based on the calamity begin circulating the internet. Disaster jokes
have long been around, but since the internet has replaced the playground and the
pub, they are disseminated closer to the event and more quickly than in the past.
Opie and Opie (1959) report a playground joke about serial killer John Christie:
Q. If John Christie had two sons what would he call them?
A. Ropem and Chokem.
During the 1940s and 1950s, John Christie was responsible for strangling and
raping eight women and then hiding their corpses in a house in London. It seems
likely that researchers Opie and Opie censored the playground joke about the
murderer as the original response; “Rapem and Chokem” may have been con-
sidered too racy for a book published in the fifties. After Christie’s execution,
several sources report another playground joke regarding Christie’s last request
that was “A cup of tea and a couple of tarts”. It is difficult to say how jokes such as
these originate. Kuipers (2006) argues that they probably stem from an instance of
wordplay in a conversation about the negative incident that is subsequently devel-
oped and expanded into the form of a joke, after which it is quickly disseminated.
With regard to the spread of disaster jokes, Oring (1992) provides a number of
hypotheses as to the reason for the popularity of these kinds of jokes. With par-
ticular references to the spate of question and answer jokes that arose following
32 The language of jokes: several years on
the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1987, Oring argues that
the very “unspeakability” of the disaster that “may conjoin an unspeakable, and
hence incongruous, universe of discourse to a speakable one” is unique to the joke
form (1992: 23). The space shuttle explosion and later the death of Princess Diana
and the events of 9/11 all received huge media coverage imbued with a rhetoric
of tragedy and mourning. Oring asks himself if joke cycles about disasters are not
a rebellion and claims convincingly that such cycles may well be an insurgence
against public discourse and the conventionalization of media discourse surround-
ing disasters.
Suspending disbelief
Like other fictional works such as novels, plays and films, jokes work on the
notion of suspension of disbelief. Those participating in the performance of a
joke, whether the joke is narrative or formulaic in nature, put reality on hold
throughout its enactment and enter what Bateson (1953) defines as a “play frame”
in which we, the listeners, adhere to an unwritten pact. We temporarily enter a
sort of time freeze in which rules of reality stand still for the duration of the joke
(Critchley 2002: 7). If we consider just two of the examples examined so far, it
would be extremely unlikely that the President of the United States, his Secretary
of State and the Pope would be travelling aboard the same aeroplane, and it is
even more improbable that a banana can speak, let alone walk into a surgery and
converse with a Doctor. Yet, of course, it is these very implausible circumstances
that signal the fact that we are entering a play frame, in this case, joke territory.
In addition, a number of joke categories work around a series of mechanisms that
defy all common sense and logic. Attardo, for instance, chooses to examine the
category of “lightbulb jokes” (1994: 70–8) both in terms of the way in which they
are constructed and in how they build up the recipients’ expectations.
How many Californians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Ten. One to
screw it in and nine to enjoy the experience.
Although it is clear that screwing in a lightbulb is a simple operation that can
be carried out by a single person, “lightbulb jokes” set out to target and ridicule
different categories of people by asking, for example, “How many X, Y, Z (e.g.
lawyers/ teachers/feminists/blondes, etc.) does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
The answer will usually be a number higher than one, followed by an expla-
nation for the high number of people involved. This explanation will play on a
stereotypical feature of the targeted group. Whenever we are questioned about the
number of people of a certain category required to screw in a lightbulb, based on
our past experience of the trope, we automatically know that we are in the realm
of non-seriousness and we will expect a facetious (but often very acute) answer
to be delivered. In fact, jokes allow us to suspend our disbelief in terms of illogi-
cal mechanisms, such as those involving a large number of people to carry out
The language of jokes: several years on 33
a simple task. In jokes, animals and objects often take on human attributes and
adopt human behaviour. “Bartender” jokes, for example, typically involve anthro-
pomorphized animals or objects entering a bar and making requests.
Three pieces of string walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Sorry, we
don’t serve strings here!” They go outside and one of the strings messes up
his hair and ties himself up. He walks back inside and the bartender says,
“Aren’t you one of those strings I just got rid of?” The string says, “I’m a
frayed knot!”
A duck walks into a bar, and asks the bartender, “Got any duck food?” The
bartender just shakes his head and says, “Nope”. The duck leaves. The next
evening, the duck comes back and asks the bartender, “Got any duck food?”
Again, the bartender shakes his head and says “Nuh-uh” and again, the duck
leaves. The next day, the duck comes back again. The duck asks, “Got any
duck food?” The bartender just shakes his head yet again and says, “Nope”.
Anyway, after a couple of weeks of slowly simmering irritation, the bartender
finally snaps when the duck comes in, and screams at the unfortunate bird, “I
swear that if you ask me for duck food again I’ll nail your feet to the floor!”
Startled, the duck leaves without saying another word. The next evening the
duck still comes in but instead asks, “Got any nails?” Mildly surprised, the
bartender replies “No”. A short pause follows. “Got any duck food?”
Two dragons walk into a bar. Dragon One: “It’s hot in here”. Dragon Two:
“Shut your mouth!”
Alongside anthropomorphism, jokes typically take place in far-fetched settings.
Heaven, Hell, desert islands, cannibal cauldrons, firing squads and, as we have
seen, falling aeroplanes with a combination of famous passengers are typical joke
situations. This is why, as we shall discover further on, joking about the here and
now outside the joke form, may be doubly ambiguous and raise questions regard-
ing whether the joker is to be taken seriously or not.
Notes
1 Sources: www.google.co.uk/#q=Jokes; www.google.co.uk/#q=witty+asides and www.
google.co.uk/#q=quips. All retrieved 22 November 2014.
2 Comments following an article by Adam Gabbatt, “Shellshock! Cadbury comes clean
on Creme Egg chocolate change”, featured in The Guardian 12 January 2015 and
available at: www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/12/shellshock-cadbury-comes-
clean-on-creme-egg-chocolate-change. Retrieved 7 July 2016.
3 Joke retrieved from Gag Universe available at: www.gaguniverse.com/joke-1142-
girlfriend-darling-will-you-give. Retrieved 7 December 2015.
4 Scott Murray, “The Joy of Six: great football headlines”, The Guardian 12 December
2008. Available at: www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2008/dec/12/joy-of-six-headlines.
Retrieved 25 November 2014.
34 The language of jokes: several years on
5 Although I was unable to trace the original meme, I would like to thank Matt
Lieberman from UCLA for allowing me to use his original tweet with the meme
that is available at: https://twitter.com/social_brains/status/781501429420883968.
Retrieved 27 February 2017.
6 An updated version of the joke is as follows: The first passenger said, “I am Steph
Curry, the best NBA basketball player. The warriors and my millions of fans need
me, and I can’t afford to die”. So he took the first pack and left the plane. The second
passenger, Donald Trump, said, “I am the newly elected US President, and I am the
smartest President in American history, so my people don’t want me to die”. He took
the second pack and jumped out of the plane. The third passenger, the Pope, said to
the fourth passenger, a 10-year-old schoolboy, “My son, I am old and don’t have many
years left, you have more years ahead so I will sacrifice my life and let you have the last
parachute”. The little boy said, “That’s okay, Your Holiness, there’s a parachute left for
you. America’s smartest President took my schoolbag”. Available at: www.reddit.com/r/
Jokes/comments/5c2j2a/an_airplane_was_about_to_crash_there_were_4/. Retrieved 27
February 2017. The joke is extremely memetic as it is replicated in dozens of versions
including an Italian version featuring Obama, Putin, Berlusconi and as always, the Pope.
7 Joke available at Reader’s Digest: www.rd.com/jokes/doctor/. Retrieved 10 August 2016.
8 See www.oxforddictionaries.com/it/definizione/inglese/dirty and www.urbandictionary.
com/define.php?term=dirty%20jokes. Retrieved 2 June 2016.
9 Description of a postcard on view at the Donald McGill Museum in Ryde (Isle of
Wight, UK): http://saucyseasidepostcards.com/. Retrieved 16 February 2015.
10 The remark occurred on Conan (TBS) 14 April 2014: www.catholicleague.org/conan-
hits-belt/. Retrieved 23 February 2015.
2
THE LANGUAGE OF JOKES
GOES GLOBAL
From the 20th century onwards, performed humour, previously restricted to the
stage and the radio, could now also be enjoyed on screen. Beginning at the turn
of the 20th century with the establishment of the “silver-screen”, a medium for
showing a wide range of comic films, by the 1950s, after the advent of television,
an assortment of comedic products became available in people’s homes too. In
western countries, at the start of the 21st century, a further change occurred in
the production and consumption of entertainment as a series of new and “smart”
screens started to spread many varieties of audiovisual products, including, of
course, different forms of comedy. At the time of writing, people are able to watch
comedies, sitcoms and a spectrum of comic audiovisual material via laptops, tab-
lets and mobile phones, yet significantly, none of these technologies has replaced
or destroyed its predecessors. Just as the advent of films did not eradicate books
and in turn, TV did not supplant the cinema, smart screens are not replacing TV.
All happily co-exist, although it does appear that the way people consume screen
products is indeed changing.
Initially with the arrival of DVD technology and subsequently with the availa-
bility of media streaming and commercial providers such as Netflix and Amazon,
we can now watch films and TV products whenever and wherever we like. While
the performance of humour remains constant, in essence such performances do,
however, seem to be appearing in new places being differently consumed and dif-
fused through communities of viewers.
It goes without saying that thanks to a number of user generated sites online
such as YouTube, millions of audiovisual texts are now easily available, not only
in their original fullness, but also, and above all, in the form of clips, compilations
and in “greatest hits” formats. Weitz sees the internet as an “apparent goldmine of
humour related performance” (2017) but wonders whether being able to control
the performance by skipping, repeating and pausing, changes the viewer’s response.
DOI: 10.4324/9781315146348-3
36 The language of jokes goes global
Not only that, but compilations made up of clips from a comedian’s different
performances may also affect response. Clips by their very nature are divorced
from the whole in which they originally occurred, not to mention their histori-
cal context. In other words, a user who uploads a favourite comic clip provides
something that is partly original; it is his or her favourite part of a film perhaps.
However, this clip can be seen and revisited repeatedly by others, yet at the same
time, it will remain devoid of its original context.
Just as the general public can now make and post its own materials aimed at
entertaining others online, they have also become protagonists on TV. Towards
the end of the 20th century, television shows began, on an increasingly large scale,
to spotlight not only well-known personalities, but also members of the public.
While mainstream game shows, talent shows and cookery programmes have been
a traditional part of TV schedules, contemporary versions of these shows now
embrace a much wider variety of genres and sub-genres. So-called lifestyle TV
now includes, for example, programmes based on self and home improvement as
well as dozens of contest shows. These programmes show ordinary people and/
or well-known personalities who may be involved in hunting for property, choos-
ing a partner, planning a wedding, or undertaking a “reality” challenge such as
trying to survive on a desert island. A prominent feature of these programmes
is that their participants convey the impression of naturalness, spontaneity and,
of course, “being real”. While the primary focus of these shows ranges from the
quest for the right wedding dress, or looking ten years younger to baking the per-
fect sponge cake, a typical episode is sure to contain a fair amount of light-hearted
banter as well as instances of diverse types of verbally expressed humour. The
humour may manifest itself in the programme presenter’s wordplay directed at
the home audience; it might take the form of joking, teasing or sarcastic remarks
made by a participant aimed at other participants in the programme. This humour
often serves as a way of involving audiences emotionally with the contestants
and creating a sense of familiarity with them. Whatever the humorous remark
and whoever it is aimed at, it is likely that viewers tune into these shows to watch
participants’ performance (humorous or otherwise), as much, if not more than
because of their interest in their subject matter of the programme itself.
However, a fact often overlooked by English speakers who have the privilege
of watching programmes produced in English with English-speaking audiences in
mind, is that speakers of other languages around the world are likely to consume
many of the same programmes, albeit through translation. In other words, in order
for these products to travel from culture to culture, first they have to undergo a
number of changes brought about through the necessary process of translation.
This shift from one language to another is likely to cause radical divergence from
the original discourse and particularly the humorous aspects of that discourse.
In fact, many more screen products are translated from English into other lan-
guages than vice versa simply because of the strength of the English language and
North American media systems that generate the bulk of audiovisual productions.
For example, while TV programmes like Britain’s Got Talent, MasterChef and
The language of jokes goes global 37
Location, Location, Location are broadcast in Italy either in their dubbed ver-
sions or accompanied by subtitles, their reciprocal Italian equivalents, Italia’s Got
Talent, MasterChef Italia and Cambio Casa Finalmente! – literally, “I’m finally
changing house!” – are not broadcast in the UK or in the USA. The same is true
of programmes in other languages too. Broadly speaking, with the exception of
Scandinavian noir detective series that are regularly translated and subtitled for
UK audiences, as far as TV is concerned English language speaking products
have the lion’s share.1
Over and above lifestyle/reality TV, the power of English-speaking and espe-
cially North American based media is such that English language movies and
sitcoms are internationally well-known, as are English-speaking comics, such as
Amy Schumer, the Wayans brothers and John Oliver. However, while their inter-
national fame can also be explained by the fact that their recorded performances
undergo the process of translation, the same cannot be said for comic products
and comedians from non-English-speaking countries. Popular comedians such as
Italian Maurizio Crozza, Spanish Dani Rovira, French Raymond Devos, Russian
Еvghenij Petrosian and German anchorman Harald Schmidt are unlikely to be
known outside their countries of origin. A custard pie may well be a custard pie,
but there is a huge imbalance in the availability of geographical and lingua-cultural
sources of screen products. Discussing the homogenization of young people’s
tastes and what they consume in a globalized world, Dutch sociologist Marieke de
Mooij (1998) argues that despite the fact that youngsters around the world dress
in a similar way (e.g. in terms of brands of jeans, trainers, etc.) and enjoy the same
kind of junk foods, their tastes in music differ significantly. Indeed, alongside
international pop mega-stars, each country has its own musical celebrities that are
rarely, if ever, successful elsewhere. The same is true for the personalities in other
media, and screen comedy is no exception. Thus, as with pop music, the globali-
zation of audiovisual comedy is largely one-directional, emanating from the USA
and to a lesser extent, the UK.
Humour in unscripted TV entertainment
“Scripted” comedy refers to a comedic script that has been written with perfor-
mance in mind. Such comedy contains lines that the actors have studied, learnt,
rehearsed and finally performed. Sitcoms are scripted and the scripts are performed
by actors. On the other hand, “unscripted” programmes, such as those in the various
lifestyle formats, including talent shows, contests and so on, are considered to dis-
play spontaneity and improvisation, especially because of the presence of members
of the public. Yet this is unlikely: for people appearing completely unprompted on
TV, ignorance of content and lack of structure in their performances might prove
risky. So, before filming, at the very least, talk show guests will have an idea of
the questions the host is going to ask them and contestants in cookery competitions
are likely to know beforehand what they are going to bake. Thus, the difference
between scripted and non-scripted TV is not especially clear-cut.
38 The language of jokes goes global
As illustrations of such blurring, there is a spread of possibilities. First, the
presenters of “unscripted” programmes, who are usually TV personalities in their
own right, are likely to make use of humour. However, the type of jocularity that
presenters adopt will, of course, vary not only from person to person but also
according to the recipients of the discourse. For instance, a TV chef alone on a set
explaining a recipe to a remote audience may have a different comic style from a
trio of chefs judging a cookery contest, bantering both amongst themselves and
with competitors. Even so, it is unlikely that so-called spontaneous discourse is
off-the-cuff; a certain amount of scripting is bound to be involved. Although there
is nothing to stop competitors themselves making witty remarks or jokes, the
extent to which these remarks are spontaneous and unscripted remains a mystery.
Second, participants in many “unscripted” formats may be the butt of humour and
laughed at because of their shortcomings. It may be the case that this last use of
humour is unprompted; however, it may indeed be possible that initiators of such
jocularity are prepared to make remarks to exploit the shortcomings of partici-
pants to humorous ends.
The role that humour plays can be identified in an overview of different types
of non-serious discourse adopted by players within some randomly chosen popu-
lar cookery, talent and lifestyle formats.
Presenting with humour
While audiences may expect humour to be part of the discourse of the host of a
variety show or a chat show, they can now expect it to be part of the talk of pre-
senters in more disparate programmes too. In fact, many presenters of lifestyle,
talent and reality shows make use of humour. For example, cookery programmes
of the 21st century are not restricted to recipes but also provide comic relief.
Rossato (2009) provides an extensive account of the history of televised cook-
ery programmes in the UK since the 1940s, arguing that a significant change
in these shows over time lies in the way that their content has shifted from the
merely instructional towards a more entertaining stance. If from the seventies to
the nineties TV chefs such as Delia Smith and Madhur Jaffrey appeared before
an audience to explain how to create a dish, which is exactly what they did and
nothing more, today’s TV chefs seem also to be there to entertain and to amuse.
Successful celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson try to create an
intimate relationship with their audiences and frequently stray from the task of
simply illustrating the dynamics of a recipe. And as they stray, they use humour.
The importance of hosts to a TV programme is due both to their skills in the
subject at hand (e.g. cookery, dancing, singing, etc.) and to what Langer (1981)
has defined as television’s “personality system” which “works directly to con-
struct and foreground intimacy and immediacy”. While the movie star system of
the more distant past placed personalities beyond the reach of the public, both
in terms of their physical distance on the big screen and in real life, television
constructs an aura of familiarity by bringing personalities into people’s homes on
The language of jokes goes global 39
a regular daily or weekly basis. TV personalities typically enter domestic envi-
ronments and act within a similar environment recreated on screen, such as the
living room with sofas and chairs typical of the chat show or a kitchen especially
created on the set. Nowadays, however, cookery programmes are often recorded
in authentic locales and part of the attraction of many of these shows are the chefs
themselves. For example, Nigella Lawson has recorded programmes from what
appears to be her London home and many of super-chef Jamie Oliver’s shows
are recorded in either his home or those of his friends. Thus, personalities enter
viewers’ households in replicated (and envy inducing) home environments while
also (seemingly) allowing viewers to share in their private lives. Audiences see
personalities in close-up shots so that they are able to witness their reactions
and emotions as the presenters apparently engage with them informally. Langer
highlights how the barriers that exist between the personality and the public
seemingly break down. Jamie and Nigella have both developed distinctive TV
behaviours. Jamie’s casual ordinariness and Nigella’s sensuality exemplify what
Langer described as “playing” oneself (1981: 335), a factor that renders them
familiar to audiences.
Both Nigella and Jamie create a bond with viewers through their warm and
friendly chitchat that includes a fair amount of humorous discourse (Chiaro 2013).
In fact, while explaining how to prepare their dishes, the two chefs will typically
pepper their instructions (pun intended) with witty banter. Much of Nigella’s
humour consists of gentle unassuming mockery. Nigella has a curvaceous figure
and highlights her love of food with declarations like, “I might give myself a mod-
est portion” [of a freshly prepared kedgeree]; the “modest portion” turns out to
be quite generous. She also plays on her carefully contrived sexual allure. As she
adds hot chilli pepper to a dish, she tells viewers that: “I always like to go just a
little too far I suppose”. Moreover, she sometimes attempts an even more allusive
style of humour – while she is preparing a spatchcock she declares, “I like a bit of
dismemberment in the evening”.2 The credits at the end of each episode of Nigella
Bites feature Nigella dressed in her nightwear raiding her fridge during the night
and sensuously eating a snack. While playing on her sensuality and abundant
curves, Nigella does not take herself seriously and the late night invasions of her
refrigerator are very much tongue-in-cheek and self-mocking, contributing to the
warm, not too serious TV persona she has created.
Jamie Oliver, on the other hand, is stylistically less subtle than Nigella. For
example, when peeling onions makes him cry, he complains of “Me old sinuses!”
and he exploits traditional Cockney expressions like “the old caramello is bub-
bling away like the clappers”,3 creating a relaxed and humorous atmosphere.
Nigella and Jamie, as many other celebrity chefs, are funny and charming; and it
could well be that audiences watch them as much, if not more, for entertainment
purposes as for their recipes.
Comedy duo Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, the presenters of The Great
British Bake Off, a contest to find Britain’s best baker, have also created their own
TV personalities, playing themselves by making ample use of humour.4 In each
40 The language of jokes goes global
episode, amateur bakers compete against each other in a set of baking challenges
judged by cookery writer Mary Berry and celebrity chef Paul Hollywood while
the duo provide comic relief, interacting not only with the audience but also with
each other, the judges and the contestants. Mel and Sue are especially dedicated
to creating rudimentary puns pertaining to cakes and baking. For example, typi-
cal Bake Off puns include, “How do you make a Swiss roll? Push Roger Federer
down a hill” (Series 5, Episode 1) and greeting contestants who are about to bake
a Madeira cake with “Right m’dearas” (Series 6, Episode 1). In the same vein, in
an episode in which competitors were asked to make puddings, they were told to
expect their “just desserts” (Season 5, Episode 4). Again, in a 2015 spin-off in
which comedians competed against one another to raise money for charity, Mel
opens the programme with a pun about the contestants making an “effort to make
some dough”.5 The couple’s punning repartee has become such an important part
of the show, that at the start of an episode in which the contestants are about to
make bread, the duo are seen (pretending to be) thinking up gags. Mel visibly acts
out her thinking and says, “Bohemian Bap-sidy?” with which Sue pretends to
judge the pun approvingly, “That’s good”.
However, not all the duo’s puns are perceived to be innocent causing several
viewers to complain to the BBC about their “smutty jokes” in which they refer to
[cakes’] “soggy bottoms” and “cracks”, to “hot buns” and to a cake tin looking like
a “piles cushion”. In an episode in which contestants were baking tarts (Series 5,
Episode 5) Sue asks one of the participants “What’s your version of a tart?” then
turns to the camera and quizzically raises her eyebrows. Later in the episode, Mel
asks a female participant whether she is a pie or a tart. The contestant answers that
she is a tart to which Mel answers, “So am I” and they both break into giggles. Are
these puns innocent or deliberately saucy?
Winner of the third series John Whaite (2014) defends the duo’s banter claim-
ing that punning is part of British comic tradition, arguing that when Judge Mary
Berry complimented him on his “lovely sausage” he “almost fell off [his] my
stool” but she was merely commenting on his bake. Although Whaite’s exact
response was: “Steady on Mary”, the rejoinder did not make the cut. As Mary’s
remark was not endorsed with a rebuttal, it remains ambiguous and not necessar-
ily lewd. To quote political cartoonist Martin Rowson (2014):
But there lies the true beauty of cheap sexual innuendo: it’s both subver-
sive and deniable: the double meaning, the code cementing the conspiracy of
laughter between jester and jestee, means any filth detected by anyone choos-
ing not to get the joke exists solely in the filthy minds of the complainant.
Therefore, when Sue tells contestants attempting to bake Berry’s cherry cake
that they “have got two hours to pop Mary’s cherry [pause] in the oven”,
the interpretation of the remark remains entirely in the mind of the viewer.
Certainly, this kind of innuendo is within the British comic tradition from
The language of jokes goes global 41
cheeky seaside postcards (see Chapter 1) to the Carry On tradition and, as
Rowson points out, it is not altogether divorced from the kind of innuendo
adopted by Lawrence Sterne in Tristram Shandy, a book that is well part of
Britain’s literary heritage.
Andrew Zimmern, the presenter of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern,6
exemplifies a very different way of using humour when presenting. Zimmern
allows himself to be laughed at, albeit benevolently, by audiences as he travels
the world and presents cuisines that are perceived as being disgusting accord-
ing to the common imaginary. Zimmern will typically present a local dish that
might consist of some kind of insect or the unlikely body part of an animal. After
showing audiences how the dish is sourced and prepared, he will then proceed to
eat it. So, while for many viewers the very contents of the dish itself may raise a
horrified smile, as Zimmern slowly chews, savours and swallows beetles, white
worms from the larvae of crickets or bull’s testicles, his facial expressions are
likely to provoke laughter and amusement – especially when the food is not to
his taste. However, the incongruity of Zimmern’s expressions of ecstasy as he
tastes a foodstuff that is unlikely to be found on a regular diet, are sufficient to
create humour.
How Clean is Your House is another of many UK TV lifestyle makeover pro-
grammes that includes humorous discourse.7 Each episode presents experienced
cleaners Kim Woodburn and Aggie MacKenzie who visit an exceptionally
filthy and unkempt home. After inspecting the premises for dirt and grime,
Woodburn and MacKenzie reprimand the owners for their slovenly habits, offer
practical advice on how to carry out household tasks, and with the help of a
team of professional cleaners, proceed to clean the premises to utmost perfec-
tion. However, if on one level, this “before and after” format is instructive,
especially in terms of tips regarding how to set about a variety of household
tasks, on another level the programme is also funny. Apart from the shock/
amusement factor arising from viewing the extreme living conditions of the
occupants of the households, each episode is also a sort of humorous cautionary
tale in which the participants and television audiences are engaged by and in
laughter (Chiaro 2016a).
Actor Paul Copley provides whimsical, often alliterative voiceover narration
for each episode. Typically, the show begins with an overview of someone’s filthy
household with the camera focusing on piles of rubbish and debris, accompanied
by music from a horror movie. Kim and Aggie first quickly inspect the household
and then change into their cleaning uniforms while yellow and black barricade
tape reading “Grime investigation” is placed around the offending property
together with a “Caution – Cleaning in progress” placard. Copley continues the
tongue-in-cheek mode with witty comments (see Chiaro 2016a). In the episode
concerning the “Crossword Lady”, a well-spoken woman whose central London
flat is in a total mess because she prefers doing crosswords to cleaning, Copley’s
voiceover says:
42 The language of jokes goes global
Rosie Loveland is a crossword fanatic but when it comes to cleaning, she
hasn’t got a clue. With over 3,000 books, she spends all her time ponder-
ing over puzzles rather than solving her hygiene problems . . . Rosie is
obsessed with words but cleaning is clearly not in her vocabulary.
Like Mel and Sue of the Bake Off, Copley takes words and expressions from the
semantic field related to the specificity of each episode and spins out as many con-
nected puns as possible. For example, in the “crossword lady” episode, when Kim
arrives in a black cab, Copley asserts that, “Kim’s got the knowledge” playing
on the name of the rigorous training that London taxi drivers go through in order
to get their badge known as “The Knowledge”. The wordplay continues with
remarks noting how Kim and Aggie are “puzzled by the boudoir of books”, are
about to face a “cleaning conundrum” as they stop Rosie reading “dirty books”. In
addition, Rosie, who was “clueless” about cleaning, finds a “solution to 24 years’
muck” when Kim and Aggie make a “clean sweep”. Unlike Mel and Sue’s risqué
remarks, the closest to innuendo in the episode are Copley’s references to “dirty
books”. It seems unlikely that Copley’s voiceover has not been carefully thought
out, written down and rehearsed at length in order to get the essential timing
right. The same must also be true of Mel and Sue who are able to come up with
numerous cheeky and fitting puns in each episode of the Bake Off. The concept of
“unscriptedness” definitely needs to be stretched somewhat when applied to these
sorts of shows.
Another type of humour in How Clean is Your House involves the use of for-
eign words and accents for comic effect. An episode involving the untidy house of
Frenchwoman Veronique allows Copley to indulge in some cross-language word-
play. In a camp voice, Copley declares, “When it comes to hunting out the dirt,
Kim and Aggie are a tour de force”, as they get the “enfant terrible” to say “au
revoir” to clutter. The joking continues as the “crème de la crème of cleaning” are
in an apartment that has lost its “panache”, which by the end of the episode is pro-
nounced “c’est magnifique” while the “slovenly kitchen that used to be a terrible
sight to behold, is now a place for one of Veronique’s soirées. Vive la difference”.
The Bake Off presenters Sue and Mel also adopt foreignness for comic purposes
as in the episode on European cakes (Season 5, Episode 5). Sue parodies a Dutch
accent, a Lithuanian accent (pre-empted by “I apologize to all Lithuanians”) as
well as a Swedish accent when the contestants bake a Swedish Princess Layer
cake known as a Prinsesstårta.
Ant and Dec (Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly) the two Geordie
presenters of the talent contest Britain’s Got Talent,8 also “play themselves”
while mainly remaining backstage watching contestants – who hope to win
a place to perform before the Royal Family – sing or dance before a panel
of judges. Above all, the duo encourages performers before they go on stage
and then, after their performance, either congratulates or commiserates with
them. The cameras focus on the duo as they provide comic relief to audiences
The language of jokes goes global 43
through their reactions to each competitor’s performance. Ant and Dec, behind
the scenes, look into the camera, i.e. at the remote audience at home, and supply
a wide range of reactions to each act. They may give a thumbs up, exaggerat-
edly nod their heads in approval, or in some other way display their enjoyment
of the act on stage. They may, however, mimic a weak act too. In fact, much of
the time the duo actually mocks the performers’ shortcomings, albeit not in
an unkind manner. Since they are so popular, we may conclude that audiences
enjoy watching them manifestly expressing a taboo, i.e. ragging participants for
their deficiencies that they will nonetheless presumably take in good humour.
Part of the entertainment value of these talent shows may indeed lie in watching
untalented people make fools of themselves. Audiences may well derive enjoy-
ment from the way the duo highlight performers’ lack of talent so that the result
is a combination of laughing “at” the player and “with” the duo.
The teasing scold
Many lifestyle and reality formats involve a certain amount of (friendly?) scold-
ing. From the cake that has not risen to the tone-deaf singer, judges and presenters
make use of irony to tease the unfortunate object of adversity.
Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood adopts a fine line between irony and sarcasm
when competitors’ bakes are not quite up to scratch. In the 2015 Comic Relief
spin-off of the show, he tells comedian Jo Brand that he “love[s] the taste of the
biscuits”, pauses, and then adds “the ones that aren’t burnt”. Again, after tasting
some custard slices he says, “I think that’s quite something”, leading the contest-
ant to think that he was happy with the result, but then repeats the phrase with
different intonation so that, “yes it’s quite something” becomes ironic.
In How Clean is Your House, Kim and Aggie use humour to comment on
disgustingly dirty houses. In the first frames of each episode when they enter
each new messy living space, they squeal and shriek in mock horror at the sight
of insects, larvae and general filth. Then, when they meet the residents of the
households, those who are responsible for the mess, Kim will typically reprimand
them with expressions like “You dirty beggar”, and “[the house is] . . . a diaboli-
cal disgrace”, or “Two words come out of my mouth. ‘Bone idle’”. The audience
knows that Kim is being serious but at the same time her chastising is all part of
the pretence of the show so that the overall effect is humorous. Once the culprits
get cleaning, any complaints about working, such as a woman who complained of
a back problem (Series 5, Episode 1), are met with comments like “Don’t start that
rubbish, you’ve not bent that back in years”. Kim’s dry humour does not stop at
faults in cleaning. When asked how long ago she had last washed the kitchen sink,
a student answered, “I done it two months ago” to which Kim retorts, “You’re not
reading English are you?” On another occasion, in a shopping centre where Kim
and Aggie are asking people how often they vacuum the carpet (Series 7, Episode
6), a man answers that he hoovers once a fortnight. “You live on your own, my
44 The language of jokes goes global
dear?” asks Kim and when the man says that he does, she retorts, “I’m not sur-
prised, you dirty thing”. Hearing Kim’s overt rudeness to the grime offenders
makes good entertainment – audiences laugh at her outright as she calls the “dirt
offender” a “daft apeth”, “lazy beggar” and other daring epithets. These insults
are taken as funny because people generally do not tell it like it is, especially in
contexts where the normal rules of politeness amongst acquaintances are in play,
preferring to soften their opinions of others’ shortcomings. And, all other things
being equal, we certainly tend to avoid being discourteous to others. In other
words, the incongruity that leads to humour lies in the breaking of the rules of
conventional conversational behaviour and politeness rather than in the content of
what is said, which is, after all, not funny per se. Social norms are thwarted. The
programme is therefore as entertaining for the audiences for the banter as it is for
the makeovers themselves.
The kind of scolding exemplified in the talk of Britain’s Got Talent judge,
Simon Cowell, is also sharp but closer to sarcasm than Kim’s acerbic comments.
Like Kim, Simon entertains the public because he dares to be rude in situations
in which conversational rules (and social norms) demand moderation. He tells
a contestant who claims that her voice is similar to that of Whitney Houston’s
that “It wasn’t remotely like Whitney Houston”. The comment is neither ironic
nor inherently humorous; the comic factor lies in its inappropriateness under the
circumstances, a talent show. Audiences expect judges to be kind to weak contest-
ants; Simon’s remarks have a shock value that appears to attract viewers. He tells
a tone-deaf contestant from Lithuania, “I don’t know what a cat being squashed
sounds like in Lithuania but I now have a pretty good idea”, and a trio of singers
“You sounded like three cats being dragged up the motorway”. This provides
amusement, further highlighted when the contestants dare to answer back. The
Singing Souls, a trio of young girls who receive boos from the studio audience
and who Simon asserts to be “one of the worst groups I’ve ever heard in my life”,
challenge him with “You wanna come up here and sing, Simon?” When he tells
them “Here’s the deal, you sing, we judge”, they answer back rudely and begin to
argue with the judges. Meanwhile, Ant and Dec, from behind the scenes, display
their own reactions for the consumption of the remote audience, laughing and say-
ing, amongst other things, “Now, that’s attitude”.9
The question is how far this use of humour can be considered as “only” joking?
When does teasing become mockery and ridicule? If Kim and Aggie scold people
responsible for poor housekeeping, while smiling as they scold them, they deride
their interlocutors’ shortcomings no matter how gentle they are with them. As
for Britain’s Got Talent, the show is on occasion reminiscent of a circus or an
arena in which the audiences take pleasure in others’ faults and delight in the
grotesque. Audiences watch from afar and enjoy Cowell’s humorous, rude com-
ments that pivot on the inadequacy and inabilities of performers. In a politically
correct world, it is quite paradoxical that this type of behaviour passes without
righteous comment while a double entendre regarding a bun or a bottom can cause
The language of jokes goes global 45
quite a stir – pun intended once more. It is tempting to agree with Billig’s notion
that ridicule can be seen as a tool to maintain socio-normative order. It is possible
that audiences are thinking that someone who is tone deaf but wants to become a
famous singer should choose a more realistic dream and that someone who lives
in a filthy home should clean it up. The use of humour as a reprimand may soften
the impact of impoliteness or rudeness; on the other hand, it may well reflect what
audiences believe needs to be said.
Behaving badly for a laugh
The Comic Relief spin-offs of the Bake Off in which contestants are professional
comedians provide extra humour. Comedian Jo Brand “misbehaves” throughout
her appearance. As soon as the competition begins with something difficult for
the contestants to bake, she dejectedly asks, “Anyone fancy a coffee?” Then, she
accidentally misses out ingredients, forgets to flour a board and asks the audience
“Have I got butter on my bum?” as she displays her derrière to the camera for a
close up. In another spin-off of the series, An Extra Slice,10 presented by Brand
herself, she asks the studio audience, “Shall I tell you what my favourite biscuit
is?” Pantomime-style the audience loudly answers “Yes!” and she replies, “The
next one!” In yet another Comic Relief, comedian Jonathan Ross attempts to bake
a cake in the shape of the Royal Albert Hall. Naturally, his cake does not resemble
the famous building in the least, which is funny in itself, but the comedian does
provide an ironic rebuttal to his coming last in the competition: “When people
saw the first Picasso they were confused. They didn’t understand Cubism. Well,
that’s what we’re seeing right now. The shock of the new, they’re encounter-
ing avant-garde baking”. These examples reinforce the claim that such television
programmes are more about their participants than cooking or music or home
improvement.
Another personality famous for his “bad” behaviour on set is comedian and
Britain’s Got Talent judge, David Walliams. Walliams is especially funny when
he openly challenges fellow judge Simon Cowell. Music and television producer
Cowell plays the part of the very serious, strict judge whereas Walliams promotes
unlikely performers that are, however, appreciated by the audience in the theatre.
Walliams’ behaviour creates the impression of a clash between the judges, facili-
tating tit-for-tat style banter and constant teasing between the two of them. Much
to the delight of the audience, Cowell typically openly disapproves of Walliams’
choices, opening the way for witty repartee. The result is undoubtedly funny irre-
spective of how scripted or unscripted these interactions actually are.
A lot of Walliams’ comedy is based on gender-bending (see Chapter 3). He
can act very camp and openly flirts with attractive male competitors, but above
all Walliams gives us some credence to unscriptedness as a lot of his gags seem
to be truly ad lib. When a member of a boy band blows a kiss at a female judge,
Walliams demands in a camp tone, “Won’t anybody blow a kiss at me?” (Season 9,
46 The language of jokes goes global
Episode 6) thus playing on the ambiguity of his sexuality. He also dabbles in
innuendo, such as when he asks a male dancer “When you do the splits did you
hurt yourself as you went down with quite a crack?”
Above all, Walliams is simply adroit. Following the performance of a twelve-
person boy band, judge Amanda Holden asks Walliams what he is thinking, to
which he replies:
I was thinking there’s something for everyone in this room isn’t there?
They’ve got the cute young one with the floppy hair, they’ve got the big
butch one who’s a car mechanic and they’ve got the one with glasses for the
more intellectual Guardian reading ladies.
Walliams makes light of his (presumed) bisexuality, his facial expressions clearly
display sexual interest in the members of the band and his “something for eve-
ryone” refers above all to himself. He then uses irony to stereotypically describe
three of the performers as the kind of “ladies” to whom they would each appeal.
Walliams’ comedic style touches upon taboo because he is a male who flirts
openly with other men but in a joking/not-joking way. We are not 100 per cent
sure that the band appeals to “ladies” in general more than it does to Walliams
himself – not to mention the fact that Walliams played a cross-dressed “lady” in
an on-going sketch in the comedy series Little Britain.11 His style is also reminis-
cent of actor Kenneth Williams who adopted a similar camp-comedic style.
Translating humour for the movies and television
In present day internationalized and transnational culture, the “traditional”
screens of cinema and television broadcast swathes of humorous discourse
worldwide. A glance at box office figures across Europe reveals that movies pro-
duced in the USA and distributed by the so-called “majors” far outnumber films
produced in and distributed by other countries. It therefore stands to reason that
audiences the world over are more likely to be familiar with North American
films and actors than those of other countries. According to McCrum et al. (2002),
at the beginning of the 20th century, the force of the US movie industry was such
as to make Hollywood a significant catalyst in the growth of English as the first
truly global language. In fact, Hollywood contributed to the spread of English
as an early precursor to the way rock music and the internet were to do in the
later part of the century. However, apart from the UK and other English-speaking
countries, elsewhere in the world, these films required translation. Ironically, by
the late 1920s, it was two comic actors, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, who were
to play a central role in kick-starting the screen translational modality of dubbing.
While the film industry was also developing in its own right in Europe, lan-
guage created a seemingly insurmountable obstacle for US directors wanting
to expand their market. In fact, to overcome the language barriers they saw in
The language of jokes goes global 47
Europe, producers inserted short dialogues in the relevant target languages within
the English dialogues, but this soon proved to be unsatisfactory with audiences.
Consequently, Paramount Pictures set up a large studio in Joinville, France, ded-
icated to the production of multiple-language versions of the same film. This,
however, turned out to be economically unfeasible and the quality of the results
was generally inferior compared to the original films.
Meanwhile, in the USA, Laurel and Hardy were already popular artists when
movies that had to that point been silent switched to becoming talkies. The duo’s
director, Hal Roach, immediately saw opportunities in the European market but
also understood the problem of language barriers. Roach decided to adopt the
European technique of producing the same film in different languages with the
difference that he would use the comic duo to act in the various European lan-
guages. He, too, would shoot French, Italian, Spanish and German versions of
each film casting native speakers in all the secondary roles, but with the differ-
ence that the two actors would read their lines from a prompt in the different
languages. The result was that Laurel and Hardy’s bizarre pronunciation of the
four major European languages (French, German, Italian and Spanish) added to
the comic effect of their films and to their great success in the Old Continent.
From this moment onwards, only a small step was required to create the practice
of dubbing, as we know it today. In fact, the idea of substituting the original voice
track with one in another language is generally attributed to the Austrian film
producer Jakob Karol, who in 1930 realized that the technology to do this was
already available (Paolinelli and Di Fortunato 2005: 45–6). At first, dubbing into
European languages was carried out in the USA, but by the early thirties, each
European country had begun to set up its own dubbing industry.
Traditionally, Europe was divided into two major screen translation blocks, con-
sisting of the UK, the Benelux and Scandinavian countries, principally subtitling
nations, and central and southern European countries stretching from Germany,
across France and down to Spain, that were mostly dubbing nations, with Greece
and Portugal opting for subtitles. Both dubbing and subtitling present advantages
and disadvantages of a practical nature and of a sociolinguistic and political kind.
Countries that originally favoured dubbing tended to do so for protectionist rea-
sons seeing the establishment of dubbing in Italy and Germany as a means to
inhibit English, but above all, to promote national languages (Bollettieri Bosinelli
1994). Conversely, a preference towards subtitling in Scandinavia reveals more
than just an open attitude towards other languages (especially English), but a rela-
tively inexpensive way to develop screen translation for small populations (Chiaro
2009a, 2009b). Nevertheless, the previously conventional division has dissolved
with the circulation of technologies such as DVD and DVX that usually contain
subtitles even in the presence of a dubbed version. Moreover, a preference for
subtitling is quickly gaining ground across Europe, especially amongst younger
generations of viewers, in countries traditionally seen as dubbing strongholds.
Furthermore, cable and satellite TV packages such as Sky and on-demand internet
48 The language of jokes goes global
streaming media such as Netflix also provide viewers with a choice of both trans-
lational modalities, while cinemas in traditional dubbing countries also offer
screenings with subtitles. In addition to all this, with the spread of English and
with increasing numbers of people wanting to see films and TV series as soon as
they are released, there is a tendency for consumers to download products straight
from the web. As more and more people access (mainly English language, but
not only) audiovisual products via tablets and smartphones in real time, subtitles
for downloads and streaming are often provided by fansubbers, armies of young
unprofessional translators whose mission is to translate new products as soon as
possible into as many languages as possible for fans around the world. Thus, fast
and cost-effective subtitling has rapidly become the most common form of screen
translation especially amongst young (mostly highly) educated people who have
proficient English language skills.
With regard to scripted screen comedy, translation has an impact not only on
the way the original source humour is conveyed, but also on how it is perceived
in different parts of the world. Notoriously, translating humour is not an easy
task; in fact, humour is generally considered untranslatable. Nevertheless, what
we mean by the term “untranslatable” is not the translator’s inability or the impos-
sibility of translating it but rather the equivalence of the translated humour to the
source text (Chiaro 2008, 2010a). Yet we only have to think of the great works
of literature to see that verbally expressed humour has been translated countless
times in and out of scores of languages. Obviously, these translations are not
identical copies of the originals; after all, if such precise imaging were possible
there would be no need for translation in the first place. Conversely, with the term
“untranslatable” we refer to the extreme difficulty involved in the task coupled
with the knowledge that the text may lose some of the desired effect in transla-
tion. In other words, because verbally expressed humour tends to pivot upon its
source language together with highly specific cultural elements pertaining to the
source culture, the lack of equivalence between the two versions is likely to be
more evident than in non-humorous discourse. Furthermore, if translating humor-
ous discourse in written form is no easy task, translating it for the screen is even
more difficult owing to the fact the words uttered by actors on screen are linked
to a series of images and sounds that need to be taken into account. A humorous
remark in a film or a sitcom may well be bound to a visual or auditory element on
which it will depend for humorous impact. Translating humour on screen is rather
like translating Lewis Carroll’s concrete poem, “The Mouse’s Tail” in which the
translator needs to deal not only with the verbal pun “tail/tale” but also with the
visual pun of the words arranged in a way as to form the shape of a mouse’s tail.12
Likewise the screen translator has to juggle with different combinations of verbal,
visual and acoustic features all of which are superimposed on one another to cre-
ate an amusing whole (Chiaro 2009a: 143, 2010b).
Nonetheless, whether we are considering instances of humour in big
screen movies or for TV sitcoms, the challenges translators face are identical.
The language of jokes goes global 49
For example, how do you translate humour based on a highly specific cultural
reference? David Katan’s concept of “chunking” (1999) is useful to describe
typical ways in which translators deal with cultural references in general. By
chunking “upwards”, for example, a translator working towards Portuguese
could substitute the term for a British custard tart with the word “bol”, the
generic term for “cake” or else, by chunking “downwards”, she could translate
it with “pastel de nata”, the term for a typical local pastry. This is all well and
good, as long as viewers cannot actually see the object on screen which, indeed,
they could in a comic scene from the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding.13 Upon
receiving a bundt cake from her future son-in-law’s American mother, Maria,
who had never seen such a cake before, is confused and in an attempt to repeat
the term “Bundt” she loudly utters “A bunt? A boont? A bonk?” The Italian
translators chunked downwards and chose to translate “Bundt” with the term
for an Italian speciality “cassata”. Maria thus utters “Una cassata? Una caz-
zata?” The translational choice is a good one because “cazzata” is, like “bonk”,
slightly taboo and therefore likely to get a laugh.14 However, Italian viewers
can actually see the tall, highly risen Bundt cake and, as a cassata is a round,
white, flat cake decorated with brightly coloured glacé fruits, there is a striking
mismatch between visual and verbal codes.
Over and above issues regarding culture specificity, humour anchored to a
visual element on screen is likely to be one of the trickiest translational obstacles,
although it is by no means the only one. How do translators deal with language
variation? Accent in particular is a frequently used comic device on screen. What
should translators do? Is substitution with a local variety a feasible solution? This
is only one of the many complex choices facing translators of screen humour.
Then there is the issue of censorship. For example, swear words are often used
for comic purposes thus putting the translator in a dilemma, as what may be
acceptable in the source culture may not be equally acceptable elsewhere. Last,
but certainly not least, how does a translator handle visual humour that does not
involve the use of verbal language? As it does not require verbal translation, could
purely visual humour be considered universally amusing?
The opening scene of the classic comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World15
features “Smiler” Grogan (played by Jimmy Durante), an ex-convict on the run,
whose car crashes in a mountainous area of California. A group of men take the
seriously injured Grogan out of his car and lay him on the ground. As Grogan
struggles to stay alive, very ostentatiously, he kicks a bucket. The camera zooms
into the bucket, follows it as it slowly and noisily rolls down the mountainside,
until it comes to a stop. At this point, Grogan flamboyantly breathes his last breath
and dies. While not exactly a visual pun, this is a visual gag depending on words
that remain unsaid. Even though the “bucket scene” is silent, the “joke” is obvi-
ous but only to those familiar with the English euphemism for death, i.e. “to kick
the bucket” and therefore lost in translation despite the fact that no translation is
required owing to the absence of dialogue.
50 The language of jokes goes global
Non-verbal humour
Visual humour
So, could it really be that words are the only obstacle to the universality of humour?
Certainly, Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks needs no explanation and nei-
ther does Groucho Marx’s chicken walk and his ever-present large cigar. Pre-code
comedy on screen, i.e. before sound allowed actors to use their voices, certainly
travelled the world, with comedians such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton
quickly reaching international fame through purely visual comic capers that cen-
tred on how their bodies interacted with their surroundings. The body movements
and facial expressions of these comics seemed to communicate more than words
could ever do. However, much as their brilliant comedic skills deserved recogni-
tion, their worldwide success also says much about US control of the film industry.
It should be noted that of course there were plenty of silent comedians elsewhere
such as Britain’s Max Wall and Richard Hearne (aka Mr Pastry) and Italy’s Totò
whose style of comedy was quite similar to that of their more famous counterparts
yet remained confined to national borders. More recently, the silent comedy of
Rowan Atkinson in the persona of Mr Bean has gained success worldwide at least
partly due to the absence of words and thus the non-requirement of translation.
Undoubtedly, the quasi-slapstick nature of Mr Bean’s comedic style plays a big
part in his success as he embodies both the underdog who typically gets into scrapes
and the canny shrewdness of one trying to turn a series of everyday situations to his
own advantage. Furthermore, Atkinson himself agrees that one of the reasons for
Bean’s success is that he is “a child in a grown man’s body” and wonders:
[w]hy the Japanese and the Chinese and people in the Mississippi Delta and
Italy and Scotland, why they all understand Mr Bean. It is not just because
he doesn’t speak although that helps. It is because he is a child, and that is
the level on which any culture can appreciate him.16
According to Sontag (2004), the comic involves not knowing, pretending not
to know, or partial knowing and refers to the innocence of stars like Charlie
Chaplin, whose helplessness and apparent “defect of understanding and child-
likeness” were at the core of their humorous capacity. It is thus hardly surprising
that Atkinson claims to be inspired by French comic Jacques Tati, who as actor
and director tended to both disregard dialogue and to adopt a childlike stance.
Furthermore, Tati, Stan Laurel, Chaplin and Bean, after getting into all sorts of
“messes” often shared the facial expression of a little boy lost who has just com-
mitted a naughty deed. One of Stan Laurel’s most famous photographs depicts
him scratching his head with a dumbfounded expression on his face – a look also
typical of comedian Michael Crawford’s “Oooh!” spoken while holding a finger
to his mouth after having created total havoc in most episodes of the BBC sitcom
Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em (1973–78).17
The language of jokes goes global 51
The third episode from the TV series Mr Bean entitled The Curse of Mr Bean
exemplifies several features of purely visual comedy.18 From the moment that Mr
Bean arrives at the public swimming pool the audience can see what he is think-
ing as he sets eyes on the kiddie slides and the super-high diving board. Bean
displays an excited demeanour as he clearly wants to have a go on two inappropri-
ate objects – a kiddie slide and a high diving board – and herein lies not only the
incongruity of the situation, but also the expectations on the part of the audience of
inescapable, hilarious disaster. Unable to play on the kiddie slides, he climbs up to
the highest diving board only to realize that he is too scared to jump. As he makes
a series of faint-hearted attempts to jump, he achieves a comic effect through his
facial expressions and clumsy posture. The camera juxtaposes close-ups of Bean’s
terrified face with aerial shots of him lying flat on his stomach on the diving board
with the pool below him as he slowly drags himself towards the edge of the board.
After much procrastination, Bean ends up dangling from the edge of the diving
board, legs akimbo and hanging onto the board with one hand. A young boy impa-
tient to dive into the pool finally stomps on Bean’s hand so that he falls into the
water. As though this was not enough, once in the water Bean somehow loses his
swimming trunks that are then retrieved by a little girl who takes them away with
her. Naked, Bean tries to get out of the pool and reach the changing rooms without
being noticed, only to be seen from behind by a group of female bathers – he turns
towards them and they scream at the sight of his naked body. The humour in the
entire sketch is achieved through a mixture of Bean’s physical reactions to his
various predicaments, but also his childlike responses to situations.
Acoustic humour
The persona of Mr Bean provides several examples of non-verbal acoustic humour
too. At the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, Bean “per-
forms” with the London Symphony Orchestra. Silent as always, Bean engages
in lots of visual gags all carried out with his signature deadpan expression. On
an acoustic level, throughout the orchestra’s rendition of Chariots of Fire, Bean
continually strikes the same single piano note with one finger.19
Bean provides another acoustic gag for 2015 Comic Relief in a sketch called
Funeral. During a funeral service, Bean blows his nose at length and very loudly.
When he notices that he is annoying the other mourners, Bean blows even harder
into his handkerchief and “plays” a tune with the snorting sounds he produces.20
Once more, Bean displays conduct comparable to that of a naughty, badly behaved
child using the ostentation of backstage behaviour, in Goffman’s (1981) terms, in
which he breaks social norms.
Verbal humour
To reiterate, verbal humour on screen faces much the same challenges in trans-
lation as it does when it occurs elsewhere such as in writing and in speech.
52 The language of jokes goes global
However, the translation of verbal humour on screen faces additional chal-
lenges, as the gag is likely to be linked to other signs on screen. Audiovisual
products are polysemiotic in nature; they are the result of the intersection of
different signs that make up a meaningful whole. In other words, auditory
verbal signs such as dialogue and song lyrics transect a series of visual ver-
bal signs like street signs, newspaper headlines, etc. In another dimension,
these diverse verbal signs will in turn intersect with a series of purely acoustic
features like music and background noises in general, as well as with a multi-
tude of purely visual features such as settings, actors’ facial expressions and
body movements, etc. (see Chiaro 2009a: 143). As in the example from My
Big Fat Greek Wedding, a verbal gag anchored to a visual element is going
to be especially problematic in translation when the element in question is
also culture-specific. On the other hand, even a straightforward gag that is not
anchored visually to any other element on screen is automatically rendered
more complex because it is performed, rather than occurring in print or an
everyday conversation.
Purely linguistic orally conveyed verbal humour
A conversation in the first episode of TV series Wayward Pines (Fox 2015)
contains a witty pun that is successfully translated for the Italian version.
“What is the only fish to work in a hospital? A sturgeon” – “Sai qual è l’unico
pesce al circo? Il pesce pagliaccio” – “Do you know the only fish in a circus?
Clownfish”. In the translation, a hospital is replaced by a circus to accommodate
a suitable answer and retain the pun that, although different from the source
pun, is still a pun.
However, wordplay translation can prove to be more arduous as in an episode
of Six Feet Under (HBO; 2001–05), containing two examples of purely language-
based wordplay. In order to translate “What do you call an Italian hooker? A
pastitute” the gag undergoes a huge transformation, as it becomes “Sai perchè
le italiane prendono la pillola?” – “Do you know why Italian women take the
pill?” – “Per sapere che giorno della settimana è” – “So they know what day of
the week it is”. Surprisingly, the joke is turned into a politically incorrect ethnic
underdog joke for an Italian audience. Why the translators opted for a stupidity
joke is hard to say, after all, the translation is for Italian audiences yet translators
opted to insult, albeit through a joke, their target audience by suggesting Italian
women are stupid. There is a huge difference between the wordplay created
through the “pasta”/ “prostitute” blend and carrying the concept of prostitution
over to dumbness in the translation.
In the same episode (Series 4, Episode 7) Keith falls for an old joke based on a
fake name when a colleague tricks him into reading the name “Heywood Jeblome”
aloud. The trick lies in the fact that the fictitious name “Heywood Jeblome” should
be pronounced “Hey, would you blow me?”
The language of jokes goes global 53
Keith: I don’t know this person!
Javier: Well say his name right, maybe you do!
Keith: Ok, Ok! Heywood Jeblome! Heywood Jeblome!
Javier: Hehehe
Keith: What’s so fucking funny?
Javier: Say it again
Keith: Heywood Jeblome!
Javier: Sure I’ll blow you, K.
In the Italian translation Keith is tricked into repeating a fake Russian sound-
ing name, Andrei Koimaski which phonologically deconstructs into “I’d go”
(“andrei”) “with men” (“coi maschi”). Noticeably, the Italian translation, albeit
effective, is much weaker than the English as it omits the reference to fellatio. We
cannot be sure whether the translators deliberately censored the gag or whether it
was the best translation possible. Nevertheless, the Italian tease remains success-
ful (for in depth discussions on translation and bowdlerization in audiovisuals, see
Bucaria 2009 and 2010).
Verbal humour is often based on the exploitation of accents; in fact, it is com-
mon for UK comedians to have pronounced regional pronunciations. Stand-up
comedians such as Scottish Billy Connolly and Frankie Boyle, Irish Dara O’Briain,
Liverpudlian John Bishop, Geordie Chris Ramsey and Cockney Mickey Flanagan
all exploit their regional identities through the way they speak. British comedy is
imbued with class and its protagonists reflect this through their use of language.
The Carry On movies (1958–78) provide examples of the entire gamut of English
accents, from Kenneth Williams’ and Leslie Phillip’s RP to Bernard Bresslaw’s
and Barbara Windsor’s Cockney; these films closely echoed Britain’s class sys-
tem. Elsewhere, many successful comedians also rely on regional variation for
their acts. In Italy, Roberto Benigni has a Tuscan accent and Checco Zalone uses
Barese, while use of argot is usual in the performances of French comedians such
as Manu Payet and Smain. This marked use of non-standard accents in comedy
ties in with the suggestion that we tend to laugh at others occupying spaces in the
peripheries of society (see Chapter 1). When humour is based on the way that
something is said, including the ethnic and or social variety in which it is couched,
being able to convey the underlying intention behind the use of a particular accent
poses an enormous translational difficulty.
The 21st century has witnessed a trend to endow the voices of computer gen-
erated animated films with those of well-known transnational personalities, for
example, Mike Myers gave Shrek his Scottish accent in the eponymous film,
while Eddie Murphy voiced Donkey in African-American Vernacular English.
Clearly, Shrek’s Scottish lilt and Donkey’s African-American speech that are
inevitably lost in translation provide extra dimensions to those who are able to
grasp the connotation of using those accents. Nonetheless, the question arises
as to whether, over and above translation, foreign audiences will recognize
54 The language of jokes goes global
linguistic variation in a language other than their own. If a product is subtitled,
presumably recognition of difference will rely on viewers’ previous knowledge
of specific varieties, but in the case of dubbing, the situation is not as clear.
Substituting a variety in Language A with a variety in Language B might at first
be seen as a good solution, but such a choice is unlikely to convey or connote
similar effects to those experienced by the audience in the target language and
culture. Therefore, dubbing countries usually adopt the so-called “homogeniz-
ing convention” (Sternberg 1981) so that any social or regional peculiarity is
flattened out in translation by simply replacing it with the standard variety. The
result of using this strategy is that in dubbed products it is common to hear
a member of a street gang in the USA speak in the same way as his lawyer,
and for the audience not to be able to distinguish a Brit from an American, a
Scottish from an Irish person, or a German from an Austrian. Typically, one
or two characters are signified with a non-standard source variety while sur-
rounding characters adopt the standard language. For example, it is common
for male comic characters in the Italian version of comic films set in Ireland to
be endowed with a high-pitched voice and a slightly effeminate inflection. This
same way of speaking is generally also given to mainstream English-speaking
comic actors who traditionally play the part of the nincompoop, such as Jerry
Lewis and Danny Kaye.
Similarly, the clichéd variety of English adopted by Italian-Americans on
screen is consistently replaced in Italian films with the accent and syntactic struc-
tures that are typical of Sicilian Italian. The negative stereotypes linked to this
translational choice are evident and possibly reflect the original intention. In the
animated film Shark Tale,21 Robert De Niro voices mobster shark Don Vito who
is surrounded by other fish thugs voiced by Italian-Americans such as Martin
Scorsese thereby clearly referencing Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. In
Italian, the fishy mobsters become Sicilian, strengthening a negative stereotype
in US movies regarding organized crime. Within the same film, Ernie and Bernie
are two Jamaican jellyfish henchmen voiced by Ziggy Marley and Doug E. Doug.
Their Rasta speech is compensated in the Italian version with laid-back Roman
teen-speak gobbledegook voiced by two well-known Italian personalities, pop
star Tiziano Ferro and comedian Luca Laurenti. Undeniably, these films exploit
an underlying truism that links Italy and Sicily to organized crime. True to this
cinematic tradition, inarticulate, Italian-American, teddy-boy-styled lawyer Joe
Gambino played by Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny22 becomes Sicilian in the Italian
version, while the southern brogue of the inhabitants of the small sleepy town in
Alabama where the film takes place becomes an unlikely standard Italian. Clearly,
this inaccuracy and non-sociolinguistic equivalence interferes with the sense of
comic otherness that the audience should ideally experience.
While computer-animated graphics have taken over traditional animated
movies, Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit23 series of films appear in marked
contrast to digital productions like Shrek, Frozen24 and so on. In fact, these
The language of jokes goes global 55
products are completely low-tech – characters are made out of plasticine and they
move by means of the stop-motion animation technique25 while the voices of the
characters belong to UK actors like Michael Caine, Helena Bonham Carter and
Ralph Fiennes. Comparing these two traditions of animated movie making, we
might note that the glossy Hollywood veneer connected with computer-animated
digitals is supplanted by a more homely effect achieved by using the voices of
British celebrities that are well-known for their stereotypically upper class or
working class accents. In Chicken Run26 voices from both continents mix and
merge when Rocky Rooster (strangely enough voiced by Australian Mel Gibson
as a rooster from Rhode Island) flies into a chicken coop in northern England.
Clearly, the comic undertones conveyed through the accents in Wallace and
Gromit are untranslatable. Nevertheless, there have been some solutions to the
issue of the translatability of accents in which their comic effect is successfully
retained. The Italian dubbed version of Hong Kong martial arts comedy movie
Shaolin Soccer27 adopted two unusual strategies so that the dub itself actually
added to the humour – thus, dubbing in the sense of “doubling” the filmic quality
and the audience’s pleasure. Voice actors with different Italian regional accents
such as Neapolitan, Sardinian, Tuscan, Sicilian, Lombard, Barese and Calabrese
dubbed the original Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking actors. For some rea-
son Italians perceive these accents as humorous per se. Furthermore, casting
well-known footballers such as Damiano Tommasi, Giuseppe Pancaro, Marco
Delvecchio, Siniša Mihajlović, Angelo Peruzzi and Vincent Candela as voice
actors provided another winning solution.
Visually conveyed verbal humour
Possibly one of the most famous visually conveyed verbal gags on screen occurs
in a scene from A Fish Called Wanda28 in which unintelligent American, Otto
(Kevin Kline) is in Wanda’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) bedroom insulting the British in
a loud voice:
[the British] . . . counting the seconds to the . . . weekend so they can dress
up as ballerinas and whip themselves into a frenzy at the . . .
when he finds a note from Archie (John Cleese) to Wanda that reads as follows:
So see you at the flat at 4,
It’s 2B St. Trevor’s Wharf E.1.
All my love,
Archie
Otto reads out the note aloud but manages to combine it into the preceding dia-
logue so that the audience hears:
56 The language of jokes goes global
[the British] . . . counting the seconds to the . . . weekend so they can
dress up as ballerinas and whip themselves into a frenzy at the . . . [reads
the note that the audience can see] . . . flat at 4, 2B St . . . To be honest
I . . . er . . . hate them.
Denton (1994: 31) comments on the challenge this scene poses to translators who
need to manipulate the target dialogue so that it successfully integrates the note
that audiences will see on screen while at the same time retaining its comic impact.
It would be impossible to transpose the phonological association between the flat
number “2B” and “to be” to which Otto cleverly adds “honest” into another lan-
guage. The Italian repair strategy is however quite ingenious:
[c]ontano i secondi che mancano all’arrivo del fine settimana per pot-
ersi vestire come delle ballerine e andarsi ad ubriacare . . . [reads]
nell’appartamento Quattro al 2B . . . due bi . . . cchieri e poi crollano.
[literal translation: “they count the seconds till the weekend so they can dress
up like ballerinas and get drunk . . . in apartment 2B . . . two gl . . . glasses
and they drop”].
What the translation does is to play on the phonological association between “2B”
in Italian which reads “due bi” with the words “due bicchieri” – “two glasses”.
By having Otto pause after uttering the first syllable of the word “bicchieri” – i.e.
/bI/ – the translators successfully adopt the identical strategy of the source text.
While the meaning is not identical as two glasses do not reflect “to be honest”, the
fact that the Italian utterance links the idea of glasses containing alcohol into the
stereotype of drunken Brits, a typecast that Otto is fond of repeating throughout
the film, actually enhances the translation.
A common visual/graphic trope on screen concerns flower arrangements in films
about funerals. In the film Undertaking Betty, the hearse displaying a flower arrange-
ment that reads “Old Bag” is likely to be lost on audiences outside the UK, especially
with its reference to the main character’s deceased yet obnoxious mother-in-law.29
On the other hand, the so-called “Bastard Hearse” in the BBC2 comedy sketch
show League of Gentlemen (BBC2 1999–2002) in which the flowers spell out the
word “Bastard”, is likely to be understood universally. Again, in Mr Bean’s Funeral
sketch mentioned above, the comedian upsets a coffin in a church so that the flower
arrangement reading “l o v E” falls over and breaks to pieces. In an inept attempt
at reconstructing the arrangement, Bean puts the flowers together so that they spell
the word “v o l E”. Now, while foreign audiences might simply laugh at the spelling
muddle that Bean has created, autochthonous audiences might also laugh at the sil-
liness of the term “vole”. While there is nothing inherently funny about the animal
itself, there is something nonsensical about the choice of rodent, thus rendering the
mix-up, like much of Monty Python’s humour, both silly and surreal.
The language of jokes goes global 57
Culture-specific verbal humour
While not specific to cinematic/TV and audiovisuals in general, verbally expressed
humour based on cultural references is problematic in translation even when the
joke is based on something that one might expect to be understood globally. The
animated films in the Shrek series, for example, are full of references to fairy tales
and to other films.30 These references act as triggers for laughter and although
they are destined to remain unappreciated by non-autochthonous audiences, the
films have been extremely successful worldwide. For example, in a well-known
line from Shrek, Donkey says:
Now I’m a flying talking donkey! You might have seen a housefly, maybe
even a superfly, but I bet you ain’t never seen a donkeyfly! Ha, ha!
This, to an English-speaking audience, would be a clear reference to the Walt
Disney classic Dumbo the flying elephant.31 Lord Farquaard (the “bad guy” in
the Shrek series whose name is a salacious pun for adult viewers) chants “Run,
run as fast as you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man”, as he
amputates the biscuit’s leg. This, and references to “the Muffin Man who lives on
Drury Lane” are extremely Anglo-centric references to traditional English nurs-
ery rhymes. Yet, although it is clear that “Every film is a foreign film, foreign to
some audience somewhere – and not simply in terms of language” (Egoyan and
Balfour 2004: 21), the kind of “foreignness” in question appears to be specific to
a dominant English-speaking culture alone. Given such specificity, it is surprising
that the film was so successful at a global level. These culture-specific references
may well be outweighed by the strength, colour and vibrancy of the visuals, the
music and the storyline.
Lingua-cultural wordplay is extremely complex to translate. Take for exam-
ple a complex wordplay based on a cultural reference from the TV series Six
Feet Under. After discussing surrogate parenting with his life partner Keith,
David Fisher has a dream in which he finds himself in a farmyard where there
is a sign reading “Eggs for Sale” (Series 5, Episode 2). In this surreal dream
scene, Keith appears dressed in dungarees and driving a tractor. When he gets
down from the vehicle, he approaches David and says, “I am the egg man”
to which David asks “goo goo g’joob?” The entire exchange is lifted verba-
tim from the Beatles’ song “I am the Walrus” (Magical Mystery Tour, 1968)
yet in the Italian translation it is lost because while Keith says “Sono l’uomo
delle uova” (literally: “I am the egg man”), the phrase bears no relation to the
Beatles’ song. In fact, in place of the well-known chorus of “goo goo g’joob”,
Keith replies “Cosa vuoi da me?” (“What do you want from me?”). However,
this (non)-joke is likely to go by unnoticed in translation as it occurs within a
bizarre dream sequence in which nothing makes much sense anyway, but this
may not always be the case.
58 The language of jokes goes global
Lingua-culturally based verbal humour
Humour is most culture-specific when language and culture are combined to cre-
ate a comic effect (see Chapter 1). In the film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking
Barrels, many characters have Cockney accents and adopt London market trading
banter to this end.32 Unlike the simple use of regional varieties discussed earlier,
and over and above accent and morpho-syntactic features that distinguish it from
the standard variety, Cockney repartee depends on a combination of rhymes, asso-
nances and culture-specific references. The film opens with the scene of a street
trader attracting his customers with quick-firing monologue typical of the capi-
tal’s market “barrow boys”:
Right let’s sort the buyers from the spyers, the needy from the greedy,
the ones who trust me from the ones who don’t cos if you can’t see value
here today you’re not up here shopping, you’re up here shoplifting. You
see these goods? Never seen daylight, moonlight, Israelites, Fanny by the
gaslight. Take a bag, come on. I took a bag home last night cost more than
ten pound, I can tell you. Anyone like jewellery? Look at that one. Hand-
made in Italy, hand-stolen in Stepney. It’s as long as my arm, I wish it was
as long as something else. Don’t think because these boxes are sealed up,
they’re empty. The only one who sells empty boxes is the undertaker and
by the look of some of you lot here today, I’d make more money with me
measuring tape.
Rhymes, assonance, couplets and repetitions are plentiful and present a sig-
nificant translational challenge. How is a translator to carry out the task of
translating the rhymes of “buyers/spyers” not to mention the crescendo of ref-
erences that begin with “Never seen daylight, moonlight” that follows with
“Israelites” that blends into “Fanny by the Gaslight”, a British film from the
1940s. The banter is nonsensical yet cleverly amusing. The trader puns on the
term “bag” playing on its slang meaning in the UK of an ugly woman whom
he presumably paid for sex as she “cost [him] more than ten pound” the very
price he is asking for the stolen bags he is selling. The replication of “hand”
with “made” and then with “stolen” complicate matters further and highlight
the extreme culture specificity of the banter. The closing joke about the coffins
contains an implicit insult to his customers when he claims that he would “make
more money with me measuring tape”.
Verbal/visual humour
Verbal humour with a visual anchor
Verbal humour with a visual anchor takes translational difficulty up a notch.
In a scene from the film Philomena,33 the two main characters are travelling in
The language of jokes goes global 59
a car when Philomena (Judi Dench) is first seen fiddling with the contents of
her handbag that include a packet of Tunes – a brand of throat lozenges sold in
the UK. After asking Martin (Steve Coogan) what kind of car he is driving, to
which he answers that it is a BMW, Philomena offers him a Tune. Audiences
can see Philomena unwrapping the packet of sweets as she asks “Would you
like a Tune, Martin?” to which he jokingly replies, “If I hum it, will you play
it?” but Philomena obviously does not get the joke and insistently asks him,
“No would you like a Tune?” Martin lets it go, thanks her, takes a Tune out
of the packet, unwraps it and pops it in his mouth. In the Italian version, the
routine containing the joke is omitted. Although the packet of sweets with the
label reading “Tunes” can be clearly seen on the product’s wrapping, it can
only have meaning to an autochthonous audience. The verbal exchange in the
Italian dubbed version is limited to an exchange about the nationality of the car.
Philomena’s offer of a lozenge is substituted with her asking Martin if he likes
“them” (“them” referring to German cars), and the pun on the word “tune” in the
source text is replaced with “I prefer English cars”. Philomena then replies that
she was talking about sweets. As a consequence, the Italian translation is rather
nonsensical, and certainly not funny, but supposedly an Italian audience would
not pay particular attention to an old lady rummaging in her bag for sweets. In
other words, while a UK audience is going to match Philomena’s fiddling with a
packet of sweets to her utterances, it is likely that Italians would pay no particu-
lar attention to them at all.
Product placement can certainly cause added difficulties in translation. In
an episode of the US TV series The Sopranos, leading character Tony (James
Gandolfini) sends his analyst a gift basket containing a packet of Tide washing
powder with a tag reading “Thinking of you, your Prince of Tide”. Even if non-
English-speaking audiences understand the reference to the 1991 film The Prince
of Tides34 about the relationship between an analyst (Barbra Streisand) and her
patient (Nick Nolte), the brand name of the detergent varies around the world.
In France, Germany and Italy the product goes by the name of Dash, in Latin
America, it is called Ace and in Poland Vizir, thus any attempt to tie the name
of the brand of washing powder to the remark would create a strong dissonance
between the visuals and the storyline.
Translation as a humorous device
Translation itself as a humorous device is by no means a novelty. Before the
advent of the internet, tourists would send amusing attempts at translations that
they came across in their travels around the world to newspapers that would
publish them for the amusement of their readers. However, with the ubiquity of
smartphones and the tendency for people to be continuously connected to each
other via this technology, today when travellers spot an amusing translational
error, they are likely to photograph it and post it on a social networking site.
60 The language of jokes goes global
In fact, googling the term “failed translations” produces 96.9 million hits and
searches for similar translations into English from specific languages generate
millions of hits too.35 Failed translations are indeed the object of humour as we
can see from title pages such as “35 Hilarious Chinese Translation Fails” and
“When translations go wrong – 13 of the funniest English fails”.36 These websites
include oriental menus presenting dishes such as “Fries pulls out rotten child” and
“Crap Stick” as well as unfortunate road signs such as “Slip and fall down care-
fully”. Restauranteurs and hoteliers are an excellent source of material as they are
especially prone to accidentally amusing their clients by producing signs such as,
“Guests are encouraged to take advantage of the chamber maid” translated from
Japanese or by including a dish called “Chocolate Puke” on a menu in a restaurant
in China. Once someone spots and posts the error on the web, it will be shared
and forwarded to others, who in turn will share with others in an endless chain of
sharing. If the error is especially spicy – pun intended – the screen-shot may go
viral and “trend” on various social networks.
Usually, translational faux pas are the result of the work of amateur translators
who will typically presume that English lexis and syntax work in the same way as
they do in their own language.
Every room has excellent facilities for your private parts. In winter, every
room is on heat. Each room has a balcony offering views of outstanding
obscenity! You will not be disturbed by traffic noise, since the road between
the hotel and the lake is used only by pederasts.
Similar mistranslations have been around for decades and are funny because
they sound nonsensical. Relying on their limited knowledge of English, these
non-professional translators are misled by false friends that lead them to produce
texts that are ludicrous to English speakers in that specific context.37 So on one
level, failed translations are amusing because we laugh at the inadequacies of
the person who produced them while we laugh with the person who discovered
the blunder. On another level, however, the bloopers are also amusing because
of their taboo-laden inappropriateness. These translations accidentally enter into
areas of distastefulness. The Spanish hotelier-cum-translator speaks of “private
parts”; [being] “on heat”; “obscenity” and “pederasts” – all misplaced and mis-
used words that seem to be too wrong to be true. Here too there is an element of
Sontag’s partial knowing. The recipient knows that sexual offenders are unlikely
to populate the hotel lake or that vomitus will not be on the menu at mealtimes,
but the architect of the translations has ventured into tricky territory where he or
she has seriously slipped up, thus creating some racy incongruity.
Gulas and Weinberg’s (2010) discussion of global advertising explores the
dangers of how ignoring subtle differences in language and culture can change a
serious message into a comic one and vice versa. Again, the internet is bursting
with examples of products, such as the Chinese “Soup for Sluts”, Ghanaian “Pee
The language of jokes goes global 61
Cola” and Italian “Fagottini” – “little faggots”. None of these product names are
funny in their source languages, but the inherent taboo elements they contain in
English render them funny to English speakers. All the translational faux pas,
attempts to translate or to “sound English” that go sadly wrong are translation-
based and involuntary, but as Delabastita (2005) points out, although they may
appear to be bilingual, they are, in effect, monolingual as they will only be seen as
transgressing by those au fait with English.
However, if we consider translation in a wider sense, it can also be taken to
describe the speech of someone speaking in a language other than their own.
When we speak in a language that is not our mother tongue we are, in a sense, pre-
senting a translated version of ourselves. Although we may not necessarily make
language errors or faux pas, our otherness and difference with native speakers
of the language is likely to emerge, amongst other things, through our pronun-
ciation. This otherness and difference reflected through speech has traditionally
been used as the butt of ridicule – a negative form of humour but nevertheless
humour. Interference of the articulatory habits of one group of speakers from one
language to another is a well-known source of humour. The Italian Man Who
Goes to Malta, a comic video clip available on YouTube, exemplifies a sort of
ridicule that makes fun of foreign, in this case Italian, accents. The video features
an Italian in Malta whose hackneyed Italian causes others to constantly misunder-
stand what he is trying to say:
One day an Italian man went to a restaurant in Malta and wanted two pieces
of toast, and the waiter gives him one, and the Italian man says, “I want two
piece”. The waiter says, “Go to the toilet”. The Man says, “You no under-
stand I want two piece on my plate”, then the waiter says, “You better not
piss on the plate you son of a bitch!” The man says, “I did not even know
him and he calls me a Son of a Beach?” Then he goes to a bigger restaurant
and finds himself with a spoon and a knife but no fork. He says, “I want
a fock”; the waiter says “Everybody wants to fuck” and he says, “You no
understand I want to fock on the table” and the waiter says “You better not
fuck on the table you son of a bitch!” Then later he goes to a hotel and in
bed, he doesn’t have a sheet. “Call the manager and tell him I wanna sheet!”
says the Italian man. The other guy says “Go to the toilet” and the Italian
man says, “You no understand I wanna sheet in my bed!” and the other guy
says, “You better not shit in the bed you son of a bitch!” The Italian man
goes to the check-out corner and the check-out man says “Peace on you”
and the Italian man says “PISS ON YOU TOO, YOU SON OF A BEACH!
I’M GOING BACK TO ITALY!”
The difficulty of Italian speakers to distinguish between the sounds /I/ and /i:/;
and to articulate the /ɔ:/ sound in the word “fork” creates a series of problems for
the Italian in Malta. Rather like the translational gaffes described previously, the
62 The language of jokes goes global
text works on a series of words that the Italian man mispronounces and inadvert-
ently “translates” into what are taboo terms in English, so that the term “piece”
is perceived as “piss”; the term “fork” as “fuck” and “sheet” as “shit”. The story
ends with him feeling insulted by the check-out person who wishes him “Peace on
you”, which he misinterprets as “piss on you”. However, accent apart, the numer-
ous videos available on YouTube recounting the tale also use visuals to ridicule
Italianness. In what claims to be the “original animated version”, the story is pre-
sented by Luigi, an unkempt, swarthy, moustachioed cartoon character wearing
an Italian football shirt out of which we see the hairs on his chest emerging. There
is a picture of the Tower of Pisa on the wall behind him. Luigi has a very strong
(and improbable) Italian accent.38 Several live enactments of the story are also
available in which the actors adopt an exaggeratedly “Italian” accent that delib-
erately amplifies the phonological features that cause the confusion. The Italian
Man Who Goes to Malta is an example of an internet meme (see Chapter 4).
Especially on screen, such cultural stereotypes are a common source of humour
and through the use of visual elements, the ridicule is not limited to verbal lan-
guage alone. When Tom and Jerry disembark from a cruise ship in Naples in the
classic cartoon feature Neapolitan Mouse, they are met by a swarthy moustachi-
oed, local mouse in the backstreets of Naples to the sound of mandolins playing
“Santa Lucia”.39 In Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, audiences see the two enam-
oured dogs sitting at a table covered with a red and white chequered tablecloth as
they eat spaghetti served by a rotund Italian waiter while the background music
is provided by the sound of a mandolin.40 Global advertising also frequently tar-
gets Italian men for being Latin lovers. The 2015 Superbowl commercial for the
FIAT 500X features an elderly Italian who accidentally drops his last Viagra pill
just as a mature woman sexily beckons him towards the bed upon which she lies,
scantily dressed.41 Instead of landing in his mouth, the blue pill falls and travels
along pipes and over the rooftops of a stereotypical Italian town until it lands in
the petrol tank of a FIAT 500X. The car suddenly swells and becomes larger and
more potent-looking as the voiceover claims, “The All New Fiat 500X. Bigger.
More Powerful. And Ready for Action”, as the car receives admiring and sexually
laden glances from women passing by. The commercial then cuts to a scene of the
man who dropped the pill lying on the bed snoring loudly as his frustrated wife
looks on drumming her fingers. Latin lovers and sexually active elderly Italians
are also lampooned in campaigns such as those of Bertolli oils and spreads (see
Chiaro 2004) and more recently, the Mutti tomato sauce campaigns that play on
street behaviour such as cat-calling and wolf whistling. One Mutti ad features four
pasta shapes calling out to (harassing?) a bottle of Mutti sauce as it/she voluptu-
ously walks past them. They call out to her, yell “Redhead” then follow her.42 This
example of politically incorrect street behaviour (that occurs not only in Italy),
is successfully exploited by the Mutti copywriters to comic effect. However,
although Italian characters are frequently teased on screen, other cultures are not
exempt from this mockery. In the 1991 Disney cartoon feature, Beauty and the
The language of jokes goes global 63
Beast, the French candlestick named Lumière is not only connoted by accent but
also through his sexual proficiency as he continually makes advances towards the
curvaceous feather duster, Babette, who is, predictably, also French. These sexu-
ally driven French characters support Davies’ claim (2011: 76–112) that in the
Anglo-Saxon common imaginary, the French are recognized for their abundant
and varied sex life that is the subject of copious jokes.43 Beauty and the Beast also
ridicules the British through the characterization of the humanized teapot, Mrs
Potts, and the clock, Cogsworth, who is inflexible, fussy and always punctual.
Certainly laughing at and making fun of the outsider is a given, yet interest-
ingly, taking command of language and playing with words seems to appeal to
exiles, émigrés and to those who in some way either cross the lines between lan-
guages and cultures, or else fall through its cracks. Not only do writers such as
Ionesco, Nabokov, Beckett and Joyce, but also comedians like the Marx Brothers
and more recently Margaret Cho and John Oliver, to mention just a few, all write
or perform through a language variety which is not completely their own. It is
almost as though these writers and comedians find it impossible to be entirely
serious in their non-native tongues. Nabokov apparently wanted to call his mem-
oirs “Crime and Puns”, while according to Brophy, Joyce wrote Finnegan’s Wake
while “in the grips of compunsion” or as Redfern puts it, Joyce’s “translingual
pun disappears up its own Erse” (Redfern 1984: 164–70).
The émigré and all that is transcultural are certainly a mark of the present
moment. Right now society is in a constant state of flux. People today easily, con-
stantly shift and change social position in terms of where we live, where we work,
our hair, our faces, our bodies – even our sexual orientation – in what Bauman
famously labelled “liquid society”. The world as we know it is in a constant state
of translation, albeit not in the sense of Jakobson’s famous but restricted defini-
tion of “translation proper”, i.e. interlingual translation concerning the transfer
of language from Language A to Language B, but in a much wider, polysemi-
otic sense (Jakobson 1959). As pointed out earlier, those whose mother tongue is
English may not be aware of the fact that we live in a verbally translated world.
Much of the textual content on the web appears in a variety of English that is the
result of translation from other languages. Often this variety of English is neither a
lingua franca nor even international English but some sort of odd sounding trans-
lationese. Beckett famously said that “In the beginning there was the pun” and we
can safely add that the pun was untranslatable. Of course, there are a number of
strategies available to translators who have to deal with the thorny area of verbal
humour. Ideally, the translator will try to match wordplay in the source language
with an instance of similar wordplay in the target language, but of course, this
is an arduous task. As jokes play on either linguistic or cultural incongruity or
a combination of both, it is unlikely that two languages will possess the same
lingua-cultural inconsistencies to create an instance of wordplay that will be an
identical of the original. Thus, instead, translators might substitute wordplay in
Language A with a completely different example of wordplay in Language B,
64 The language of jokes goes global
doing their best to retain some element of the source joke. Another common strat-
egy is for translators to compensate for an untranslatable joke in Language A by
inserting an occurrence of wordplay in Language B elsewhere in the text where
it might fit in better in the target language. Of course, translators may even omit
the wordplay altogether (for a detailed discussion of translational strategies, see
Chiaro 2017). To examine this more thoroughly, if the recipient requires a trans-
lation it probably means that he or she is not proficient in the source language in
the first place, therefore unlikely to be aware of the substitution or omission. In
other words, although the target language result may not be what was originally
intended, it is important that in terms of response, the recipient recognizes the
humorous function of the text. Better still, if the translation is nevertheless funny,
then the aim has been achieved – formal equivalence is relatively unimportant,
while functional equivalence is fundamental (see Chiaro 2008).
When we convey a joke or a pun in another language, we run the risk that
it will fall flat. We can indeed substitute the stupid Irishman, Pole, Belgian or
carabiniere with a stupid other; the canny Scot with a canny other of our own,
but only as long as we steer clear of paronomasia, highly specific cultural refer-
ences or a combination of both. However, given that translation is impossible,
and that “not finding the same thing funny as anyone else finds funny is of course
a common immigrant experience” (Phillips 2001), nonetheless so many exiled
writers have achieved exactly this, namely rendering humour liquid, and bi and/or
trans-lingual by using translation itself as a comic device. As illustrated in depth
by Delabastita (2005), translation of Shakespeare is a prime example of this
sort of cross-language play. For example, in a famous translation scene from
King Henry V, French Princess Katherine’s pronunciation of innocent household
words such as “foot” and “gown” are turned into the bawdy taboo French terms
“foutre” and “con”. This is no different to what happens today in viral videos such
as The Italian Man Who Goes to Malta. As we saw, the Italian gets into trouble
when he asks a waitress for a “fuck (fork) on the table”; and a “shit (sheet) on the
bed”; or indeed The French Man Who Goes to Malta who asks for “a big cock”
instead of “a big Coke”.44 According to Freud, what comes between “fear and
sex” is “Fünf” and nothing more. These jokes depend on phonemic features and
articulatory habits being carried over from one language to another and serving
to rationalize the comic pun.
Simplistic as it may sound, when two or more languages come together on
screen, the situation will tend to involve either conflict or confusion (see Chiaro
2016b). There are scores of multilingual films and TV products set against a back-
ground of war, unrest, danger, poverty and anxiety. Clearly, this is a parallel with
reality – trenches, prisoner of war camps, dismal war-torn peripheries and sweat-
shops often act as settings for films in which polylingualism simply underscores
angst and torment. Vice versa, the home of mix-up and confusion is surely the
comedy. A single linguistic misunderstanding – almost inevitable if two people do
not speak the same language – and the farce, and subsequently the laughter, begins.
The language of jokes goes global 65
We find some of cinema’s first trans-lingual mix-ups in the Marx Brothers
movies. Sam Wood’s 1935 comedy A Night at the Opera is a film totally based
on migration, part of which takes place on a ship sailing from Italy to New York
in which the Marx Brothers are stowaways. The film highlights both the inevita-
bility and the problematics of translation, but above all, as discussed at length by
Cronin (2004: 55–63), it pivots upon translation’s humorous potential. The very
famous contract scene features Driftwood (Groucho) reading a legal contract to
the illiterate Fiorello – Chico Marx in his persona of a rustic Italian. The scene
is a parody of legal language in English, but it also shows how translation is as
much intralingual (i.e. involving different varieties or registers of the same lan-
guage) as it is interlingual. In other words, legalese may be as impenetrable to
native speakers of English as it is to many foreigners. Driftwood puns away on
the legal term “party” in a language which is not Fiorello’s, telling him to “pay
particular attention to this first clause because it’s most important . . . the party of
the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part”. By the
time Driftwood and Chico arrive at the “party of the ninth part” the contract is in
shreds. The scene culminates in a cross-language pun where the legalese term “a
sanity clause” intersects with Fiorello’s misunderstanding of both legalese and
English so that Chico “translates” what he hears into what he knows namely that
“there ain’t no such thing as Santa Claus”.
However, cross-language humour need not always be so exact. Adenoid
Hynkel’s speech in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) consists entirely of what
Sternberg labelled “vehicular promiscuity” (1981); what Sherzer calls “mock-
language” (2002) and Cronin labels “pseudo-language” (2004). At the Rally of
the Sons and Daughters of the Double Cross, Hynkel’s rant is actually pure twad-
dle, yet the abundant use of words such as “Wienerschnitzel” and “Sauerkraut”
give it a German flavour. But what is most convincing about Hynkel’s speech
is that it is accompanied by a voiced-over interpretation in English which, in
serious contrast with Hynkel’s gibberish, further adds to the comic effect of the
scene. The interpreter drastically reduces the content of Hynkel’s discourse –
which is already garbage – therefore displaying the scope of being able to
tamper with the original message through translation and the possible untruth
of much translation:
Hynkel: “und nach der Tsuden”.
Off screen interpreter: “The Jews”.
Hynkel: “unbelievte Sauerkraut mit der Juden”.
Interpreter: “His Excellency has just referred to the Jewish
people”.
The voiceover provided by the interpreter demonstrates how translation has the
power to censor and by default, to lie. In Italian, there is a saying “Traduttore tra-
ditore” – literally “translator traitor”. One can never be certain of the validity and
66 The language of jokes goes global
truth of a translation but has to trust the translator and rely on their honest rendition.
There are countless books and films regarding espionage where the double agent
is bilingual – a term that derives from the Latin bilinguis, literally “split” or “dou-
ble” tongued, rather like a serpent, hardly the most endearing and trustworthy
of creatures. In another famous scene from the same film, Hynkel rages against
Italian dictator Napoloni calling him “Napaloni, de Grosse Peanut, de Cheesy
Ravioli” and at one point the couple duel armed with German sausages and spa-
ghetti. Naturally, comedy is a genre in which much typecasting and stereotyping
tends to occur. However, it is worth noting how, at least as far as Italian and
German stereotyping is concerned, the traditional food of Hynkel and Napaloni’s
respective cultures become worthy of mockery.
The Marx Brothers also use mock language in A Night at the Opera, when the
brothers are rumbled as stowaways and they take on the identity of three Russian
aviators in order to get off the ship in New York. Unluckily for the stowaways
the real aviators happen to be famous and were scheduled to give a speech at the
City Hall. As the brothers set out to impersonate the Russian aviators, Driftwood/
Groucho acts as the interpreter, although the language he is translating from is
clearly not Russian but gobbledygook. Yet the officials listening to the “inter-
preter” take what Driftwood is saying as bona fide. The Mayor of New York
only doubts the aviators when he notices that Harpo’s false beard is coming
off, at which point he accuses them of being phoneys. Unperturbed, interpreter
Driftwood converses with Harpo in balderdash relaying to the mayor that his
guests are insulted, and offended walks away saying, “Of course you know this
means war”.
UK comedian Catherine Tate also uses mock language in a well-known
sketch from the BBC’s The Catherine Tate Show in which she plays the part
of a secretary who claims to be able to interpret into English from seven differ-
ent languages.45 At an important board meeting, it soon becomes clear that she
can neither speak nor understand any of the languages of the delegates present.
Tate reads the nametag and country of affiliation of each foreign delegate sitting
around the table and then babbles in sounds that resemble the perception of the
language in question according to the collective imaginary. She achieves a comic
effect by reproducing hackneyed sounds and gesticulations of each language she
preposterously “translates”. For example, Tate inflates the nasal sounds of French,
repeats the Spanish silent dental fricative in her Spanish, and produces a series of
high-pitched squeaks to articulate her Chinese “translation”. The sketch is delib-
erately politically incorrect and highlights the typical way we mock and parody
those different from ourselves. As we know in comedy, anything goes. According
to Sherzer, this is a way in which the dominant group in a society ridicules the
non-dominant language group using “mock” language based on code-switching:
“usually one that is characteristic of groups low on the political-economic and
social hierarchy of a community – is inserted into the discourse of the dominant
language of the same society, in a purposely parodic form” (2002: 93–4). Sherzer
The language of jokes goes global 67
asserts that idioms like hasta la vista baby and no problema illustrate a way in
which non-Hispanic Americans actually mock Spanish speakers.
There are countless examples of cross-language humour in film, on TV and,
of course, on the web. The well-known interpreting scene in Benigni’s La Vita
è Bella in which Guido, played by Benigni deliberately mistranslates what the
SS Kapò is saying and Tom Hanks’ Krakozhia speaking Victor Navorski in The
Terminal, who deliberately mistranslates in order to avoid the arrest of a fellow
migrant illustrate how humour and translation can thrive on cross-linguistic mis-
understanding (see Chiaro 2016b).46
Possibly the most extreme form of translation as a source of humour can be
seen in the movies by Sacha Baron Cohen (see Cronin 2004: 72–80). Beginning
with the title of the film that he directed and stars in, Borat! Cultural Learning
for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, the exploiting of translation
for humorous purposes emerges very clearly. The title reads like a mistransla-
tion, and when we insert the DVD we read that we are watching “pre record
Moviedisc for purpose domestic viewing of movie film” and that “sellingpirating
of moviedisc will result in punishment by crushing”. Now, Sacha Baron Cohen
is a native speaker of English who plays the part of Borat Sagdajev, a Kazakh
journalist. Cohen speaks neither Kazakh nor Russian, yet we see the use of a sort
of Cyrillic in the opening credits. At the start of the movie, we are in Romania,
where people speak Romanian, yet we are told that we are in Kazakhi territory.
Borat is accompanied by Azamat Bagatov who speaks Armenian, yet conver-
sation between Bagatov and Borat (who actually uses Hebrew here) must be
mutually unintelligible, while the subtitles provided are inaccurate. As Cronin
points out, the use of languages in this film underscores the limits of intercul-
tural understanding. For viewers who are familiar with none of the languages
involved, the speech is simply that of the unintelligible “other”. While this may
be very amusing, the fact that anything not linguistically recognized as belonging
to the centre is of little importance should make us think. Is the underlying mes-
sage that is being conveyed that otherness is of no importance within a dominant
language and culture?
Finally, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) is a film that high-
lights the importance of being able to speak more languages than one during a
conflict. During the Second World War, being a polyglot in Europe could save
your life. SS Colonel Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz, uses his poly-
linguistic ability to treacherous ends. However, in one of the funniest – and
cleverest – scenes in the film, US soldier Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt, and
his associates attempt to pass as Italians before Landa. Brad Pitt’s accent is
atrocious, but even more of a giveaway is the mismatch between their incorrect
use of Italian gesticulation coupled with the wrong verbal language. How were
they to know that Landa’s Italian was native speaker like?47 Audiences laugh
at the linguistic incompetence of the Americans while simultaneously fearing
Landa’s treachery.
68 The language of jokes goes global
Notes
1 Scandinavian “noir” is a TV and filmic genre based on Scandinavian crime fiction.
Examples include the Danish TV series Forbrydelsen (2007–12) later adapted in the
USA as The Killing (2011–14) and Swedish Stieg Larsson’s bestseller The Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo adapted into a movie.
2 Examples from Nigella Lawson, 2002. Nigella Bites. Channel Four DVD.
3 Jamie Oliver. 2004. Pukka Tukka: An Essential Guide to Cooking. Video Collection
International DVD.
4 The Great British Bake Off, 2010 to 2016, distributed by BBC Worldwide.
5 The 2015 Great Comic Relief Bake Off.
6 Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern was produced by Travel Channel USA and broad-
cast from 2006 to the present.
7 How Clean is Your House was produced by Channel 4 and first broadcast from 2003 to
2009.
8 Britain’s Got Talent broadcast on ITV3 from 2007 to present.
9 Scene available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfWTxg72JpM. Retrieved 3 November
2015.
10 An Extra Slice, BBC2, 2014 to 2016. The show follows what happened in the previous
episode of the Bake Off and shows unseen footage.
11 Little Britain was a BBC television series broadcast between 2003 and 2005. One of
David Walliams’ persona in the series was Emily Howard whose repeated catchphrase
was “I’m a lady and I do lady’s things” hence the undeliberate link with his remark
about the band on the talent show. See Chapter 3 for further discussion.
12 See The Lewis Carroll Society of North America at: www.lewiscarroll.org/tag/the-
mouses-tale/. Retrieved 14 July 2015.
13 My Big Fat Greek Wedding, released in 2002 and directed by Joel Zwick.
14 Depending on the context, the word cazzata can mean “bullshit” or “fuck up”; in either
case, it derives from the word cazzo, a vulgar term for “penis”.
15 Directed by Stanley Kramer and released in 1963. The scene described is available at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=w00Kab17aeI. Retrieved 11 January 2017. I would like
to thank Graeme Ritchie for drawing my attention to this gag.
16 Quoted from an online interview with Rowan Atkinson (21 August 2007). Available
at: http://moviehole.net/200711633dvd-interview-rowan-atkinson. Retrieved 3 August
2015.
17 Images of Stan Laurel and Michael Crawford adopting the above-mentioned poses are
respectively available at: https://classicmoviehubblog.wordpress.com/tag/stan-laurel/
and www.doyouremember.co.uk/memory/some-mothers-do-ave-em. Both retrieved 6
August 2015.
18 Originally aired 1 January 1991.
19 Mr Bean at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in London. Available at: www.
dailymotion.com/video/xti810_mr-bean-at-2012-olympics-opening-ceremony_fun.
Retrieved 3 August 2015.
20 Mr Bean at Comic Relief 2015, available at: www.dailymotion.com/video/x2jkcpx.
Retrieved 3 August 2015.
21 Shark Tale, released in 2004, was directed by Bibo Bergeron, Vicky Jenson and Rob
Letterman.
22 My Cousin Vinny, released in 1992, was directed by Jonathan Lynn.
23 The Wallace and Gromit series consists of animated films directed by Nick Parks
between 1999 and 2011.
24 Frozen was released in 2013 and directed by Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck.
25 This technique involves the physical manipulation of an object so that it seems to
move on its own. The object is moved a bit at a time and photographed with each
small movement so that put together into a single sequence the individual frames
create the illusion of movement.
The language of jokes goes global 69
26 Chicken Run, released in 2000, and directed by Peter Lord and Nick Parks.
27 Shaolin Soccer was released in 2000 and directed by Stephen Chow.
28 A Fish Called Wanda was a British and US co-production, released in 1988 and directed
by Charles Crichton.
29 Undertaking Betty (aka Plots with a View) was released in 2002 and directed by Nick
Hurran.
30 Shrek was released in 2001 and directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson; Shrek
II was released in 2004 and directed by Andrew Adamson, Kelly Adamson and Conrad
Vernon; Shrek III was released in 2007 and directed by Chris Mikker and Roman Hui.
31 Dumbo was released in 1941 and directed by Ben Sharpsteen.
32 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was released in 1998 and directed by Guy
Ritchie.
33 The film Philomena was released and directed by Stephen Frears.
34 Directed by Barbra Streisand.
35 See www.google.it/search?q=I+remember+the+corned+beef&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&
client=firefox-b&gfe_rd=cr&ei=Yop3WOSUEcHCXsT0rKAN#q=+failed+translation+.
Retrieved 12 January 2017.
36 See www.boredpanda.com/funny-chinese-translation-fails/ and www.mirror.co.uk/news/
weird-news/translations-go-wrong---13-3700064. Both retrieved 12 January 2017.
37 False friends are words in two languages that are very similar yet have very differ-
ent meanings in each language. For example, an English speaker might think that the
Spanish word embarazada has the same meaning as the English word “embarrassed”,
but, in fact, embarazada means pregnant.
38 The Italian Man Who Went to Malta – (official animated version) available at: www.
youtube.com/watch?v=YjXGywPzkw0. Retrieved 17 January 2017.
39 Neapolitan Mouse was directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, USA, 1954.
40 Lady and the Tramp was directed by Clyde Geronimi and Wilfred Jackson, USA, 1955.
41 Video available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAcLViTHDOo. Retrieved 19 January
2017.
42 Video available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcoR75dX5rM&list=PLOqQ75wVR
dqf3p1wI_zMzt-oI48X6aeZ4. Retrieved 19 January 2017.
43 Beauty and the Beast was directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, USA, 1991.
44 Video available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFkzSfRFiMU. Retrieved 23 January
2017.
45 The Catherine Tate Show. 2005. UK/BBC2, Directed by Gordon Anderson. Sketch
available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNKn5ykP9PU. Retrieved 23 January 2017.
46 La Vita è Bella 1997, directed by Roberto Benigni. The Terminal 2004, directed by
Steven Spielberg.
47 Scene available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxEY3DRJUFs. Retrieved 23 January
2017.
3
THE LANGUAGE OF JOKES
AND GENDER
A major concern marking the first two decades of the 21st century is an ongoing
debate about crucial issues pertaining to gender. Following in the wake of Women’s
Studies and Feminist Theory, intellectual debate regarding gender has expanded
to include studies in masculinity and, additionally, the wide gamut of sexualities.
The traditional binary opposition between male and female genders is now comple-
mented by LGBTQI while society is slowly but surely moving towards attitudes that
are inclusive of all genders and nuances of sexuality. In fact, gender has now begun
to be accepted as a social and cultural construct that, as first argued by Judith Butler
(1990), is as much about performance as about fixed behaviour that is the natural
result of chromosomes and physical characteristics. However, gender is wherever
we turn, and the fact remains that for an individual filling in a form, applying for a
job or a mortgage, or participating in a survey – alongside name and date of birth,
the applicant’s gender is required. Everything we do implicates gender – from how
we speak and move to how we dress – so it follows that the way we “do” humour,
the way we accept humour and even our sense of humour may, in some way, be
marked in terms of gender.
Since the mid-1990s, the internet has grown exponentially to occupy the prom-
inent place it does in almost every area of life. Apart from the ubiquity of social
networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc., the internet is also
the source of answers to any query one might have. It has become the norm to
find directions, go shopping and even find a partner online. Therefore, it should
come as no surprise to find that the internet is also a massive source of humorous
materials and is, furthermore, a “major player in the production and distribution
of humor, in general, and humor about gender, in particular” (Shifman 2007). If,
as argued by Billig (2005), comedic texts bring into play dominant ideologies and
cultural codes, an investigation of online humour should provide an up-to-date
DOI: 10.4324/9781315146348-4
The language of jokes and gender 71
perspective on what Shifman and Lemish consider to be “highly charged issues
such as gender and sexuality” (2010).
This chapter will first focus on instances of verbally expressed humour target-
ing gender that can be found on the internet with particular attention to humour
that “goes viral” by means of social media. This will be followed by a discussion
of gender-related humour that is politically “charged”. Charged humour is very
much in the limelight within the genre of stand-up comedy where the stage has
become a place for women comedians to voice and challenge all number of social
givens. Finally, I will examine comedy that plays with the fluidity of gender.
Male, female, humour and laughter
Starting from the binary biological distinction between male and female, let us
attempt to understand how similar or how different these categories might be in
terms of humour styles. With regard to gender, it is worth exploring whether the
same things amuse both males and females and whether the way in which they
perform humour might vary too. Given that humour is closely connected to laugh-
ter, a good starting point could be to explore whether males and females laugh in
the same way.
At first sight, the most obvious difference could be that the quality of laugh-
ter differs in the two sexes in terms of sound if only because males generally
have deeper voices than females, but what does the word “generally” tell us in
any meaningful way? Presumably, some females have longer and slacker vocal
chords than do most males and thus produce huskier laughter, just as there will be
males with tighter vocal chords and the high-pitched voices normally associated
with females.
However, in English, there are a number of laughter words, i.e. words that
indicate a type of laugh, that instinctively seem to be more associated with one
gender rather than with another. For example, “giggle” (Figures 3.1 to 3.6) and
“cackle” (Figure 3.7) appear to connote females rather than males, while “guffaw”
FIGURE 3.1 Examples of the term “giggling” emerging as an unsuitable impulse to
display publicly
F9X 3056 and was surprised to see Britta covering her mouth to stifle a
AMC 606
BP8 385
BPA 2146
C8A 1890
C8T 1461
FEE 3052
H8J 2090
F9X 3766
HW8 1608
giggle
giggle
giggle
giggle
giggle
giggle
giggle
giggle
giggle
giggle
. The Doctor was standing with his hands behind his back.
, Wendy pulled the banister away from the wall. Stifling a , she hazarded a guess that the wardrobe would be full of
Committee? What is British Committee?’ She suppresses a hysterical . ‘You must know who they are. You know,
cackle, and fell fractionally forward. Forster suppressed a nervous . They reached the main deck, dropping down in a defensive
. ‘Tall and dark . . . ’ Jennifer stifled an impulse to . A tall, dark stranger — that was what fortune-tellers always
at the same time. I had an almost irresistible impulse to . I know it was only a reaction to shock but it
and You. Good Old Mavis, I thought, suppressing a; she takes her defeats like a lady. I said ‘
own?’ He sounded so hard done-by that Claudia wanted to , a feeling she sternly repressed. Give in to it and
n’t hit the island’, Ace tried to stifle an inappropriate , ’I guess it’ll just sink into the brains.
?’ I put on my stern voice so I wouldn’t. ’She kicked him — in the place which is most
72 The language of jokes and gender
(Figure 3.8) appears to connote male laughter. Some may even believe that gig-
gling in grown men may undermine their masculinity just as others may think that
guffawing in women may question their femininity. In fact, a search for the word
form “giggle” in the British National Corpus returns 254 hits, several of which
collocate with terms such as “suppress”, “stifle” and “repress”, implying that gig-
gling may not be an especially positive thing to do or that it may be perceived as
being inappropriate.1
Furthermore, the word form also collocates with words like “childlike” and
“childish” underscoring the undesirability of this type of laughter in fully grown
adults by implying the giggler’s immaturity. In addition, in the corpus, “giggle”
also collocates with the negative adjective “cheap”.
After sifting out expressions such as to “have a giggle” and “for a giggle”
from the corpus, the word form “giggle” did indeed emerge more frequently as
a collocate of female as opposed to male nouns. For example, out of 47 proper
APW 3003
EFJ 28
G1M 2528
BMN 2014
CA5 588
would be childish, and spoil it all. ‘But Ithe same thing, my lord‘. They stiffened. To
thought of him being ten years old made the children want to
giggle
giggle
giggle
giggle
giggle
but they bit the giggles back. Their mother was looking so
, once more behind her. Her lips thinned. Her finger, evolving through a deep guffaw, and ending as a childlike
behind their mother’s skirts. Corbett bowed. ‘Joan Taggart dirty children who eyed Corbett boldly, then ran to hide and
. Similarly, your subconscious cannot try not to be a happens? Right. It’s like instructing a schoolchild not to
FIGURE 3.2 Examples of the terms “children”, “schoolchild”, “childish” and
“childlike” collocated with the term “giggle”
CMD 1014 ? There is a strong danger of a mountain ‘twitcher’names. What is the significance of Marilyn other than a cheap giggle
FIGURE 3.3 Example of the adjective “cheap” collocated with the term “giggle”
APC 223
B38 3370
B38 3398
HH3 15394
H94 1488
HP0 1019
happily as they dressed the Virgin for a procession;, behaving
Women natter, women nag Women niggle niggle niggle Men Talk.
as their men rush forward in front of the TV camera to
slipped from her lips. His golden head whipped around and she
, among the undergrowth toward the centre of the small coppice.
29
41
42
202
178
In Arequipa I had watched women in the church of Santo Domingo giggle
giggle
Giggle
giggle
giggle
giggle
Women niggle-niggle-niggle Men Talk. Women yatter Women chatter
Women chew the
and they babble Men Talk Men Talk. Women gossip Women
philadelphia Cream Cheese. Oh Bossy Women Gossip Girlish Women
women are overjoyed. Their hard work has paid off. They
dark wintry streets with a woman in a tea-cosy. A small
trees. There was a scuffle, and then a woman’s
FIGURE 3.4 Examples of the terms “woman”, “woman’s” and “women” as collocates
of the term “giggle
The language of jokes and gender 73
nouns either preceding or following the form “giggle” (thus nouns referring to
who was actually doing the giggling), 33 are female names and only 14 male.
Similarly, against 37 occurrences of the pronoun “she” as a collocate of “giggle”,
there are only 9 occurrences of “he”. Again, 19 other incidences of “giggle” col-
locate with “her” against 5 for “his”. In addition, the corpus contains only one
occurrence of the word form “woman”; four occurrences of “women”; one of
“women’s” and five of “girls” all collocated with “giggle” against a single con-
cordance with the word form “man”; a single concordance with the word form
“boy” and a single concordance with “father”.
Noteworthy are the collocations “girly giggle”, “girlish giggle” and especially
“schoolgirl giggle” that occur near the taboo term “fuck!” (Figure 3.5 example 71/
CGC730). The corpus displays no similar “male” equivalents – “boyish giggles”
and “schoolboy giggles” are not natural expressions and do not occur in the cor-
pus observed. Consequently, the data examined backs up an intuitive hypothesis
that giggling is largely perceived as a somewhat unfortunate female characteristic.
In the same corpus, the word form “cackle” returns only 61 hits, implying that
it is not especially common usage. Three occurrences of “cackle” collocate with
names of fowl, as cackling is the sound birds make, while another six collocate
with “Miss” to create “Miss (Amelia) Cackle” a character from the British TV
series The Worst Witch.2 In fact, “Miss Cackle” makes up around 10 per cent of all
36 ATA 417 Kind of image that girls can talk about, laugh at and giggle over together. Indeed Katie’s group, when I’d pushed
39 ATE 1981 whined, ‘pops is tired’. The girls continued to giggle and scream and run and hide and generally have fun with their
57 CAD 1643 it ! J: We’re liking everything today! (theygiggle, theatrically, like the Philadelphia cheese girls) They’re from
187 HD7 269 . Every so often I stood the treat. The girls would giggle and tell risqué stories. My ears burned with their crudity at
219 J13 817 ‘What are you girls snorting?’ I ask. They giggle into the mirrors. I snap, ‘come on !’
42 B38 3398 Philadelphia Cream Cheese. Oh Bossy Women Gossip Girlish WomenGiggle Women natter, women nag Women niggle niggle niggle Men Talk.
71 CGC 730 want to fuck men.’ She forces a false, schoolgirl giggle . ‘How kooky. That's the real alternative lifestyle!
79 CHA 1018 I’ve always resented the ideal of the frilly frock and girly giggleas the symbols of femininity – dungarees and big boots should not
134 FRS 1989 catch her, and she fell into them with a ridiculous girlishgiggle. ’If she wants the hotel she can have it,
191 HGF 2302 . I saluted Heil Hitler, you know, with a girlishgiggle. The Jewish family got back their papers and told me afterwards
195 HGN 2361 bounce off the walls (nothing so trillingly femme as a girlishgiggle). I don’t quite see the joke, but then
FIGURE 3.5 Examples of the terms “girls”, “girlish”, “schoolgirl” and “girly” as
collocates of the term “giggle”
65 CCW 673
!’ he remarked, and the young man gave a high-pitched
boys, they have got it all worked out. They may
the poor man was jealous.’ My father had begun to giggle . ’Do you know what she told me, Nick?
. Sara knew that she had not been intended to understand this
and act as though they have not a serious thought in their
giggle
giggle
EWH 844
CCN 540
107
64
FIGURE 3.6 Examples of “man”, “boys” and “father” as collocates of the term
“giggle”
74 The language of jokes and gender
occurrences. Furthermore, in diverse concordances the form “cackle” is repeated
in sequence to create an onomatopoeic effect thereby inflating the number of con-
cordances. Therefore, not only unlike the word form “giggle” does the word form
“cackle” appear to be used less frequently as a laughter word, but also, diversely
from “giggle”, the collocations of “cackle” are less clear in terms of their asso-
ciation with pronouns that mark gender. It is, however, evident in the corpus
examined that cackling, like giggling, is another undesirable type of laughter as
we find “cackle” collocated with terms like “scornful”, “unfeeling”, “derisive”,
etc. Three interesting concordances of “cackle” are “devilish”, “demonic” and
“lunatic-sounding” that precede the word form, while “old lady” acts as its col-
locate on two occasions.
However, without resorting to a corpus, Vennochi (2007) notes that “HENS
CACKLE. [original upper case] So do witches. And, so does the front-runner in
the Democratic presidential contest”. In fact, throughout the 2008 US Presidential
elections, the media dedicated a large amount of space to deriding Clinton’s
laughter, so much so that according to Groch-Begley (2015), the “Clinton cackle”
and her “record scratch” were constantly adopted as a form of attack. In addition,
during the 2016 run-up to the US Presidential elections the media continued to
ridicule the candidate’s laughter and, above all, her “cackle” while there was no
reference to the quality of laughter of her male opposition. Blogger Sonny Bunch
(2015) goes as far as dehumanizing Clinton by asking “Hannah Groch-Begley
can’t actually think that Hillary Clinton has a normal, appealing, human laugh,
can she? I mean, have you heard it?” while mockery is sustained through the sale
of items such as the “Hillary Clinton 2016 Laughing Pen”, which, according to
the sales’ blurb, produces “a crescendo of maniacal and frightening giggles and
guffaws”.3 Also known as the “scary as hell” pen, consumers are encouraged on
the package to “Laugh with/at Hillary”. Video compilations of Clinton’s laughter
went viral over the internet, together with videos of the Laughing Pen. However,
the extent to which dislike of Clinton is justified by the way she laughs is best
illustrated through remarks left by YouTube viewers that appear below video
clips portraying Clinton’s laughter. Many comments reflect sexist attitudes that
are apparently vindicated by the quality of her signature laugh. Hillary’s laughter
is considered “witchlike”, “evil”, “creepy” with observations such as “who in
their right mind would want to listen to that old witch cackling?” Beneath one
YouTube video of the Laughing Pen, we find comments such as, “She’s not a
witch. Witches are technically human”; “LOL comparing Hillary’s widemouth
GVP 2394 ?’ ‘Dressed in mourning?’ Iris gave an unsympathetic
cackle . ‘Can’t say we didn’t warn her.’
GVP 3099 .‘ ’Oh, yes.’ Iris gave a derisive
cackle . ’The last straw, losing her golfing partner. Enough
s own excesses — simple, melodic threads he untangles from demonic
GVT 83 ‘ll bring to the pictures next,’ she wheezed. Her cackle turned into a bronchial cough. Gertrude stopped working, and collapsed
HGV 1572 ‘Good bye, ma’am. Keep well.’ There was a cackle from the old lady. ‘Ain’t me you want to
J54 890 heard you shouting at Mr. Matthew.’ ’She gave a little cackle and then bent down and began locking the french windows.’’
K57 1639 cackle and sheer noise. But some of the astonishment was that we
FIGURE 3.7 Examples of some collocations of the term “cackle”
The language of jokes and gender 75
laugh next to the Predator was funny! They resemble each other so closely it’s
scary!!!” (sic.). Again, we also find, “That wicked witch of the west sure can open
her mouth wide”.4 Just as everyone has a distinctive tone and timbre of voice, the
same applies to laughter. It is odd that in a politically correct world in which we
must tread carefully so as not to cause offence through our choice of words and
to avoid being indelicate about the physical appearance of others, people can get
away with publicly mocking someone because of their way of laughing. Even Dr
Annie Evans, a well-known expert on female health, when describing the mood
swings which may occur during the menopause in a series of lectures published
on YouTube uses Clinton’s laugh to exemplify menopausal symptoms. “What
women want to know is whether this is normal” asserts Evans, “or am I going
stark, staring raving mad”, at which point viewers are presented with a close-
up of Hillary Clinton with a wide mouthed laugh. The live audience, made up
predominantly of women, can be seen and heard reacting with lengthy laughter
presumably in agreement with the instance of mockery.
Finally, the word form “guffaw” returned only 28 hits in the BNC corpus,
suggesting that, similarly to “cackle”, it is not commonly used. However, 16
occurrences of “guffaw” clearly collocate with male names or pronouns com-
pared to 3 that collocate with females, once more backing up the intuition that
guffawing is more of a male laughter style. In one occurrence in which a certain
Lady Merchiston emits a “cackling guffaw”, we find a combination of two types
of laughter that endow the character with twofold traits that are undesirable in
women in contemporary society, namely ageing and lack of femininity (Figure 3.8
23/HGV1227). As we saw previously, Clinton’s antagonists combine their
remarks about “guffaws” with “frightening giggles”; thus, while paradoxically
linking ageism with immaturity, at the same time they bestow upon her non-
human attributes that are intended to evoke fear.
As for styles of humour, according to Tannen (1991), males generally appear
to favour a “competitive” style when interacting with each other so it might also
follow that a tendency for them to hold centre stage while telling jokes and “top-
ping” those told by other males may be a prominent feature of male comic style.
On the other hand, Tannen claims that females display a preference to collaborate
with other females and “match” their contributions with those of other participants
HGV 122723 when the time comes.’ Lady Merchiston let out a cackling guffaw, and then noticed her godson’s glance going from one to
ALS 183 Doom the jailer laughed. Jake and his men gave a loud guffaw and so did the Town Clerk and the Dragoons. And now
BMU 8Wot a night!' wheezed an old farmer, with a guffaw that shook the raindrops from his whiskers. ‘Granted before asked
CCD 2270 think . . .’ Forest's last words had been accompanied by a guffaw, and Edward's half-formed comment was drowned by the slamming of
HH1 4910 helped out like a dutiful daughter.’ He gave another coarse guffaw . ‘I'll pay in coin like I always does,
EVC 2533 , but that's all.’ Oswin let out a huge guffaw .‘ I admire the man. Two wives and a mistress
CFY 2339 age to him, he wanted not only to laugh but to guffaw, like he used to do when Harry or Martin came out
FEE 3228 carry on the Great Name of Graham – She gave a short guffaw .‘ So now you're going to have what might well
CK9 167 yours?‘ The question was innocent but it brought a great guffaw from the youth and he answered, ‘Ben Smith, Jones
FIGURE 3.8 Examples of some collocations of the term “guffaw”
76 The language of jokes and gender
within a conversation, thereby creating a sort of alliance (1991: 92). In fact, when
it comes to humour, research shows that females tend to use it in a cooperative
way and frequently adopt a variety of jocular styles to provide support for others
(Coates 2014; Holmes 2006; Holmes and Marra 2006; Holmes and Schnurr 2014;
Vine et al. 2009).
One difference between the sexes in the performance of humour may lie in the
invention and telling of jokes, which appears to be more of an activity engaged
in by males (Kuipers 2006: 46). Men create a sort of inclusive atmosphere and
cement groups by means of telling jokes. In contrast, women form closer ties
through telling each other (funny) stories (Coates 2014). According to Davies
(2012), it is males, rather than females, who are responsible for generating joke
cycles that reflect their position in the social order.
Based on experimental data, Hall (2015) claims that laughter is a fundamental
feature in courtship where the female, through laughter, provides an “audience”
for the male who makes jokes. However, in a far-reaching outline of psychology
research on gender differences in sense of humour, Martin (2014) highlights how
difficult it is to generalize about a multifaceted subject such as humour when there
is such wide variability amongst individuals within each gender. Martin, in fact,
concludes that there are more similarities between males and females in aspects
such as sense of humour and joke appreciation than there are differences. At least,
however, the commonplace that women’s sense of humour is generally less than
that of men’s is now considered devoid of foundation.
Targeting gender
Jokes not only have to be about something (see Attardo’s “Situation KR” in
Chapter 1) but they also require a target, someone or something for the recipient
to laugh at. As discussed in Chapter 1, jokes usually target individuals or groups
of people who, for the purpose of the joke, are depicted as being intellectually
challenged or else duped into acting in a senseless manner through the astuteness
of another. Whether the joke is an ethnic joke or one about politics, religion, mar-
riage or any other institution, the target will behave in an injudicious manner or
else be the victim of their own stupidity through someone else’s canniness. Even
so-called “dirty jokes” based on sex, when stripped of their taboo content, are
likely to involve a punchline based on one person’s inanity or another’s astute-
ness. In other words, titillating content simply tends to serve as a frame in which
the joke’s target will be either inherently foolish or else tricked into being so by
another more artful individual. Either way, the recipient of the joke is intended to
laugh at the target.
The target of the ethnic joke, the underdog, typically inhabits a periphery and
is joked about and laughed at by those occupying the more illustrious centre.
As discussed in Chapter 1, every centre has its own outsider who is in some
way depicted as an underdog or as being inferior by the hegemonic majority. As
The language of jokes and gender 77
we have seen, Davies (1998) argues that much ethnic humour may arise from
feelings of economic or sexual fear in the minds of a consolidated and well-estab-
lished group directed towards the new “peripheral” group entering their society.
This view makes sense and is credible as far as, for example, newly arrived immi-
grants in a community are concerned. Established inhabitants fear new “others”,
they fear for their jobs and their spaces. Interestingly, women have traditionally
been targeted in sexist jokes, thus rendering them in some way peripheral to the
society of which they are an integral part. Could it be that in heteronormative
society, women, similarly to migrants, for example, are seen as “other” and thus
as an economic or sexual threat?
On the internet, vast numbers of people not only read, but also partake in the
circulation of humour that can be, to varying degrees, sexist in nature. If it is given
that jokes are founded upon shared ideologies and cultural codes, then, in sub-
stance, such jokes may be deemed as being political. In other words, while “only
joking”, these texts provide significant insight into contemporary perceptions of
gender and sexuality (Billig 2005). In their study of gender-related cyber-humour,
Shifman and Lemish (2010) classify jokes based on gendered humour on the
internet according to whether it is sexist, feminist or postfeminist, three useful
labels that will be adopted in the discussion that follows.
Sexist humour
As the term itself implies, sexist humour targets women, “disparaging them as a
unified collective” Shifman and Lemish (2010).
Q. How do you know when a woman is going to say something intelligent?
A. When her rst words are, “A man once told me. . .”.5
I left three notes scattered around the house for my girlfriend. They say
“Will”, “You” and “Me”. That will keep her busy whilst I watch football
on TV.6
Sexist jokes such as these depict women as unintelligent beings, usually bent on
trapping men into marriage. Shifman and Lemish go on to sub-divide sexist jokes
into “general” and “specific” jokes”. General sexist jokes unite all women under
a single classification in which they all behave in the same manner, while specific
sexist jokes target only certain women according to a number of stereotypical
characteristics, e.g. wives, blondes, nuns, etc.
Significantly, while jokes in general connote men ethnically (Irish, Black,
Italian, etc.) or according to a profession (e.g. doctor, lawyer, engineer, politician,
cleric, etc.) women in jokes (if and when they happen to have a profession) are
typically restricted to the occupation of teachers, nurses and nuns. While nurses
and nuns are largely restricted to the category of dirty jokes, wives and mothers-
in-law are also popular targets. Walker (1988: 120), in fact, suggested that the
78 The language of jokes and gender
ever-present stereotypes of “bimbo and housewife” disguise a society that trivial-
izes women’s lives.
Needless to say, the World Wide Web contains countless websites that special-
ize in collections of jokes – suffice it to google “joke collections” to retrieve 48.1
million hits while other combinations of the term “joke” (e.g. “children’s jokes”,
“clean jokes”, etc.) spawn countless other compilations.7 When googling “joke
collections”, one of the major websites that emerges is “jokes2go”. This website
contains a large number of joke categories listed from A to Z ranging from “Animal
jokes” to “Yo mama jokes”. Most categories appear to be gender neutral apart from
the categories of “Men”, “Men jokes”, “Women”, “Women jokes”, “Blondes”, and,
of course, “Yo mama jokes”. Another highly visible website is “Jokes4all” that
also lists joke categories in alphabetical order.8 Amongst its numerous categories,
the Jokes4all website contains jokes regarding over 50 professions in alphabetical
order ranging from “accountants” to “waitresses”. Although the vast majority of
the listed professions are gender neutral, e.g. doctors, managers, economists, etc.,
the professionals in the jokes are mainly male:
A physicist, biologist and a chemist were going to the ocean for the first time.
The physicist saw the ocean and was fascinated by the waves. He said he
wanted to do some research on the fluid dynamics of the waves and walked
into the ocean. Obviously, he was drowned and never returned.
The biologist said he wanted to do research on the flora and fauna inside
the ocean and walked into the ocean. He too, never returned.
The chemist waited for a long time and afterwards, wrote the observa-
tion, “The physicist and the biologist are soluble in ocean water”.9
“A philosopher”, said the theologian “is like a blind man in a darkened
room looking for a black cat that isn’t there”.
“That’s right”, the philosopher replied, “and if he were a theologian,
he’d find it”.10
Of course, these two jokes are not about gender at all, they are jokes that target
people in high standing occupations and that, according to Davies (2011: 29)
undermine stupidity jokes generally aimed at “powerless people at the bottom end
of the social order”. Nevertheless, the professionals are consistently male and it
would be tempting to argue that we are unconsciously primed to consider pres-
tigious professions to be the monopoly of males. On the same website, however,
the categories of babysitters, nurses and secretaries, while labelled with gender-
neutral terms, include only jokes about female babysitters, nurses and secretaries.11
Furthermore, with the exception of babysitters and waitresses who are paradoxi-
cally targeted both for their stupidity and canniness, jokes about nurses, nuns and
secretaries are mainly obscene in nature. Apart from wives and mothers-in law, the
only occupations that are strictly female at Jokes4all are restricted to “hookers”,
prostitutes, princesses and nuns.
The language of jokes and gender 79
A popular brainteaser from the 1990s illustrates how common gender stereo-
types are:
A man and his son are driving in a car one day, when they get into a fatal
accident. The man is killed instantly but the boy, although unconscious, is
still alive. He is rushed to hospital, and will need immediate surgery. The
doctor enters the emergency room, looks at the boy, and says, “I can’t oper-
ate on this boy, he is my son”. How is this possible?
The answer to the conundrum is simple because the doctor is the boy’s mother, yet
the answer is not always immediate to many recipients because the profession of
doctor tacitly implies “male”. Surprisingly, in 2016, out of 17 mixed-sex under-
graduates majoring in English aged between 21 and 25, only 3 females guessed
the correct answer, while the others were mostly unable to solve the enigma with
most recipients guessing that the surgeon was the boy’s biological father.12 So
again and still, we may be primed to consider some professions more closely
associated with one gender than another.
According to Shifman and Lemish (2010: 871), the internet “offers a unique
perspective for understanding contemporary perceptions and stereotypes of
highly charged issues such as gender and sexuality”. They go on to argue that
while traditionally jokes in which women were the butts reflected a series of
consolidated attitudes and values, the growing visibility of female stand-up
comedians together with a platform for humour provided by the web has helped
subvert these attitudes with what they define as “feminist humor”. In fact, there
is a growing trend for jokes made at the expense of men in industrialized coun-
tries (Bing 2007; Kotthoff 2006; Shifman and Lemish 2010). Sexist jokes aimed
at men include jokes such as when, in answer to the question “Why are women
bad at parking?” the female joker replies “Because they are used to men telling
them that this much (joker indicates an inch with thumb and finger) is ten inches”
(Chiaro 1992). Also:
The patient’s family gathered to hear what the specialists had to say.
“Things don’t look good. The only chance is a brain transplant. This is an
experimental procedure. It might work, but the bad news is that brains are
very expensive, and you will have to pay the costs yourselves”.
“Well, how much does a brain cost?” asked the relatives.
“For a male brain, $500,000. For a female brain, $200,000”.
Some of the younger male relatives tried to look shocked, but all the men
nodded because they thought they understood. A few actually smirked. But
the patient’s daughter was unsatisfied and asked, “Why the difference in
price between male brains and female brains?”
“A standard pricing practice”, said the head of the team.
“Women’s brains have to be marked down because they have actually
been used”.13
80 The language of jokes and gender
Specific sexist jokes
Wives
Returning to Walker’s suggestion that women in jokes are trapped within the
stereotype of “bimbo or housewife”, in many jokes women are indeed portrayed
as sexual objects or as money-driven beings who use their sexuality to trap men
into marriage, yet once they are married, they are no longer keen on sexual
relations with their husbands. However, wives in jokes do retain a predilection
for sexual activity, but with men other than their husbands. These men can be
frequently found in wardrobes by husbands who come home early from work.
When not partaking in adulterous activities, women in sexist jokes spend most of
their time spending their husband’s hard-earned money. In other words, in spe-
cific sexist jokes about wives, women emerge as mercenary beings who, to put it
mildly, are quite despicable.
As argued by Davies (1998, 2011), jokes poke fun at institutions, so it is of
no surprise that there is an abundance of jokes about marriage in general. Yet,
traditionally, when wives are targeted it is either because they no longer have
sexual feelings for their husbands, or because they spend too much money, or a
combination of both:
A wife arrived home after a long shopping trip, and was horrified to find her
husband in bed with a young, lovely thing. Just as she was about to storm
out of the house, her husband stopped her with these words: “Before you
leave, I want you to hear how this all came about. Driving home, I saw this
young girl, looking poor and tired, I offered her a ride. She was hungry, so
I brought her home and fed her some of the roast you had forgotten about in
the refrigerator. Her shoes were worn out so I gave her a pair of your shoes
you didn’t wear because they were out of style. She was cold so I gave her
that new birthday sweater you never wore even once because the colour
didn’t suit you. Her slacks were worn out so I gave her a pair of yours that
you don’t fit into anymore. Then as she was about to leave the house, she
paused and asked, ‘Is there anything else that your wife doesn’t use any-
more?’ And so, here we are!”14
A husband walks into the bedroom holding two aspirins and a glass of water.
His wife asks, “What’s that for?” “It’s for your headache”, he replies. “But I
don’t have a headache”, she says. To which her husband replies, “Gotcha!”
These two jokes both work because of the astuteness of husbands who manage
to find shrewd solutions to overcome their deprivation of marital sex. In the first
joke, the husband justifies his adulterous behaviour because his wife no longer
“uses” his body (for sex), so he therefore chooses charitably to donate it to a
The language of jokes and gender 81
needy woman together with other items his wife no longer uses such as her cast-
off clothing. Notably, in the joke, the new woman is described as a “young, lovely
thing” – literally as an object. In the second joke, the husband craftily takes the
euphemistic excuse of his wife having a headache for not wanting to have sex
literally and provides his wife with painkillers so that he can legitimately have
(non-consensual?) sex with her.15 While on one level this is a stupid/canny joke,
i.e. the wife makes up an excuse to avoid sex while her husband cannily finds a
solution to her “headache”, on another level the joke highlights the power differ-
entials between husband and wife and the “legitimate” entitlement of a husband
to sex, regardless of the wishes of his wife. Furthermore, it also reinforces the
stereotype that wives have no sexual desire, but that male desire will find a way,
despite the lack of receptivity to his desires. Although interpreting this as a rape
script may be going too far, as rape is not explicitly foregrounded, a “rape read-
ing” is also possible. The two (distant) poles in the joke are (a) a way to “force”
the woman to have sexual intercourse against her will and (b) a (clever) way to
prevent the headache excuse (given a subtle interplay of the kind “well I’m not
against it, but I do not feel like it right now”). As in most (clever) jokes, a lot is left
unsaid. In other words, this interpretation is very much in the mind of the beholder
as what is left unsaid is uncontrollable by the teller.
Interestingly, in both jokes, the wife is the guilty party who gets her just
rewards, namely betrayal and/or unwanted sex. According to George Orwell
(2000), the conventions of what he labels the “sex joke” state that “Marriage only
benefits women. Every man is plotting seduction and every woman is plotting
marriage. No woman ever remained unmarried voluntarily”, and this notion is still
constantly reiterated in jokes today:
A groom waits at the altar with a huge smile on his face. His best man
asks, “Why do you look so excited?” The groom replies, “I just had the best
blow job I have ever had in my entire life, and I am marrying the wonder-
ful woman who gave it to me”. The bride waits at the other end of the aisle
with a huge smile on her face. Her maid of honor asks, “Why do you look so
excited?” The bride replies, “I just gave the last blow job of my entire life”.16
Wives in jokes display contemptible personality traits by using sex to trap men
into marriage after which they no longer come up with the goods, yet, at the
same time, they do engage in extra-marital sex. As we have seen, a popular trope
in the “wife/husband” category regards the husband coming home from work
and finding his wife in flagrante with her lover who will be typically hiding in
the wardrobe:
A man comes home earlier than expected from work and hears his wife
yelling. He runs up the stairs and finds her in bed naked and clutching her
chest.
82 The language of jokes and gender
“What’s the matter?” he asks.
“I think . . . I’m having . . . a heart attack”, she gasps.
“I’ll call 911!” he cries. As he is reaching for the phone, the couple’s two
children come running in.
“Daddy, daddy!” they yell. “There’s a naked man in the hall closet!”
The man rushes to the closet and throws open the door to reveal his next-
door neighbor, buck-naked.
“Fred, I can’t believe this!” he yells. “My wife could be having a heart
attack, and here you are running around scaring the kids!”17
Once more, we have a stupidity joke wrapped up within a joke about marriage.
The given within the situation is that the husband is the breadwinner while the
(house)wife has the luxury of being able to stay home and engage in an extra-
marital affair. In fact, Pressley (n.d.) lists 25 “marriage” jokes of which 5 concern
the canniness of wives whose husbands come home from work unexpectedly to
find them in bed with another man. This trope endorses the common imaginary
of a 1950s household where the woman is the homemaker and the husband is a
hardworking dupe. To my knowledge, there are no jokes of women hiding away
in wardrobes from homecoming wives. These 1950s style jokes strengthen the
stereotype of women being restricted to the domain of the home while men ven-
ture beyond – women are stationary and men are in motion. Interestingly, leaving
women at home alone is very dangerous for men. Apart from withdrawing sex,
wives also typically overspend.
A man had his credit card stolen. He however decided not to report it
because the thief was spending less than his wife did.18
Q. What book do wives like the most? A. Their husband’s checkbook!19
Still other jokes about wives focus on unattractive, slovenly women whose husbands
rejoice in their demise.
Q. What worse than nding out your wife’s got cancer? A. Finding out
it’s curable.
In his discussion of seaside postcards, Orwell (2000) notes the ageism upon which
their humour pivots:
Sex-appeal vanishes at about the age of twenty-five. Well-preserved and
good-looking people beyond their first youth are never represented. The
amorous honeymooning couple reappear as the grim-visaged wife and
shapeless, moustachioed, red-nosed husband, no intermediate stage being
allowed for.
The language of jokes and gender 83
While it is undeniable that age has always been a target for comedians, it is also
true that unattractiveness in wives and, as we shall see below, mothers-in-law,
is more acceptable to joke about than unattractiveness in husbands. However,
there is also the trope about the rich, old but canny guy who thinks he can have
any beautiful young woman, but she is of course (being a woman) taking him
for all she can get so it is still the woman who is acting unethically:
A rich man goes golfing with his friends and he brings along a gorgeous
young lady. “Well guys, meet my new fiancée”, he says, full of pride.
And for the rest of the afternoon the friends can’t take their eyes off the
beauty. After the round of golf, the rich man goes up to the bar to order
drinks for the group. One of his friends accompanies him and quietly
asks: “how did you manage to hook up with such a beautiful young lady?
You’re seventy. She must be at least forty years younger than you!” “I lied
about my age”. And she believed you!? How old did you say you were?”
“I told her I was ninety”.20
Mothers-in-law
The portrayal of the mother-in-law in jokes is generally that of an intimidating
battle-axe clutching a rolling pin. Consistently targeted in jokes in which they
traditionally henpeck their long-suffering sons-in-law, these elderly women are
hard-line harridans:
Wife: “You hate my relatives!”
Husband: “No, I don’t! In fact, I like your mother-in-law more than I like
mine”.
Two men were in a pub. One says to his mate, “My mother-in law is an
angel”. His friend replies, “You’re lucky. Mine is still alive”.21
David is finally engaged, and is excited to show off his new bride. “Ma”,
he said to his mother, “I’m going to bring home three girls and I want you
to guess which one is my fiancé”. Sure enough twenty minutes later, David
walks in the door with three girls following behind him. “It’s that one”, said
his mother, without blinking an eye. “Holy cow”, exclaimed David, “how
in the world did you know it was her?” “I just don’t like her”, she replied.
In the spring of 2016, while the Italian parliament discussed the same-sex mar-
riage bill, a common aside by both supporters and non-supporters of the statute
regarded the prospect of a man marrying the daughter of two lesbians who would
end up with two mothers-in-law, who as is well-known, are nasty, ugly naggers.
There is an element of “woe betide” attached to the notion of a mother-in-law
84 The language of jokes and gender
so that two female in-laws add up to a sort of double torment. Jokes about the
hypothetical mother-in-law allow the male joker to get his feelings about her off
his chest. Male audiences and possibly female audiences too associate with these
negative feelings.
“I haven’t spoken to my mother-in-law for 18 months. I don’t like to inter-
rupt her”.
Ken Dodd
We were having tea with my mother-in-law the other day and out of the blue
she said, “I’ve decided I want to be cremated”. “Alright,” I said, “get your coat”.
Dave Spikey
“I took my wife to Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors and one atten-
dant said, ‘Keep her moving, Sir, we’re stocktaking’”.
Les Dawson22
Davies’ (2012) investigation of mother-in-law jokes sets out to demonstrate that
such cycles “stem from a male perception of an incongruity in the social order”
that is based upon “hidden transgressive thoughts or feelings”. According to
Davies, the reason these jokes are funny is that they mention the unmention-
able and “evade rules about how something may be spoken about”. Through a
comparative and historical analysis, Davies asserts that the mother-in-law joke
derives from the tension between the wife’s mother and her son-in-law within
the nuclear family. Men tell jokes about their wives’ mothers in societies in
which extended kin are in an ambiguous situation. While mothers-in-law are
kin, at the same time they are also strangers that occupy an equivocal slot in
the structure of the family. In fact, in cultures where families include extended
kin, such as India and China, there are no mother-in-law jokes. For a series of
economic and practical reasons, in the recent past it was common for young
married couples in Britain to live with their parents, and the natural choice fell
upon living with the wife’s parents. The son-in-law would tend to avoid conflict
with his wife’s mother who was, after all, what could be seen as an interfer-
ing outsider. Furthermore, these jokes conceal the stereotypical suggestion that
women are closer to their mothers than they are to their husbands and that they
are in a collusion with their mothers to infantilize or otherwise persecute the
husband. In the USA, there are lots of jokes about Jewish mothers both because
of something in the Jewish family set-up and owing to the fact that so many
male stand-up comedians of earlier generations were Jewish.
Two men, old friends, run into each other at the bowls club.
“I hear that your mother-in law’s ill”, says the one.
“Yes, she’s in the hospital”.
The language of jokes and gender 85
“How long has she been there for?”
“In 3 weeks’ time, please God, it’ll be a month”.
Aarons 2012: 2723
In conclusion, Davies sees these jokes as a way to manage hostility between
mother-in-law and son-in-law. According to Davies, by joking about them with
other men, they avoid direct conflict with their wives’ mothers. That of course is
not to say that these jokes are to be taken seriously. In the jokes examined so far,
sons-in-law do not really want these women dead and neither do mothers-in-law
take offence at the jokes.
However, despite scouring the internet for father-in-law jokes, there were very
few returns:
Daughter announcing to her father that she was engaged. The father
asked, “What does he do? Does he have any money?” The daughter
replies back saying, “You men are all alike. That’s the first thing he
asked me about you!”
A young woman brings home her fiancé to meet her parents. After din-
ner, her mother tells her father to find out more about the young man.
The father invites the fiancé to his study for a drink. “So what are your
plans?” the father asks. “I am a bible scholar,” the young man replies. “A
bible scholar, huh”, the father says. “Admirable, but what will you do to
provide a nice home for my daughter to live in, as she is used to having?”
The young man replies, “I will study and God will provide for us”. “And
how will you buy her a beautiful engagement ring, which she deserves?”
asks the father. “I will concentrate on my studies and God will provide
for us”, replies the young man. The conversation proceeds in this man-
ner, with each question the father asks, the young man replies that God
will provide. Later, the mother asks, “How did the conversation go?” The
father answers, “He has no job and no plans, but the good news is that he
thinks I am God”.24
Davies also documents a lack of jokes by women about their mothers-in-law,
i.e. their husbands’ mothers. He explains that this is due to women seeing their
mothers-in-law in personal rather than structural terms. In fact, women seri-
ously complain about their mothers-in-law and their aberrant behaviour rather
than make jokes about them (e.g. Apte 2009; Hill 2008). The daughter-in-law is
an intruder in the mother–son relationship in which the mother’s power is ille-
gitimate within a nuclear family structure. It seems that wives have a personal
problem with their mothers-in-law rather than a structural one, making the issue
a serious subject matter. However, subversive comedian Joan Rivers included
mother-in-law jokes in her stand-up routines, such as how she flew halfway round
86 The language of jokes and gender
the world to cremate hers and reprimands herself when she says, “I should have
waited till she was dead”, which is not so different from the typical demise of the
mother-in-law joke told by men.25
Davies, in fact, puts the preponderance of jokes told by men about wives’
mothers down to a gender divide, claiming that joke-telling is a masculine pas-
time. In contrast, as some have claimed, women’s way of joking is in sharp
contrast to the aggressive and competitive joke-telling that is typical of men, in
that women prefer a more “storytelling” style that forms a sense of comity (Coates
2007; Kothoff 2006).
The dirty joke
Dirty jokes relate sexual matters in an indecent or offensive way and of course,
being about sex, in one way or another, they will usually concern gender. As
we saw before, there are diverse categories of dirty jokes, yet, apart from their
titillating content, like so many other jokes, they tend to be mainly either about
someone’s stupidity or else about another’s astuteness. Sex almost acts as a coat
hanger upon which to hang a joke about someone else’s stupidity. However, over
and above stupidity and canniness, these jokes surely also reflect sexist attitudes
in society. For example, one blatantly sexist category of dirty jokes that was
especially popular in the late 1990s is about blonde girls and their UK Essex
girl equivalents. These jokes play on a combination of the stupid target, i.e. the
blonde/Essex girl and a canny male who will take advantage of the stupid target
and lewdness.
Q. What do Essex girls use for protection during sex?
A. Bus shelters.
Q. Did you hear about the new blonde paint?
A. It’s not real bright, but it’s cheap, and spreads easy.
Shifman and Lemish classify blonde jokes as “specific” sexist jokes. Davies has
explored these jokes at length (2011: 69–76) without classifying them as sexist
in any way, but simply claiming that blonde joke cycles are predated by other
jokes about “sexy blonde-haired” women in general. Davies argues that there is
a widely held perception that blonde-haired women are remarkably attractive.
He then reports Ovid’s accounts of the Ancient Romans who would cut off the
blond locks of German slave girls captured in war to make false hair for their
own womenfolk who had often severely damaged their hair by excessive use of
bleach. Davies also relates how, later, Arab and Turkish slave traders acquired
blonde female slaves from Poland and the Baltic states, while today pimps from
wealthy Arab countries import and exploit blonde prostitutes from the Ukraine.
It is no secret that women with other hair colours have traditionally attempted to
The language of jokes and gender 87
imitate blondeness with the use of dyes, peroxide, bleach and wigs. Since the time
of music hall and vaudeville in Britain, USA and France, blondes have routinely
been the subject of jokes in which hair colour was completely irrelevant apart
from the fact of its being a cue that the joke would be about sex:
A stunningly stacked blonde walked into a dress shop and asked the
manager.
“I wonder if I could try on that blue dress in the window”.
“Go right ahead,” he said, “It might help business”.
Davies 2011: 71
According to Davies, the allure of blondeness explains why fair-haired women
have become joke targets. In addition, while Davies acknowledges a class-
dimension – blondes/Essex girls are associated with material, working class
occupations – he attributes the careless use of their bodies for sex to their stupid-
ity. Although Davies does not mention the word “sexism” in his discussions, the
language in which blonde jokes are couched does indeed strongly whiff of sex-
ism. The joke about blonde paint in which a substance is compared to a specific
group of women cannot be acquitted of chauvinism given the claim that both
paint and blonde women are “cheap” and that both “spread[s] easy”. Also, the
use of the term “stacked” successfully dehumanizes the woman in the joke using
a rather vicious way to describe a woman with large breasts and a voluptuous
body. That is to say, the words used in these jokes go beyond the beauty and
allure of the women and trivialize and humiliate them as merely sexual objects.
These words debase women. If these jokes circulate, then there are presumably
people who see women in this way and as a matter of fact, the widespread and
uncritical circulation of these jokes reflects entrenched gendered power rela-
tions. While jokes about blonde-haired men exist, they seem to be based upon
pre-existing blonde girl jokes. Furthermore, there is no joke cycle concerning
stupid fair-haired men who are also extremely promiscuous.26 Notably, the fact
that jokes about stupid blonde men do not exist as a cycle, means that they are
limited to smaller circles of tellers and recipients. An example of gender equal-
ity within the context of blonde-haired people concerns a sexually inexperienced
couple of blondes:
Q. Why was the blonde’s belly button sore?
A. Because her boyfriend was blonde too.27
However, the absence of promiscuity in the male blond in jokes shows that a
double standard regarding sexual mores still exists, as reflected in these jokes.
There would be no ambiguity in a fair-haired man seeking (sexual) protection by
standing under a bus shelter. A penchant for abundant sexual activity with diverse
partners is not perceived in the same way for men as it is for women. As for the
88 The language of jokes and gender
joke suggesting the fair-haired woman try on an outfit in the shop window in order
to attract customers, if we substitute the “stunningly stacked” blonde for a “well
hung” fair-haired man, we might find that while the gentleman would indeed
attract a crowd, his nudity would not necessarily help business. There is a trace
of ridicule in male striptease well documented in the comic trope represented in
films such as The Full Monty (directed by Peter Cattaneo, UK, 1997) and, more
generally in dance routines that are popular on talent shows in which naked men
play a (dangerous) game of peek-a-boo with the help of objects to cover their
genitals.28 Should a dancer accidentally mistake a hand movement, a view of his
genitals would cause ridicule and laughter. Compare this to the photograph of
Prime Minister Theresa May and First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon who
are ridiculed in the British tabloids for (a perfectly respectable) vision of their
legs. “Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it” reads the headline of the Daily Mail
encouraging readers to ogle at the two politicians’ legs.29
The type of ogling that occurs towards the naked male body results in a very
different perception of the body with respect to the way the female body is both
gazed upon and perceived. If not ridicule, the nudity of a male body in a shop
window may project beauty of Greek proportion but not necessarily eroticism. On
the other hand, the female body is endowed with erotic capital and hard as we may
try, owing to its lack of the same erotic capital, the male body cannot be objecti-
fied in the same way. A comic scene from the film The Dressmaker (directed by
Jocelyn Moorhouse, Australia, 2015) pictures mother and daughter dressmakers
(respectively played by Judy Davis and Kate Winslet) ogling at the nakedness of a
well-proportioned and muscular male customer (Liam Hemsworth). Interestingly,
the humour in the scene is created by making the two women the target of the joke,
especially the elderly mother who openly shows pleasure in what she sees and is
ridiculed for doing so. The suggestion is that sex is something in which the older
woman should no longer be interested. It is an incongruity and therefore material
for humour. Last F**kable Day, a sketch from the US comedy series Inside Amy
Schumer backs up the commonplace that older women are not or perhaps should
not be interested in sex.30 In the sketch, Schumer comes across 50+ actors, Tina
Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Patricia Arquette who are having a picnic to cel-
ebrate Dreyfus’ “last fuckable day”. The sketch is a send-up of the way in which
Hollywood treats older female actors by putting them out to pasture years before
their male contemporaries.
So, blonde/Essex girl jokes reflect and target women behaving “badly” because
of their stupidity, and according to Davies these jokes have little or no effect on
society, which, of course is probably a truism. In fact, Davies claims that in general
“Jokes have no consequences for society as a whole” (2011: 266) and that they are
merely a “thermometer” that expresses the status of a society rather than a “ther-
mostat” that can adjust society in any way (2011: 248). However, the consequences
of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons suggest that some groups see humour as extremely
powerful and subversive, and it might be equally sustainable to claim that the
The language of jokes and gender 89
thermometer might be recording power relationships. Furthermore, if humour is so
inconsequential, the question arises as to why it is so strictly monitored in totalitar-
ian societies. However, we must bear in mind that when jokes travel – and today
they travel quickly and ubiquitously – they may easily be received in the “wrong
circles” and become a cause for offence. As argued by Kuipers and Van der Ent
(2016: 605–33) with regard to ethnic jokes, context is essential. The playful and
ambiguous nature of ethnic (and gendered) jokes may reflect entrenched ideolo-
gies (Billig 2005; Weaver 2011). After all, who is to deny that when someone
targets an old/fat/blonde/promiscuous woman or a gay man or a lesbian in a joke,
they are doing so because their audience shares that same mind-set and will align
with the joker? A mind-set that will no longer be funny if it accidentally travels
into the group being targeted:
Q. How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. That’s not funny.
As long as promiscuous females are targeted rather than licentious men, the ther-
mometer is undoubtedly saying something about society’s perception of female
sexuality. Whichever way we look at it, the blondes and Essex girls in jokes are
taken advantage of by men. It is the blondes who are derided for their stupidity
and certainly not the men who benefit from it. However, the cleverness of the men
and stupidity of the women may well be only half the story, as so-called “dirty
jokes” are not restricted to blondes or Essex girls, yet do frequently target women
tout court.
A famous heart specialist doctor died and everyone was gathered at his
funeral. A regular coffin was displayed in front of a huge heart. When the
minister finished with the sermon and after everyone said their good-byes,
the heart was opened, the coffin rolled inside, and the heart closed. Just
at that moment one of the mourners started laughing. The guy next to him
asked: “Why are you laughing?” “I was thinking about my own funeral,” the
man replied.“What’s so funny about that?” “I’m a gynaecologist”.31
The joke verges on the ridiculous, with an image of a coffin sliding into a vagina
like a probe. It is an analogy of the equally ridiculous image of the coffin going
into the heart. No human organ inserts itself into a heart, so the image of the
coffin going into the heart is a giveaway as to how one is primed to interpret
the punchline. What is going into the heart is a foreign object, but the scene
as described demonstrates the heart specialist’s love for his work (the image
of the heart functioning both as a sign of the specialization in cardiology, but
also as an expression of his love for his work). The gynaecologist thinks of the
vagina in the same way, as a way of penetrating the physical object of his work,
while expressing his gleeful desire to do so (clearly a huge professional taboo).
90 The language of jokes and gender
The gynaecological part of the joke picks up only on the penetration reading, not
on the love for his work reading. This joke could indeed fall into Davies’ category
of canny jokes as the triumphant gynaecologist imagines himself in his coffin pen-
etrating a huge vagina, i.e. priming with the “huge” heart at the start of the joke.
In terms of “priming prosody” (Hoey 2005), the word “gynaecologist” immedi-
ately primes with the word “vagina” even though the latter term itself is missing
from the joke. In the joke image, the coffin would still be tiny when compared
to the huge vagina, yet the triumphal sense of accomplishment conveyed by the
gynaecologist’s unstated implication suggests that there is something else going
on here beyond canniness. Could this joke appeal to someone who does not spend
their (his?) time with his hand in women’s vaginas? Is the coffin a symbol of a
hand, or a phallus, or indeed a whole body? The idea of a man being swallowed
by a vagina might be both exciting and terrifying at the same time for an imagined
male audience and certainly, if what we fear most is what we most desire, and
jokes are a way of escaping the internal censor, then a Freudian interpretation of
this joke would carry some weight. One reading of the joke reflects a social asso-
ciation between humour and power that is entrenched in the notion of domination
present in the act of penetration itself, as argued by radical feminists like Dworkin
(2006 [1987]). The gynaecologist is so powerful, he (in the form of his coffin) can
dominate and enter the huge vagina; another reading, however, might suggest the
humiliation of the coffin/corpse being sucked into the all-powerful vagina. The
second reading reveals a deep fear that a vagina has the power to swallow up and
consume. That reading implicates a different kind of joke: one in which desire and
fear are linked. Is it possible that a male audience would laugh out of fear? What
would this interpretation mean for a female audience, for whom the first interpre-
tation may be a very offensive form of objectification in which the vagina is seen
as only the sexual province of a man, and further, does not acknowledge women’s
desire or their autonomy.
As Billingsley points out (2016: 24) while excluding power relations in his
discussion of blonde jokes, Davies does, however, begin to theorize about the
relationship between humour and supremacy in his discussion of jokes by hetero-
sexuals that target gay men. Here Davies links these jokes to an obsession with
penetration, dominance and becoming like women (Davies 2011: 155; my italics).
Davies also stresses that the relationship between penetrator and penetrated
reflects “patterns of social domination” (2011: 166). If this argument counts for
the heterosexual obsessions about gay men, then might it not also count (a fortiori)
for heterosexual men’s relationship with women? The gynaecologist joke is cer-
tainly about some kind of power play. In fact, let us see what happens if we alter
the joke slightly:
A famous heart specialist doctor died and everyone was gathered at his
funeral. A regular coffin was displayed in front of a huge heart. When the
minister finished with the sermon and after everyone said their good-byes,
the heart was opened, the coffin rolled inside, and the heart closed. Just at
The language of jokes and gender 91
that moment one of the mourners started laughing. The guy next to him
asked: “Why are you laughing?” “I was thinking about my own funeral” the
man replied. “What’s so funny about that?” “I’m a proctologist”.
By replacing the gynaecologist with a proctologist in the joke, an anus would
then have to replace the vagina in the image, thus changing the joke quite radi-
cally. The punchline no longer says, “I’m about to penetrate my way into a vagina
and enjoy this feeling for eternity”, but “I’d hate this to happen to me (i.e. get
swallowed up by an anus) when I die”. This is quite a different kind of laughter
compared to the man who is happy to penetrate a vagina. The assumption is that
heterosexual men do not like being penetrated. In this case, it is the proctologist
doing the penetrating. We are left to wonder whether or not he would enjoy it, as
it is the act of penetration that is key to the joke. In fact, while it is common to
hear remarks made by men regarding the good luck of gynaecologists who spend
their time inserting their hands and enjoying the company of female genitalia,
it is extremely rare to hear envious remarks about proctologists who examine
anuses for a living. With the idea of a proctologist penetrating an anus, arguably
the power balance shifts because of either the suggestion of anal sex and/or the
implied homosexuality. In this joke, being penetrated is scoffed and feared rather
than being the (fortunate? delighted?) penetrator which is always seen as an act of
power. Another reading entirely could imply that the coffin is like a medical probe
being inserted into an orifice, thus making it funnier than the original, but in a dif-
ferent way, as it picks up on the reading that medical professionals probe different
bodies, and the anus is the bottom of the barrel – no pun intended. A similar kind
of sexual domination and power play can be seen in the following joke:
A man gets the words “I love you” tattooed on his penis. His wife says,
“Stop putting words in my mouth!”
Tucker 2012
As before, on one level, we can explain the joke in terms of the man’s canniness
in getting such a tattoo, as a “romantic” reading overlaps and clashes with an “oral
sex” reading. Stereotypically women want men to say, “I love you”, and men
want women to show them how much they love them by giving them oral sex.
The man in the joke is literally putting words into the woman’s mouth so that she
can stereotypically demonstrate how much she loves him by saying so, but also
by performing oral sex on him, without her permission. She tells him to stop, so
there is no consent in this act. On another interpretation, the act of fellatio itself,
particularly without mutual consent, could be considered an act of power and
dominance on the part of the man receiving it. Rather like the use of the term “my
bitch” in rap culture to refer to a person someone “owns” – and note, “bitch” can
only be feminine even if “someone’s bitch” can be of either sex – jokes like this
one highlight (and some would say, reinforce) the idea of male superiority in the
social hierarchy.
92 The language of jokes and gender
Rape jokes
No discussion of gender and humour would be complete without a discussion of
rape jokes. Rape jokes fall into the category of specific sexist jokes that straddle
two categories: that of the dirty joke, owing to their coarse content, and that of
the sexist joke. Rape jokes are very different from what I shall label more main-
stream dirty jokes as they take unwholesomeness up a notch by joking about a
heinous crime – something that has rendered these jokes, those who tell them
and recipients’ reactions to them, the subject of much public debate. These jokes
have become significant on the humour scene in the digital age because of the
numerous discussions that appear on the web regarding the phenomenon. In a
study analysing disputes on the internet regarding the funniness of rape jokes,
Kramer discusses the difficulty in defining what we actually mean by “rape jokes”
(2011: 139). Is a rape joke one in which the main plot element is rape? A joke that
describes rape? Kramer wonders if it is sufficient simply to “implicitly gesture
towards it” for a joke to qualify as a rape joke. As we saw previously, in a joke in
which a husband resolves his wife’s headache with an aspirin to be able to have sex
with her, a rape reading may be possible in a joke where significant sense depends
on variables like the recipient’s perspective and the joker’s intentions. Owing to
their violent content, jokes that are widely considered to be highly controversial
are those in which the main plot element is rape and those that describe rape.
Disputes on the internet principally concern whether such jokes can be funny in
the first place. As Kramer argues, if rape jokes exist then some people obviously
find them funny. The point is that the “rape joke” debate is about whether people
should find rape jokes funny, hence endowing humour, and especially humour
about rape, with what Kramer labels “moral weight” (2011: 138). To some, telling
a rape joke is seen as breaking social norms because rape is a crime about which
it is inappropriate to adopt a non-serious stance. Furthermore, for others, telling a
rape joke or laughing at one may indicate alignment with rapists, almost as though
the verbalization and report of the act becomes the act itself. There are others
for whom not being able to tell jokes about rape impinges upon their freedom
of speech. Problematically, laughing at a rape joke may render whoever laughs
morally reprehensible; not laughing may see him accused of lacking a sense of
humour. It is worth considering this question: if the process of laughter is invol-
untary, are some people saying that in the face of rape jokes laughter should be
supressed? And if this is indeed the case, how could this suppression be achieved?
As Davies has argued, whole categories of disaster jokes and sick jokes have
always existed, and people are always going to joke about any subject, no matter
how unpalatable. An example of the fine line between serious and non-serious
discourse can be exemplified by an incident that occurred in 2012 during a perfor-
mance in which stand-up comedian Daniel Tosh told a rape joke.32 Whether or not
the joke was in good or bad taste is not at issue, but what is at issue is the come-
dian’s response to a woman in the audience who heckled him and shouted out
that rape is never funny. To this, Tosh replied, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl
got raped by, like, five guys right now? Like right now?” Clearly, Tosh tried to
The language of jokes and gender 93
humiliate the woman by asserting his power, as stand-up comedians will do when
heckled. However, his comment caused much controversy on social media and
soon led to his having to apologize. Tosh’s initial joke may have been in bad taste,
yet we do joke about everything and anything. The problem with Tosh’s response
to his heckler was that it sounded like an invitation to rape and a celebration of
a violent crime. In addition, and this is likely to have been the issue, he stepped
outside the play frame for his riposte. Although he was standing on stage, and in
a comedy club, and the rape joke which the heckler disputed took place within a
play frame, context matters. Tosh was knowingly or unknowingly approving and
giving authenticity to a crime.
Additionally, over and above the viciousness of the act of rape itself that is
described in such jokes, these jokes also tend to include and describe other diverse
forms of violent acts. Only very rarely can rape jokes be quite innocuous, such as
the one-liner, “Rape: small word, long sentence”, that puns on the terms “rape”
and “sentence” and is in any event a warning about rape, not an encouragement to
engage in it.33 Naturally, this joke is not part of the norm of rape jokes. The typical
rape joke can be quite graphic and hence disturbing. These jokes remind us that
although we are human beings that distinguish ourselves from other non-human
animals, behaviour such as rape is non-human, animal-like conduct. Critchley
provides us with many examples of satire from the literary works of authors such
as Aesop, Kafka, Swift and Orwell to Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons in which
animals take on human features (2002: 31). Critchley argues that while the animal
who becomes human is endearing and amusing, when the reverse happens and the
human becomes a beast, the effect is disgusting. The rape joke evokes the epitome
of animal behaviour in the human.
I was walking down a street when the woman in front of me dropped her
bags. She asked me for help. “Of course I’ll help”, I said to her, “With how
beautiful you are, I bet you can get a man to do anything”. She giggled and
flirted back by touching my arm and saying, “With how strong you are, I
bet you can get a woman to do anything”. I laughed and said, “Yes, I can
actually”. Then I raped her.
On one interpretation, the joke is a typical example of two scripts that overlap and
oppose each other to create a single script. The joke contains an apparent “two
people flirting” reading/script in which the couple flatter each other reciprocally
for their physical attributes of beauty and strength through which they can get
the opposite sex to do “anything”. A second “sexual” reading/script is concealed
and hinges on the term “anything” thereby setting up the rape in the punchline. A
person who is being raped is passive and does nothing but gets something done
to her. This is reflected syntactically through use of the passive voice. It is more
common to read, “X was raped by Y” rather than “Y raped X”. Yet “Y raped X”
is more forceful than the more common alternative. Perhaps if the active form
was used more frequently more people would become aware of the gravity of the
offence. In fact, one feature that makes rape jokes especially horrifying is the fact
94 The language of jokes and gender
that these jokes are typically couched in the first person. In other words, the joke-
teller is the rapist himself. The use of the first person combined with the backdrop
of an ordinary situation provides further incongruity and at the same time brutality
to the narrative. The punch is quite unambiguous, there is no pun or duplicity in
“then I raped her”. Of course, there are other joke cycles that are couched in the
first person like the “I walked into a bar/pub the other day” that prime the recipi-
ent for what is to come, but the use of “I” in rape jokes does not occur within a
fixed joke cycle signalled, for example, by the “bar/pub” frame. Also, very sel-
dom are those “walked into a bar” jokes dependent on the person (first or third) in
which the joke is told. They usually simply depend on context and personal style.
Additionally, the heterogeneity of the manner in which rape jokes are framed
does not immediately signal a Knowledge Resource (cf. Attardo). These jokes are
delivered in a nonchalant tone – even though they are to be read on websites rather
than recited – that continues right to the punchline where the use of the throw
away “then” highlights an ordinariness contained in the action of rape. Whoever
posted this joke is, in fact, being openly tendentious while at the same time cov-
ertly reinforcing the “woman asking for it” discourse because of the way in which
the victim giggles and flirts with her aggressor/rapist.
In a collection of “sick” jokes, Jardon (2014) provides 44 jokes under the
heading of “Sex Crimes”, 17 of which are specifically about raping women – the
remaining jokes being more specifically about necrophilia and paedophilia. Nine
of these jokes are told in the first person, in other words by the rapist himself:
I was raping a woman the other night and she said “Please, think of my
children!” Kinky bitch.
I hate having to walk through parks alone at night. Makes me wonder why
I became a rapist in the first place.
For me having sex is a lot like spreading butter on toast. It’s easier with a
credit card but much easier with a knife.
Jardon 2014
These three jokes are all set against a background of normality. If the oppositeness
and overlap of Attardo and Raskin’s GTVH is created simultaneously by both
the duplicity and the incongruity of the situation, undeniably, inherent illogicality
manifests itself in the casualness of the language. Consider the insouciance of “I
was raping a woman the other night” in which the heinousness of the felony is
cushioned by the normalcy of actions conveyed through the past continuous tense
as the rapist’s misdeed casually occurred “the other night”. In the second joke a
person claims that he is frightened of walking “through parks alone at night” while
in fact, it is he, the narrator himself, who is the perpetrator of violence and not an
unknown other. The utterance “Makes me wonder why I became a rapist in the
first place” weakens the crime of rape when it is set against other possible forms
The language of jokes and gender 95
of criminality that he might encounter in the park at night (and also, it makes being
a particular type of criminal a career choice). The third example begins by com-
paring sex with spreading butter on toast, a contrast that evokes the congeniality
and warmth of a kitchen but which ends in vulgarity and violence. All three jokes
insult women further by suggesting that sex is only obtainable via payment or vio-
lence. However, the most striking rape jokes juxtapose what at first sight appears
to be consensual sex, with pure brutality:
It’s a fact that 9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape.
Hello, my name is Rape. Remember it; you’ll be screaming it later.
I like my wine how I like my women. 15 years old and locked in a basement.
My favourite sexual position is the JFK. I splatter all over her while she
screams and tries to get out of the car.34
Finally, a sub-category of rape jokes ends with the violent death of the victim.
These jokes too are contained within a linguistic framework of ordinariness as
discussed previously.
I never do well with women, they always want to hug, cuddle and pillow talk
after sex. I just like to slam the boot shut and push the car into the river.35
A further adverse aspect of rape jokes is that they play on the assumption that the
victim may actually enjoy being raped. Many rape jokes concern the sexual desire
of nuns. Presumably, nuns are targeted because of the unnaturalness of choos-
ing a life of celibacy that some may consider bizarre. Yet the fact that nuns are
continually stereotyped in jokes suggests that these particular sexist jokes transfer
perfectly normal physiological sexual desire into a craving to be raped. In a sense,
these jokes implicitly justify a felony on the part of the rapist as a case of satisfy-
ing the sexual need of the victim.
A nun is walking down a deserted road when a man grabs her and starts rap-
ing her. After the rapist is done, he says, “Hey Sister, what are you going to
tell the other Sisters now?”
“I’ll tell them the truth, that you grabbed me, threw me to the ground, and
raped me twice . . . unless you’re tired”, she responded.36
Two nuns, Sister Mary and Sister Elizabeth are walking through the park
when they are jumped by two thugs. Their habits are ripped from them and
the men begin to sexually assault them. Sister Elizabeth casts her eyes heav-
enward and cries, “Forgive him Lord, for he knows not what he is doing!”
Sister Mary turns and moans, “Oh God, mine does!!!”37
96 The language of jokes and gender
Presumably, the world has its share of sexually frustrated beings, but such jokes
imply that these women actually want to be raped. Whether a person is not getting
their share of sex by choice or because they are old or irretrievably unattractive,
does not necessarily mean they cannot wait to be raped. Rape is a heinous crime,
the crime is not at all funny and, as we have seen, many rape jokes are extremely
unpleasant. However, to quote outspoken comedian George Carlin, we should be
able to joke about anything; it clearly depends on how the joke is constructed.38
This is demonstrated in Carlin’s own words: “Feminists do not think all men are
rapists. Rapists do”.
A 14-year-old boy was arrested for raping an 8-year-old girl in Cardiff. He
was later released without charge, after a judge ruled the girl was dressed
provocatively in her woolly fleece.
The joke that plays on the commonplace that Welshmen (like Sardinians and other
sheep farmers around the world) partake in sexual activities with sheep. However,
on another level the joke mocks the discourse of rape in which the victim, the girl,
actually provokes rape and becomes the accused because she is dressed provoca-
tively. Of a similar ilk is the remark made by British female stand-up comedian
Bridget Christie at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 2015:
I know you didn’t come here today to hear a rape joke but you’ve all come
here dressed like you want to hear one so it’s not my fault.39
The final example is similar. It too is a meta-joke that subverts the genre even
further by couching the joke within the typical structure of the rape joke, i.e.
use of the first person and casualness of both situation and language. The joke
is set in an ordinary pub where an ordinary young girl is sitting having a drink.
Equally “normal” is the supposition that the speaker is about to take advantage
of her:
I was in the pub last night and I took advantage of a young girl. When she
went to the toilet, I nicked her chair.
In 2015 the Thames Valley Police promoted a short video cartoon, Tea Consent,
which compares initiating sex to making a cup of tea.40 The voiceover describes a
number of ambiguous situations in which sex is implied, yet never mentioned as
the text always keeps within the tea analogy.
Maybe they were conscious when you asked them if they wanted tea,
and they said “yes”. But in the time it took you to boil the kettle, brew
the tea and add the milk they are now unconscious . . . Don’t make them
drink the tea. They said “yes” then, sure, but unconscious people don’t
want tea.
The language of jokes and gender 97
For the sake of completeness, I would like to add a short video that, after being
broadcast as a preview of BBC television’s Tracey Ullman’s Show (Season 2,
Episode 6) in mid-March 2017, immediately went viral online.41 In the clip, a well-
dressed young man is in a police station being interviewed after he has reported
that he has been mugged at knifepoint. The man is noticeably in a state of shock
when Ullman, in the persona of a rather unsympathetic detective, interrogates
him. The young man is wearing a suit and tie and Ullman asks, “Is this what you
were wearing when it happened? You look quite provocatively wealthy”. When
the young man says that he fails to see what he is wearing has anything to do
with the incident, the detective Ullman insists, “Just a bit of an invitation, isn’t it?
Like you’re advertising it”. Of course, the parallel with a post-rape interrogation
is quite evident. Police detectives in films and TV series typically accuse rape vic-
tims of wearing inappropriate clothes such as short skirts and therefore the victims
are implicitly “asking for it”. Furthermore, the cold manner in which police offi-
cials grill victims is replicated in the parody. The young man’s visible distress is
clearly heightened by the callous manner of the detective; when Ullman brings in
a counsellor to assist the victim she tells her, “This gentleman’s a bit upset; he was
mugged earlier”, to which the counsellor replies “Oh dear!” According to a semi-
nal work on women’s language by Robin Lakoff, expressions such as “Oh dear!”
that are typically connected to the speech of women, diminish the force of what
has caused their use. Lakoff (1975: 10) famously argued that expressions such
as “Oh fudge my hair is on fire” and “Dear me, did he kidnap the baby” under-
score how inappropriately soft expressions often adopted by females in place of a
stronger four-lettered taboo word favoured by males, will weaken the importance
of the matter at hand. In this clip, the use of such traditionally female language
actually becomes a strong weapon so that “Oh dear!” sounds like a mockingly
feeble reaction to mugging, yet simultaneously highlights how rape is all too often
belittled. Donning a smug expression, the counsellor then asks the man whether
he had been drinking after which, accusingly and without a shred of sympathy
the detective adds, “Yes, because if you’d had a drink it could send out confusing
signals . . . Lead somebody on with the nice suit and the phone, and then at the
last minute, say, ‘I don’t want to be mugged!’” As in the “tea” parody discussed
earlier, simply replacing the word “rape” with “tea”, blaming the victim of mug-
ging for the crime derides the widespread narrative that puts rape victims at fault.
When the man repeats that the mugger pointed a knife at his throat, the detective
coldly wonders, “How is somebody to know that you don’t enjoy handing over
your possessions unless you make your intentions clear?” The man repeats that
he did not scream because the mugger had a knife and he was “really scared”, but
the detective tells him that he will have to accept some of the responsibility for
what has happened to him. The parody closes with a policeman who interrupts
the interview because of someone who is complaining about receiving abusive
emails. The detective asks about the font adopted in the mails, “If it’s something
coquettish like Helvetica, he has probably brought it on himself!” The parody, of
course, highlights how in cases of rape, a double standard is often applied.
98 The language of jokes and gender
Feminist jokes
Alongside sexist female jokes, the internet is full of plenty of what Shifman and
Lemish label “feminist” jokes that parallel conventional male sexist jokes such as
the one below.
Q. How do you know when a woman’s about to say something smart?
A. When she starts her sentence with “A man once told me”.42
Traditional sexist jokes reflect gender inequalities and hegemonic stereotyping.
Feminist jokes, on the other hand, subvert heteronormative expectations and
according to Franzini (1996) are “ground in criticism of the patriarchal structure
of society and aspire[s] to reform it”.
Q. Why did God create men rst?
A. Because we learn from our mistakes.43
Q. What did God say after creating Adam?
A. I can do better.
Q. Why don’t women blink during foreplay?
A. They don’t have time.
According to Shifman and Lemish, feminist humour opposes the present state
of affairs and at the same time empowers women by giving them a sort of free-
dom of (humorous) speech for which the internet provides a convenient and ideal
platform. However, the internet is not the only platform for feminist humour as
female stand-up comics in theatres and television are also significant drivers of
feminist humour. However, the internet plays a part in the consumption of these
routines as recordings of these comedians’ live performances are available on
platforms such as YouTube and therefore spread to millions of users.
“The best way to a man’s heart is through his hanky pocket with a bread knife”.
Jo Brand
“I blame my mother for my poor sex life. All she told me was, ‘The man
goes on top and the woman underneath’. For three years my husband and I
slept in bunk beds”.
Joan Rivers44
“In advertisements, there are just two types of women: wanton, gagging
for it; or vacuous. We’re either coming on a window-pane, or laughing
at salads”.
Bridget Christie
The language of jokes and gender 99
These examples provide a mix of feminist attitudes. While Brand and Rivers
provide traditional script oppositions: a nurturing/murder script by Brand and a
sexual/furniture script by Rivers, Bridget Christie’s asides are especially interest-
ing because there are no oppositions as she is actually telling it like it is. In other
words, the incongruity of the remarks lies in the absurdity of reality itself where
in advertising, women are indeed often portrayed as hypersexualized and/or
vacuous. Indeed, the script contains hyperbole and a mixture of registers, but it is
also the case that advertisements do make use of women displaying happy and/or
erotic expressions while handling foodstuff and cleaning products. Christie’s gag
is an example of “charged” humour that according to Krefting, is humour that
challenges “social inequality and cultural exclusion” (2014: 2).
Postfeminist humour
The so-called postfeminist movement is multifaceted and diverse. What is certain
is that postfeminism has turned away from traditional issues concerning women’s
oppression to embrace women’s abilities and accomplishments by positively focus-
ing on many and different areas of lifestyle. The movement, however, is heavily
influenced by and involved in mass media and consequently spills over into ques-
tions about consumerism, i.e. beauty products, fashion, etc. The individual female
body and sexual empowerment are brought to the forefront of audience conscious-
ness as opposed to an older fashion of public debate regarding equality and the
breaking of the socio-political glass ceilings. Thus, whereas in traditional sexist
humour there is a hierarchy of males and females – as we have seen so far, domina-
tion plays a central role in sexist male/female jokes – postfeminist humour pivots
on the differences between the two sexes. It especially hones in on differences in
communicative styles and emotional needs and, by focusing on these differences, a
concept that owes much to the writings of Tannen (1991) who initially made these
differences respectable long before postfeminist arguments. Rather this humour
seemed to reinforce the idea of “equal but different”. Postfeminist humour oblit-
erates some elements of the hierarchy woven into traditional sexist humour.
Typically, these jokes will highlight, for example, women’s need to discuss
feelings and males’ apparent lack of a similar need and the diverse sexual neces-
sities of the two sexes.
One evening last week, my girlfriend and I were getting into bed. Well,
the passion starts to heat up, and she eventually says, “I don’t feel like it,
I just want you to hold me”. I said, “WHAT??!! What was that?!” So she
says the words that every boyfriend on the planet dreads to hear. . . “You’re
just not in touch with my emotional needs as a woman enough for me to
satisfy your physical needs as a man”. She responded to my puzzled look
by saying, “‘Can’t you just love me for who I am and not what I do for you
in the bedroom?” Realizing that nothing was going to happen that night, I
went to sleep. The very next day I opted to take the day off work to spend
100 The language of jokes and gender
time with her. We went out to a nice lunch and then went shopping at a big,
big unnamed department store. I walked around with her while she tried on
several different very expensive outfits. She couldn’t decide which one to
take, so I told her we’d just buy them all. She wanted new shoes to compli-
ment her new clothes, so I said, “Let’s get a pair for each outfit”. We went
on to the jewellery department where she picked out a pair of diamond ear-
rings. Let me tell you . . . she was so excited. She must have thought I was
one wave short of a shipwreck. I started to think she was testing me because
she asked for a tennis bracelet when she doesn’t even know how to play
tennis. I think I threw her for a loop when I said, “That’s fine, honey”. She
was almost nearing sexual satisfaction from all of the excitement. Smiling
with excited anticipation, she finally said, “I think this is all, dear, let’s go
to the cashier”. I could hardly contain myself when I blurted out, “No honey,
I don’t feel like it”. Her face just went completely blank as her jaw dropped
with a baffled, “WHAT?” I then said, “Honey! I just want you to HOLD this
stuff for a while. You’re just not in touch with my financial needs as a man
enough for me to satisfy your shopping needs as a woman”. And just when
she had this look like she was going to kill me, I added, “Why can’t you just
love me for who I am and not for the things I buy you?” Apparently, I’m not
having sex tonight either.45
This narrative neatly fits into the category of canny jokes in the sense that the
husband reciprocates his wife’s behaviour in which she does not consent to
sex following ample foreplay, so he retaliates by not buying her the clothes she
desires after a long day’s shopping. The joke, however, mostly highlights what are
traditionally considered to be the different emotional and physical needs of males
and females. Stereotypical or not, it would appear that women pass in the public
imaginary as needing embraces and heart-to-heart dialogue while men’s foremost
desire is to engage in sexual activity. Women’s stereotypical love for shopping
stands for sexual foreplay in this joke, so the butt of its particular narrative is the
woman, because the husband gets his revenge for not being able to fully have
his arousal satisfied by penetration and ejaculation. But, of course, the story also
plays on clichés and stereotypes. A user called Iamrb posted the “story” in 2015
on the Reddit entertainment website under the heading Venus vs Mars and is
pre-empted as follows:
[n]ever quite figured out why the sexual urge of men and women differ so
much. And never have figured out the whole Venus and Mars thing. Never
figured out why men think with their head and women with their heart.
Although Iamrb tries to make the story pass as something that really happened to
him, a commenter in the thread following the story points out that the same story
had been published two years earlier on Facebook. In fact, the joke scores 8,410
The language of jokes and gender 101
hits on Google showing that it is by no means either true or original.46 However,
even though this humorous story is supposedly generated from a male perspective
(and contains a certain degree of spite), it is structurally typical of a category of
jokes that mirror the positive and negative traits of the two sexes. Generally, these
“Venus versus Mars” jokes are better balanced than the story in question in which
the man comes out trumps. Figure 3.9 illustrates a classic cartoon of a highly
organized woman versus a highly disorganized man packing their respective suit-
cases. Clearly, each sees the other as being either too excessive or too cavalier,
and the joke shows how they are both equally right but also equally wrong. The
joke underscores the stereotypical weaknesses of each gender.
Similarly, the illustration in Figure 3.10 displays the meticulous analysis car-
ried out “when a girl receives a text message from a guy”. Starting from “How
long did it take him to respond?” the complex flow chart worthy of the best sci-
entific analysis purportedly follows the female brain as she thinks about why the
man texted and how she should respond. The male response to the same text mes-
sage is reduced to two options, both involving the prospect of sex.
Likewise, The Female and Male Dictionary (Figure 3.11) also plays upon the
divergent communicative styles of males and females. According to this diction-
ary, men are imagined, rightly or wrongly, to say exactly what they mean and to
always get straight to the point. For example, when a man says, “leave me alone”
he means just that, whereas the same remark uttered by a woman appears to
FIGURE 3.9 Source: http://9gag.com/gag/6854629/-when-women-pack-vs-when-
men-pack-true-or-not
102 The language of jokes and gender
actually mean the opposite as she typically expects the male to read her mind, or
rather, that he should automatically understand that she wants him to engage in
dialogue with her. Women in these jokes come across as emotionally overflow-
ing and men as unruffled beings who are unable to infiltrate women’s minds and
true needs.
Extremely pervasive on the internet are the Human Brain Analysis jokes.
These visual/verbal jokes have many variants but are similar in that they feature a
sketch of a female brain and one of a male brain in which different areas varying
in size are supposedly dedicated to gender-specific interests. Stereotypically, sex
FIGURE 3.10 Source: https://plus.google.com/108531052526575991056/posts/
WnjH2b4xXjc
The language of jokes and gender 103
and/or women take up large areas of the male brain, while shopping, talking and
shoes occupy large areas of the female brain. However, over and above large areas
of the brain dedicated to chocolate, sport, cars and shoes depending on the sex,
what is most interesting is brain space dedicated to the communicative style of
each sex. “Mysterious moods and behaviours” occupies a large part of the female
brain, while in the corresponding male brain we find “getting lost and not admit-
ting it” (Figure 3.12). These features display two forms of silence triggered by
different reasoning. Presumably, the female wants the male to understand why she
is moody, she wants him to engage in talk and explore her emotions. On the other
hand, not admitting to being lost may be seen to be an affront to a man’s masculin-
ity that would explain why he is unlikely to admit that he is at fault. Other features
that challenge a man’s masculinity may be asking for directions and avoiding per-
sonal questions paralleled by women’s huge need for commitment (Figure 3.13).
A minuscule area of the male brain is dedicated to listening compared to the large
area occupied by talking in the female brain. Good or bad driving skills, a predi-
lection for chocolate or beer and even being unable to aim correctly while using
the toilet may refer to superficial aspects of gendered behaviour that the opposite
other may or may not approve of, but these features are hardly of great pith and
moment (Figure 3.14). On the other hand, the male inability to listen and the
female expectation of the other to interpret what she means through her silence
or for him to deduce that what she actually means is the opposite of what she is
FIGURE 3.11 Source: http://cavemancircus.com/2012/02/09/the-female-vs-male-
dictionary/
The language of jokes and gender 105
saying are significant aspects of communicative styles. This kind of humour is
indeed a thermometer that reflects people’s perceptions of aspects of communica-
tive behaviour that can make or break relationships.
Women and self-deprecatory humour
The internet has given the general public access to a huge amount of comedic
materials especially thanks to users who upload audio-visual clips onto platforms
such as YouTube so that they can share them with other people. This allows
researchers like myself to access vast amounts of materials from the past and
from the present, with the ease of a click. The discussion that follows is the result
of numerous YouTube searches, especially for performed humour on stage and in
clubs. Obviously, I would not have been able to access such materials with such
ease in the past. Now from the comfort of my desk I have a world of performers
readily available at the click of a mouse.
Stand-up female comedians appear to be especially fond of particular topics
upon which they build a humorous discourse that is often self-deprecatory in nature
and that makes up a large part of their repertoire. While these comedians parallel
male sexist humour by aiming disparaging remarks at themselves especially with
regard to their appearance, they also produce humour that is specifically about
their relationships with their male partners, female friends, mothers and offspring
as well as humour about the strong effect of hormones on their wellbeing at dif-
ferent stages of their lives.
In an age where appearance is paramount and various media promote the body
beautiful and eternal youth especially for women, it is not surprising that many
(most?) women are insecure about their body image. A fat body is certainly not
seen favourably and the fact that many women struggle with keeping their weight
down through dieting in a perennial quest to obtain an ideal body shape may
well underlie the rising number of girls and women with eating disorders in the
western world. Although people come in all shapes and sizes, consumer culture
undoubtedly promotes a single female body type that is preferably tall, slim and
at the same time curvaceous in the right places. As most women probably do not
correspond to this ideal body type, joking about inadequacies is an obvious choice
of comic material together with the subject of the decline of the female body due
to ageing. As Joan Rivers ironically puts it,
It is all about looks, this is my message . . . looks count, education? (She
pauses and spits at the floor). Looks count. I have no sex appeal and it
screwed me up for life. Peeping Toms looked at my window and pulled
down the shade . . . my gynaecologist examines me by telephone.47
The GTVH may not be adequate to deal with this type of self-detrimental humour.
Rather than opposing or hidden scripts pertaining to the joke form, the humour
in female stand-up routines seems, first, to occur outside the joke frame proper
106 The language of jokes and gender
and, second, appears to involve saying the unsayable in a pseudo-naïve manner.
Rivers uses exaggeration and absurdity to create incongruity in answer to the bit-
ter truth that according to herself, and much of the media, looks do indeed count
more than education, and, as Rivers frequently asserted: “no man ever put his
hand up my skirt looking for a library card”. Rivers yells as she utters her lines
as though needing to convince the audience of something that should be a truth
universally acknowledged. In other words, while the incongruity of disgusted
Peeping Toms and distant gynaecologist present linguistic and cognitive duplic-
ity, “looks count” is unequivocally a single script. It is an example of charged
humour that is highlighting the double standards of the world in which we live.
UK comedian Bridget Christie takes the issue of the importance of women’s
looks further by being ironic about the way advertisements use women. In many
TV ads, women are seen spinning around in a circle for no particular reason. This
in itself should be funny, although of course it is designed presumably to show the
woman twirling so that audiences can admire her body, and especially her legs, if
she is wearing a flared skirt:
A woman’s looks are very important, in fact the way a woman looks is more
important than anything she can ever think do say or achieve er women’s
looks are so important in fact that women are often asked in fact to give
people a twirl so she can be approved in 3D.48
Christie is telling it like it is but in a pseudo-naïve fashion so that what she says could
be perceived as irony, but in effect, what she is saying is anything but. As discussed
previously, as well as twirls women in ads are “wanton, gagging for it; or vacu-
ous. We’re either coming on a window-pane, or laughing at salads” (see page 98).
If these lines contain any opposition or incongruity it is surely with the real world
that depicts women twirling and looking vacuous rather than in a script that is hid-
den within Christie’s overt discourse. Of course, in terms of script oppositions we
can see a “sexist fantasy” reading and a “reality” reading, and regarding the twirls,
Christie continues,
[e]r but us women don’t just turn around in circles all day long looking
hopeful and getting dizzy er we do lots of other things as well. For exam-
ple, when Christine Lagarde isn’t twirling around in a circle she’s the head
of the International Monetary Fund, Angela Merkel fills her time between
turns by being the German chancellor. Jayne Torvill is not a good example
to use here.
The absurdity of these twirling women in advertisements lies in the fact that
women do not spend their time turning and actually have other more significant
roles and things to do in life. Thus, we find a second opposition between “getting
dizzy” and the downplayed “[doing] lots of other things as well”. Christie chooses
The language of jokes and gender 107
two high profile women to make her point, but even women in less prestigious
occupations do not spend their time twirling around. The incongruity lies in the
equivalence of the sexist image of women as objects to be looked at and the reality
of accomplished women world leaders going about their work. Now, if irony is
meaning more than what you are actually saying or something different from what
you are actually saying, what exactly is going on here? Christie is certainly not
saying the opposite of what she means. Lagarde and Merkel do many things other
than twirling. It is the idea of twirling gormlessly itself that is absurd. The GTVH
remains silent on such matters although we possibly have two overt oppositions,
or rather incongruities, in twirl + Head of IMF; twirl + Chancellor of Germany.
We have here a conflict between the trivial and the serious, and Christie under-
scores the absurdity by giving twirling status that is as serious as being a political
figure. However, I would argue that the only true opposition comes in the final line
where Christie implicates Jayne Torvill, an ice skating champion, as a poor exam-
ple of the point she is making because Torvill really does literally twirl for a living
by virtue of the sport in which she participates. She therefore does not fit into the
previous discourse ridiculing the idea that women spend their lives twirling.
British comedian Jo Brand is a well-built and robust woman who uses her weight
as the subject of many of her gags. In a performance in which she recounts how
people often ask her whether she would take a pill to make her thin, she responds:
[c]ourse I bleedin’ well would. I would like to take a pill that made me six
stone then I could eat my way back up to ten! What a bloody brilliant week-
end that’d be wouldn’t it!49
While she adopts exaggeration and intensification to get her audience laughing,
her spiel also strikes a chord with all those familiar with comfort eating. While
it is highly unlikely that a person could feasibly put on so much weight in such
a short period of time, it is certainly possible both to binge and put on some
weight. And the success of Brand’s punch consists in the surprise contained in the
amplification of how much weight she could gain in such a short amount of time.
Brand goes on to compare the way she binge eats biscuits to people who have
exceptional control over what they eat and thus continues to strike a sympathetic
chord with her audience.
You see I think there’s two types of people in the world, right, and it’s all to
do with how they eat biscuits right. ‘Cos the first type of person makes a cup
of tea, gets a plate out, [PAUSE] opens the packet of biscuits and takes one
biscuit out, puts it on the plate, eats it very daintily off the plate, folds the
packet back up, bit of sellotape over the top to keep it fresh for next month,
now those sort of people should be executed shouldn’t they because the rest
of us get a packet out eat the whole fucking lot without taking the cover off
do we and consequently end up looking like me.
108 The language of jokes and gender
She portrays herself as someone with an eating disorder (although she questions
who or what is disordered) but at the same time highlights the normality of a love
for food and the temptation to overeat. She accomplishes this by placing herself
in the position of being laughed at while at the same time not sparing any irony
or sympathy towards slim people who watch what they eat. Brand delivers her
monologue with a deadpan expression and her signature matter of fact, even tone
of voice. Her timing is perfect especially when she pauses and emphasizes the
word “plate” when describing the type of person who “makes a cup of tea, gets a
plate out” showing her indignation about anyone who would dream of placing a
single biscuit on a plate before eating it. Here we can find a hidden and opposing
script when she describes the saintly eaters who carefully store their remaining
biscuits. Normality, according to Brand, is to quickly devour the lot straight from
the packet. Through a combination of stance, gesticulation and facial expressions
and above all timing and clever use of pauses, she waits for the audience’s positive
reaction through laughter. Following the “biscuit” episode, she then goes on to tell
the audience how she has always had a weight problem and how a teacher at school
had asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. When Brand replied that
she wanted either to be a nurse or get married, the teacher suggests “You’d better
be a nurse then”. As well as underscoring her perceived unattractiveness, Brand is
also pointing out the social credit attached to married women, getting a laugh when
she claims, “You’ll be surprised I managed to get a husband, but I did”.
Another British comedian, Sarah Millican also makes ample use of the issue of fat
and body image in her stand-up routine.50 She tells the audience that she is on a diet
and recounts her disappointment at not being able to fit into clothes when she goes
shopping. She goes on to discuss the irony of the song she typically listens to after an
unsuccessful shopping trip in which she is unable to find clothes in her size, namely,
“Big Girls Don’t Cry” but, according to Millican, they do cry. The comedian then
tells the audience that she cries because she is fat, because she cannot get a boyfriend
and because “there’s no trifle left”. Millican cannot get a boyfriend because she is
greedy, the underlying message being that fat girls are ugly because they are greedy.
Her love and craving for fattening foods overrides her desire to diet and become
slim – she must forgo the idea of obtaining a man. Like Brand, who pokes fun at
the control of slim people eating a single biscuit, Millican pokes fun at slim women
by describing her unease at swimming pools. Here other women are wafer thin and
Millican avoids these women for fear that others might think she has eaten one –
although she says she could not eat one as there is “no meat on them”. She also tells
her audience that she has developed “something of a cake shelf . . . it’s bigger than a
muffin top so I call it a cake shelf. I call it a cake shelf ‘cos that’s where I keep me
cake”. Again, Millican pokes fun at her consumption of cake. And of course the large
quantities of cake she eats adds inches to her midriff, cause it to bulge and turn an
endearing muffin top into a shelf. Beautiful women do not eat cake.
The style of all the comedians quoted so far could be described as coming
from the “alt com” (alternative comedy) tradition. Apart from performing, at least
initially in venues such as clubs, these women break from mainstream comedy
The language of jokes and gender 109
tradition by telling stories rather than reciting a string of jokes. They use a story
telling technique to subvert mores and create incongruity through surreal situa-
tions that surprise the audience – of course men do this too, but differently. We
suspend our disbelief when Brand tells us she intends to put on four stone over a
single weekend and when Millican recounts an episode in which she accidentally
placed her belly on the scales at an automatic checkout till. The result was that
she “just put it down as satsumas and legged it”, because she did not want to
pay for her own fat. While we are dealing with simple narrations, the contrasting
scripts rely heavily on our suspension of disbelief rather than linguistic duplic-
ity. Millican provides a rare example of a female comedian adopting a pun when
referring to her “cake shelf”. When someone asked her if she was pregnant she
replied, “Only if I’ve been shagged by Mr Kipling” and after the audience’s laugh-
ter subsides she adds, “It was exceedingly good”. Here Millican provides us with
an example of two overlapping and contrasting scripts by referring to both the Mr
Kipling brand of pastries and a hypothetical person of the same name followed by
a reference to the advertising slogan of the same cakes (“exceedingly good”) and
her opinion of a sexual encounter she had with Mr Kipling.
US comedian Margaret Cho also requires audiences to suspend disbelief when
she recounts the unfortunate effect on her bowels after going on a diet that con-
sisted of eating only persimmons for six months.51 After surviving on this fruit
alone, as might be expected, she develops the need to defecate copiously and the
performance pivots on her attempts at retaining oncoming diarrhoea while driv-
ing on a motorway. The basic scatological humour is multiplied because she is a
young, attractive female. Young attractive females do not need to diet. Focusing
on women’s obsession for slim bodies, Cho asserts:
I think everyone should go on my diet. It’s called the Fuck It Diet.
Basically what it is, is if I want to eat something but it has a lot of fat or
carbs, I just take a moment, and I go within, and I say “Fuck it” and I eat
it. You have to do it 6 times a day. It works really well with the Fuck That
Shit Exercise Program.
Cho’s anti-diet rant exemplifies Krefting’s notion of “charged humor”. Like
Brand, Christie and Millican, through her irony Cho is ridiculing the ordeal of the
lives of many women that are dominated by an obsessive control over what they
eat coupled with strenuous exercise regimes. Much of the incongruity between
what she says and what she means can be found in the tone of what Cho says
rather than the content itself which sounds perfectly sensible. Her tirade includes
many taboo terms and she certainly tells it like it is, as she verbalizes what many
people think. Rivers, Brand, Millican and Cho all give strength to the argument
that men, rather than women, tell jokes consisting of a framed narrative containing
a narrative build-up and a punchline while women opt for a more “narrated” style
of humour embedded in a less-regimented frame (Coates 2007). If we attempt to
apply the GTVH to the Fuck It Diet text, while we could agree that the hidden text
110 The language of jokes and gender
might refer to any well-known diet such as Weight Watchers’ or the Atkins Diet,
Cho is surely expressing not only what many women really think of dieting, but
also how they truly eat, namely ignoring “fat and carbs”.
Ageing is another subject favoured by female comics, especially older ones.
Joan Rivers, famous for having gone under the plastic surgeon’s knife numerous
times, made the effects of ageing a central part of her routines. Apart from her
hyperbolic descriptions of sagging bodies (“My boobs have dropped so much I
use the left one now as a stopper in the tub”; “It all drops, I can have a mammo-
gram and a pedicure at the same time”)52 she also uses very dark humour to joke
about the effects of osteoporosis. She considers the effect of Viagra on elderly
men who then attempt sex with their wives whose bones are audibly cracking and
whose vaginas are so dry that sexual activity could create a fire. She describes
the “good” positions for what she labels “old sex”. She lists nonsensical positions
such as “reaching for the phone to call the doctor” advising the elderly to “make
sure you groan into the good ear” when faking orgasm and noting that the fact
that “the nurse changes the sheets” is one of the great advantages of “old sex”. Jo
Brand on the subject of elderly sex gives us “Laughter is the best medicine but
does not tend to work in the case of impotence” (uttered during a performance at
the Edinburgh Fringe 2015).
Of course, the subject of strictly female conditions that range from motherhood
through pregnancy childbirth, menstruation to menopause are all favourite topics
of female stand-ups. A classic remark regarding childbirth regards comparing the
size of a baby’s head to the part of female anatomy involved in the birthing pro-
cess: “I remember looking down and thinking, there’s a design fault here” says
comedian Victoria Wood.53 As before, there is no incongruity in the reality of the
female body and the size of a baby’s head. Bridget Christie takes a different view
of motherhood when she says of new-borns:
Obviously, they’re very cute, if they weren’t cute obviously the human race
would have died out a long time ago because early humans would have
gone “OK I’ve done three days now I’m out, that’s enough”. I just think
they’re overrated. I think they contribute the least to society but they are the
most worshipped and revered people on earth . . . they create chaos, if you
replaced any of us with a baby there would be chaos.54
This discourse goes against the grain, but similarly to other incongruities thrown
up by reality, tackled by female comedians, here too Christie tells it like it is from
the point of view of her persona, presumably shocking audiences as she dares to
criticize babies in a culture that holds motherhood and new-borns in high regard.
In fact, women with no maternal instincts or a desire for motherhood are often
regarded as less than women in mainstream discourse.
Not only do professional comedians joke about these subjects, Dr Annie Evans,
a physician specializing in women’s health who has a channel on YouTube where
she posts lectures in which she talks about symptoms and remedies of/for a variety
The language of jokes and gender 111
of female ailments, adopts humour in her talks.55 Her videos are full of scientific
data yet at the same time are extremely user-friendly, as Dr Evans makes the
scholarship accessible via humour. Talking of the menopause and changes that
may occur in the vulva during this period, Evans says “we vary rarely talk about
changes in the appearance of the vulva . . . it isn’t a family car”. Now, unlike the
type of language used by the female comedians we have seen so far, Evans uses
the technique of straight overlap and opposition where the term “vulva” is placed
in opposition to, for example, Vauxhall Viva, Vectra and Nova or Renault Thalia.
These short feminine sounding names ending in an “a” to most people supposedly
prime with the name of a car. Interestingly, towards the end of one of her talks on
menopause, Evans uses the kind of postfeminist humour we saw earlier in which
males and females are seen as similarly complex. “We have all kinds of little
tweaky buttons which get affected by time and age and our hormonal changes”
says Evans, as her PowerPoint slide displays a remote control with dozens of but-
tons labelled “Women’s Remote”, “but never let it be said” she continues “that
men are not just as complex as we are”. At this point, a second remote control
labelled “Men’s Remote” appears on the PowerPoint slide with simply two large
red buttons, namely “Food” and “Sex” (Figure 3.15).
FIGURE 3.15 Women and men’s remote controls
112 The language of jokes and gender
Significantly, Evans resorts to several techniques adopted by professional
comedians. She uses self-deprecatory humour at the start of her talk when she
shows her audience the painting of the Seven Ages of Woman by Hans Baldung
Grien. “I wish that I was still down at the other side” says Evans, pointing towards
the younger stages of a woman’s life and then adds, “I know of course I am up
at this side with the Grim Reaper looking over my shoulder”. Evans gets a laugh
from the audience; she is not being ironic but simply telling it like it is.56
Gender bending
Comic representations of male cross-dressing
Hollywood has a long tradition of portraying men who see dressing up in women’s
clothing as the only solution to get themselves out of some kind of sticky situa-
tion. In mainstream filmic comedy, men who cross-dress mainly do so in order to
solve a problem. In Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot, saxophonist
Joe becomes Josephine (Tony Curtis) and viola player Jerry becomes Daphne
(Jack Lemon) when the couple opt to masquerade as unlikely looking women as
a solution to escape from Spats and his mafia hitmen after accidentally witness-
ing the St Valentine Massacre in Chicago. In the 1983 movie Tootsie (directed
by Sydney Pollack) cross-dressing as Dorothy is the only way Michael (Dustin
Hoffman) can get work and similarly, Daniel (Robin Williams) cross-dresses as
Mrs Doubtfire in the eponymous 1992 film (directed by Chris Columbus) in order
to be able to see his children following his divorce. These comedies, as well as
many others in which men dress up as women, have a number of features in com-
mon. Cross-dressing does not come naturally to the main characters in these films;
instead, having to do so is the only solution to solve some kind of impossible
problem. Audiences suspend their disbelief, as these men, who belong to artistic
professions in the first place, think nothing of donning a disguise and perform-
ing the part of another gender. In addition, much screen time is dedicated to the
protagonist’s transitioning, in other words, scenes in which these men get dressed
up as women, apply make-up and so on. Naturally these scenes are those which
add to the farcical elements in the films and create tension as the protagonist
runs the risk of being caught out in the wrong persona, i.e. as a man, by the very
person he is trying to trick into believing he is really a woman. Throughout these
films, the protagonist’s heterosexuality is continually reiterated, especially when
he receives sexual attentions from another man.
In dramatic films and in those in which the protagonist regularly wears wom-
en’s clothes and adopts a series of female characteristics as his consistent lifestyle,
cross-dressing is not part of a lifesaving scheme. In fact, if we look at the The
Crying Game (directed by Neil Jordan, 1993) and Kinky Boots (directed by Julian
Jarrold, 2006) for example, the two cross-dressers do not don women’s clothing
as a ploy but because it is natural for them to do so. Although both films contain
The language of jokes and gender 113
comic scenes, their respective protagonists Dil and Lola are not comic characters
but regular men to whom wearing female outfits is a necessary lifestyle choice.
However, whether in comedy or in drama, male characters who perform the femi-
nine on screen are usually already some kind of performer. Joe/Josephine and
Jerry/Daphne are out of work musicians, Michael/Dorothy is an out of work actor,
and Daniel is a dubbing actor before he turns into Mrs Euphegenia Doubtfire.
Presumably, the fact that they had all already set out as entertainers becomes
an asset as they set out to play the part of females in their everyday lives. In the
dramatic The Crying Game and the mixed genre comedy/drama Kinky Boots, the
cross-dressing protagonists are also performers, yet in both films they play drag
artists. In other words, in mainstream comedies, the men dressed up as females
look ridiculous, especially because of their old-fashioned, matronly style of attire,
whereas the drag queens of the more serious movies choose sexy attire, look more
credible as women and make fun of themselves during their stage performances.
Comedies based on cross-dressing include at least one scene that highlights
the sheer effort involved by the male hero to transition into his female other. The
scenes in which the actor is seen shaving, plucking, curling, painting, dyeing, don-
ning prosthetic boobs, women’s clothing and, last of all, high heels, are usually
the lengthiest and amongst the funniest in each movie. While audiences are sup-
posed to laugh at or be intrigued by the absurdity of the sheer effort involved by
these men donning the female mask, it is what many women do on a regular basis
in real life. Interestingly, some of these movies pre-date Judith Butler’s (1990)
concept of gendered performativity by decades. The idea here is that male is the
baseline and that maleness requires no further embellishment. The cross-dressing
men in these movies enact the “stylization of the body”; indeed, in our films,
we see the same individual who, despite having one unequivocal biological sex,
actually presents two body variants thanks to the artifice of disguise. The outward
body essentially presents us with a display of signifiers denoting gender. In terms
of comedy, these signifiers require hard work. We laugh at these actors as they
wobble in their high heels and adjust their bosoms in a performance of the female –
something that is void of incongruity when enacted by females simply performing
the female in everyday life.
Comedies based on cross-dressing will typically include at least one comic
scene that focuses on the main character transitioning into the female character.
As the plots are farcical, much time involves ensuring that the protagonist’s true
gender does not emerge to those he wants to convince that he is female. This, of
course, implies a lot of rushing around and changing appearance as quickly as
possible so as not to be unmasked and caught out. A lot of the action therefore
takes place “backstage” in bathrooms and bedrooms as much shaving of legs and
making up and removing make-up occurs in these rooms, and so they are handy
places to switch disguises. However, rather unsurprisingly, another topos in these
films is the male character forgetting to remove a piece of female attire when
he is in his male persona. Most famously, Joe/Josephine forgets to remove her
114 The language of jokes and gender
earrings when he is pretending to be heir to the Shell Oil Corporation and Jerry
is still wearing Daphne’s shoes in one of the final scenes in Some Like It Hot.
Bedrooms and bathrooms are the spaces in which much of the physical transi-
tioning typically occurs as actors dress in and out of their two personae. A bubble
bath can hide a multitude of sins and above all, a penis, as in the scene in Some
Like It Hot where Lorelei (Marilyn Monroe) sits on the edge of a bathtub in which
Josephine aka Joe is submerged. The unmasking of Mrs Doubtfire occurs in a res-
taurant bathroom. However, bedrooms and bathrooms are also the spaces where
the heterosexuality of the cross-dresser may be restored. In Some Like It Hot, it
is in a sleeping car of a train where Jerry, disguised as Daphne, almost seduces
Lorelei and in Tootsie, Michael is looking for outfits for Dorothy and is trying
on dresses in his girlfriend’s bedroom when she walks in. Not wanting to admit
that he is trying on women’s clothes, Michael pretends that he wants to have sex
with her. If there was any doubt regarding Michael’s sexuality, it is now restored
through a sexual encounter with his girlfriend. Connected to the possibility that
they might be unmasked is their insecurity regarding their looks, so we find these
men asking others whether their female outfits look good on them or not, which
is stereotypically female behaviour. Heterosexuality is also restored on occa-
sions in which female personae take on a masculine stance out of necessity. Mrs
Doubtfire attacks a young man who tries to snatch her handbag and Dorothy, tired
of waiting patiently for a cab and being physically usurped by men finally adopts
the same tactics and uses strength (kicking and elbowing) in order to catch a cab.
Thus, they resort to male privilege when they have to because they can. Quite
the opposite occurs in Kinky Boots when Lola, a trained boxer, deliberately loses
a wrist fight so as not to challenge her opponent’s masculinity. Unlike in drag,
where the two bodies and the two identities coexist in a juxtaposition, comedic
cross-dressing aims at obliterating the original body/identity, in place of a brand
new performed gender.
But what is interesting in the comedies is how asexual these men dressed up as
women are! For some reason all them opt for frumpy clothes buttoned right up to
the collar, liberty florals, long hemlines, old-fashioned permed hair, and unlikely
glasses combined with ridiculous accents and tones of voice – also interesting is
that they all transition into women who are older than their true selves are. This is
quite the opposite of the dress code of the main actor in a drama whose character is a
genuine transgender male who prefers tight slinky sparkly dresses. The beautifully
dressed Lola in Kinky Boots has a predilection for sexy red thigh boots. While Lola
certainly has the gift of the gab, she is in no way a comic character. For example,
she never disguises the husky tone of her voice. Paradoxically, it is in the comedies
that cross-dressed protagonists are courted by other men. Despite their matronly
aspect, at some point an unsuspecting male will make a pass at them – a bus driver
makes allusive remarks to Mrs Doubtfire; a man proposes to Dorothy in Tootsie as
does a billionaire, Osgood Fielding III, to Daphne in Some Like It Hot. Yet, in the
more dramatic films, where the female personae are far more credible, their effect
The language of jokes and gender 115
on people is quite different. When Lola’s landlady asks him if he is a man, she does
so only so that she knows in what position she should put the toilet seat.
The process of unmasking in comedy aims at provoking laughter. When the
characters are finally unmasked, chaos sets in. In the dramas, however, a slightly
misplaced wig in Kinky Boots is sad as is the scene in which Dill cuts her hair
short in The Crying Game. While the topos of the heterosexual man who falls for
the cross-dressed man is considered humorous, the discovery that the object of
desire is really a man tends to cause shock and anger in the thwarted lover. The
unmasking of Dil as a male provokes vomit and disgust in the man who had previ-
ously thought Dil was female.
In the media we are made accustomed to stereotypes of sexuality that create
two polarized sexualities, hetero and homo, and people who belong to these poles
are easily identifiable – especially in the recurring presence across media texts
of the screaming queen. Comedian Eddie Izzard, on the other hand, dressed in
female clothing, and donning full make-up, has nothing of the drag queen. He may
be dressed like a woman, but he embraces very masculine gender in his move-
ments and in his speech, with nothing remotely camp in his self-performance.
The overlap and oppositeness that make up Izzard’s humour consists of a per-
formance of his own masculinity superimposed upon a female frame so that self
and other blend and merge. In fact, with his tongue firmly in his cheek, he con-
siders himself to be a “a straight transvestite or a male lesbian” and has also
described himself as “a lesbian trapped in a man’s body” (Sommers 2016). And
as he stomps heavily across the stage in high heeled boots and kimono, swearing
like a trooper, he resembles more a prize boxer than a fairy. In the case of Izzard,
gender and sexuality clearly refuse to remain invisible and their visibility does not
lend itself to the creation or repetition of familiar clichés and polarized identities.
In his show, Dressed to Kill, Izzard appears on stage wearing a kimono and full
make-up and, as he declares, “ln heels, as well. Yeah” and then goes on to explain:
Yes, I’m a professional transvestite so I can run about in heels and not fall
over. If women fall over in heels, that’s embarrassing but if a bloke falls
over in heels, you have to kill yourself. End of your life. It’s quite difficult.
Izzard begins to laugh at himself and at his feminine side yet immediately enlight-
ens the audience regarding the erroneous notion that transvestites are homosexuals.
Izzard is a heterosexual who enjoys wearing women’s clothes and explains this in
a tirade about his wanting to join the army:
I was going to be in the army when I was a kid. Yes. I say that and people go,
“Oh, yeah, yeah”. No I was going to be in the army when I was a kid. Cos if
you’re transvestite, you’re actually a male tomboy. That’s where the sexuality
is. Yeah. It’s not drag queen. No. Gay men have got that covered. And this is
male tomboy. And people do get them mixed up. They put transvestite there.
116 The language of jokes and gender
No no no no! Little bit of a crowbar separation, thank you. Gay men I think
would agree. It’s male lesbian. That’s really where it is. Because . . . It’s
true, cos most transvestites fancy girls, so fancy women, so that’s where it
is. So running, jumping, climbing trees, putting on make-up when you’re
up there, that’s where it is. I used to keep all my make-up in a squirrel hole
up the tree and the squirrel would keep make-up on one side, and they keep
nuts on the other. Sometimes I’d get up that tree and that squirrel would be
covered in make-up.
In an attempt to have audiences understand the liquidity of gendered identities
and sexuality, Izzard describes his transvestitism as “male tomboy” and “male
lesbian”. As he describes his running, climbing, masculine side combined with his
make-up wearing feminine side, he mimics a squirrel alternating putting on make-
up and eating nuts in a style of humour reminiscent of the Pythons.
Izzard counterpoints the “cave man” transvestite, the man who feels something
is amiss and therefore cross-dresses with his own brand of transvestitism, namely
the “executive” transvestite and the “action” transvestite, two labels to which he
constantly refers throughout his shows. Ironically and comically, Izzard claims
that he did not sign up because of the haphazard way soldiers camouflage their
faces that would be in contrast to his flawless make-up:
They [soldiers] only have that nighttime look and that’s a bit slapdash. And
they look a mess. You can’t join. Even though the US armed forces have a
distinct policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” if you’re a bloke wearing a lot of
make-up, they don’t need to ask. So you can’t join. They go, “No, it’s the
wrong shade of lipstick for the army”. They’re missing a huge opportunity
because one of the main elements of attack is the element of surprise. So
what could be more surprising than the First Battalion Transvestite Brigade?
Airborne wing. The airborne wing parachuting into dangerous areas with
fantastic make-up and a fantastic gun.
The young men who form Out of the Blue, an all-male capella choir consisting
of Oxford University alumni, also play with gender, but they do not cross-dress.57
Out of the Blue adopt the notion of camp to create a witty effect. In their ver-
sion of Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie, the choir members sing in falsetto and prance
around wiggling their derrières and other body parts in exactly the same way as
the Columbian star Shakira does in her original video. The amusing incongru-
ity occurs because a bunch of gawky male undergraduates in dark suits, shirts
and ties act like the scantily dressed and sensual Shakira. The contrast between
Shakira and the boys displaces the expectations of audiences and thus amuses.
What was an erotic text originally, namely a video clip in which a half-naked
Shakira gyrates and pouts into the camera as she is seen and projected through the
male gaze, is transformed playfully as that same male gaze gives us fully dressed
The language of jokes and gender 117
men gyrating and pouting into the camera in place of Shakira. Thus, the choir
members subvert female objectification through a conceptual blend thanks to
which they make a political point as here, gender is bending, rather than snapping.
Yanis Marshall, Arnaud and Mehdi are a dancing trio who perform dance
routines wearing high heels and, similarly to Out of the Blue, emulate feminine
movements in an exaggerated fashion, thus creating an incongruity between their
masculine selves and their feminized movements. In their first appearance on the
talent show Britain’s Got Talent, they danced to a medley of songs by the Spice
Girls and immediately after their performance one of the (female) judges com-
mented, “That was ten times better than any female dancers we’ve seen on that
stage today”. This remark highlights the fact that the desired effect was achieved,
in other words, the three dancers are clearly men, and they perform femininity
better than the women do. Yet the incongruity of their act provokes a mirthful
response in the audience. After their performance in the semi-final, judge David
Walliams, who had openly flirted with the trio after their previous performances
cried out “Sisters that was fierce!” Walliams, on several occasions on the show,
plays on his ambiguous sexuality by flirting with attractive male competitors
(see pages 45 and 46).
The presenters ask the trio “The big question is of course what do your wives
and girlfriends make of this routine?” to which the three dancers pretend to
look embarrassed and do not answer. “That was just a joke”, responds the pre-
senter, but of course it wasn’t. Or rather, the question was deliberately asked to
make the audience laugh as they are supposed to presume that the dancers are
homosexual – something still considered incongruous and worthy of laughter
by many. So a certain element of ambiguity lies in the fact that men dressed up
as women are seen to be funny and that men who like other men are funny, too.
Funny odd and/or funny haha?
Walliams is also famous for his persona from the Little Britain TV series in
which he plays the part of the “Rubbish Transvestite” Emily Howard, a “lady”
who dresses in long floral dresses, uses a parasol, has a high-pitched voice and
participates in what she refers to as “lady-like” activities. Emily spends much time
trying to convince people that she is “a lady” as she attempts to use female only
facilities and generally pass as a woman. Walliams dressed up as an unlikely look-
ing woman creates dissonance between himself as a man and as a cross-dresser,
especially when he doth protest too much about his sexuality.
In an episode of Little Britain in the USA, two US police officers arrest Emily
for having stolen a frock from a store. As she is handcuffed and led away, the
British accented voiceover tells us “One of the most popular pastimes in Great
Britain . . . is transvestitism”. At the police station, Emily poses sexily for mug
shots and does her best to answer the police officer’s questions posing as a female.
However, try as she might to insist that she is “a lady” in answer to her name, sex
and general information, a severe glance from the police officer forces her to admit
she is a man and answering in her male persona and in a male tone of voice.58 This
118 The language of jokes and gender
stark contrast of two genders that Walliams creates is quite original. Walliams
insists to all and sundry that she is a she and then, when we least expect it, sud-
denly reverts to her “he” persona. In a sketch for the 2009 Comic Relief Emily
and another “lady” Florence, own a dress shop. In her signature high-pitched
voice, Emily tells Florence that it is important for women to have somewhere
they can buy “ladies’ things . . . our little lace handkerchiefs, our parasols, our
general ladies’ . . .”; at this point Emily hesitates and changes facial expression
and tone. Lowering her voice and reverting to the masculine, she adds the word
“shit”. When pop star Robbie Williams enters the dress shop by accident, Emily
and Florence convince him to dress up as a lady. As Williams walks away from
the clothes shop dressed in a long flowery gown and holding a parasol, Walliams,
dressed as Emily looks on and in a masculine voice utters “Bloody poof!”59
Emily behaves in a similar way in 2010 when she joins singer Sting on stage
as he is performing Fields of Gold.60 Emily openly flirts with Sting, inviting him
back to her hotel after the show and insisting she is a lady who spends her time
doing “lady’s things”. In answer to Sting’s question as to what “lady’s things”
actually are, Emily responds “I bathe in rose petals, skip through meadows, I play
the harp” then reverting to her male persona lowers her voice and adds, “that sort
of bollocks”. As in the sketch with Robbie Williams, Emily at times seems to be
a half-hearted transvestite who considers – what Emily considers to be – “ladies’
things”, “bollocks” and “shit”. Again, when Emily sings with Sting she does so in
a flat, harsh, male tone of voice, after which she kisses Sting at length on the lips.
Walliams jumps backwards and forwards from he to she and back again when the
audience least expects it.
Notes
1 The concordances were generated in KWIC format from the BNC, extracting the corpus
from two diverse platforms: the University of Lancaster BNC-baby and the BNC online
version by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University.
2 The Worst Witch is a TV series about a group of witches attending a school for magic
that ran on ITV between 1998 and 2001. Miss Cackle, played by Clare Coulter, is the
school’s headmistress.
3 On sale at Amazon www.amazon.com/Hillary-Clinton-2016-Laughing-Pen/dp/B0125
51IEE. Retrieved 15 February 2016.
4 Comments randomly retrieved from threads below the following videos: “Hillary
Clinton Evil Laugh Compilation” available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=btgLIgPK
YsE and “Hillary Clinton’s Laugh” available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2VMB
HCzfr8. Retrieved 15 February 2016. Crackerwv, The Viper of Death and Andrej
Pejcic are the names of the three people who left the comments.
5 Available at: www.jokes4us.com/dirtyjokes/womenjokes.html. Retrieved 1 December 2016.
6 Available at: www.funny-jokes-quotes.com/jokes-about-women-wife.html. Retrieved
2 December 2016.
7 This figure refers to a search conducted on 26 October 2015.
8 See www.Jokes4all.net. Retrieved 21 October 2015.
9 Joke available at: http://jokes4all.net/physicist-jokes. Retrieved 22 October 2015.
10 Joke available at: http://jokes4all.net/philosopher-jokes. Retrieved 22 October 2015.
The language of jokes and gender 119
11 See http://jokes4all.net/nurse-jokes; http://jokes4all.net/babysitter-jokes; http://jokes4all.
net/secretary-jokes. Retrieved 22 October 2015.
12 I would like to thank the second year students of my 2016 English Linguistics class for
their help and enthusiasm. The imaginative answers to the conundrum included those
of the two 21-year-old males, one of whom answered, “Maybe the doctor had an affair
with the mother of the young man” and the other who thought that “Doctor is bored and
tells a lie to avoid operating on the boy”.
13 Joke available at: www.singlix.com/417/jokes/braintr.html. Retrieved 4 September 2016.
14 Available at: http://unijokes.com/joke-8572/. Retrieved 25 February 2016.
15 Thank you to Debra Aarons, Giuseppe Balirano, Janet Bing, Alison Bron and Giselinde
Kuipers for their helpful insights on this joke.
16 Available at: http://unijokes.com/marriage-jokes/. Retrieved 25 February 2016.
17 Available at: http://www.jmpressley.net/humor/marriage.html. Retrieved 23 November
2015.
18 Available at: http://jokes4all.net/wife-jokes. Retrieved 22 October 2015.
19 Available at: www.jokes4us.com/dirtyjokes/husbandwifejokes.html. Retrieved 25
February 2016.
20 Available at: www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/3we3z3/a_rich_old_man_goes_golfing_
with_his_friends/. Retrieved 4 September 2016.
21 Available at: http://betterafter50.com/2013/06/these-in-law-jokes-will-make-you-smile/.
Retrieved 25 February 2016.
22 Joke available at: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1263846/Mother-law-jokes-new-
lease-life-online.html. Retrieved 10 March 2016.
23 Interestingly there is no mention of Jewishness in the joke yet we “know” it is a Jewish
joke. Thanks to Debra Aarons for pointing this out (personal communication).
24 Joke available at: www.quora.com/How-come-you-never-hear-father-in-law-jokes.
Retrieved 9 March 2016.
25 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=knxuG_hYe-8. Retrieved 12 July 2016.
26 Although, see for example: www.realjock.com/gayforums/4203439/ and www.realjock.
com/gayforums/4203439/. Retrieved 17 July 2016. According to Christie Davies, “They
are fakes” (personal communication).
27 Available at: www.jokes4us.com/blondejokes/blondejokes.html. Retrieved 26 January
2017.
28 See “The Naked Chef” (les hommes à poêles), Available at: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=tuTVGjZea3o, and a similar dance carried out with towels available at: www.
youtube.com/watch?v=ae69-9llIhQ France Got Talent (towels). Retrieved 2 May 2017.
29 For more on this issue see: www.theguardian.com/media/2017/mar/28/daily-mail-
legs-it-front-page-sexist and www.theguardian.com/media/2017/mar/28/theresa-may-
refuses-to-comment-on-daily-mail-legs-it-front-page. Retrieved 2 May 2017.
30 Inside Amy Schumer – Last F**kable Day – Uncensored. Available at: www.youtube.
com/watch?v=XPpsI8mWKmg. Retrieved 7 September 2016.
31 Available at: http://jokes4all.net/funeral-jokes. Retrieved 17 February 2016.
32 The rape joke told by Tosh is available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=isSJjwdXgho.
Retrieved 6 June 2016.
33 Slogan adopted by the South Wales Police Rape Awareness Campaign on TV and
radio. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=COujGHikiqM. Retrieved 22 February
2016.
34 Available at: www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/26gfos/rape_jokes_general/. Retrieved
29 February 2016.
35 Available at: http://thedingers.eu/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=25&start=540. Retrieved 29
February 2016.
36 Available at: http://www.jokes2go.com/jokes/19762.html. Retrieved 22 February 2016.
37 Available at: www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/3ipnl9/two_nuns_sister_mary_and_
sister_elizabeth_are/. Retrieved 22 February 2016.
120 The language of jokes and gender
38 “George Carlin about Rape”. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwMukKqx-Os.
Retrieved 29 February 2016.
39 Edinburgh Fringe 2015: The 50 Best Jokes, Independent online 28 August 2015.
Available at: www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/edinburgh-festival/edinburgh-
fringe-2015-the-50-best-jokes-10476941.html. Retrieved 24 July 2016.
40 Tea Consent. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQbei5JGiT8. Retrieved 7
September 2016. It was part of the Thames Valley Police #ConsentisEverything campaign
against rape.
41 “What were you wearing?” Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=51-hepLP8J4.
Retrieved 13 March 2017 shortly after being broadcast by the BBC on Tracey Ullman’s
Show see: http://bbc.in/2mWxDTW.
42 Available at: www.jokes2go.net/joke/3192/how-do-you-know-when-a-woman-s-about-
to-say-something-smart. Retrieved 26 October 2015.
43 Available at: www.jokes2go.net/women-jokes/3. Retrieved 26 October 2015.
44 Jokes reported by Katy Brand, “Feminists have never been funnier – and here’s the
proof” The Telegraph. 9 January 2015. Available at: www.telegraph.co.uk/women/
womens-life/11334783/Feminists-have-never-been-funnier-and-heres-the-proof.html.
Retrieved 3 March 2016.
45 Joke available at: www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/355cz2/venus_vs_mars/. Retrieved 9
July 2016.
46 Joke googled 9 July 2016.
47 Examples taken from Joan Rivers Live at the Apollo, available at: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=knxuG_hYe-8. Retrieved 12 July 2016.
48 Bridget Christie: A Woman’s Look. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aUHZh
Kbf6o&spfreload=10. Retrieved 25 July 2016.
49 Examples taken from Jo Brand Live at the Apollo, available at: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=d9vjyAizwQU. Retrieved 10 July 2016.
50 Examples taken from Sarah Millican Live at the Apollo, available at: www.youtube.
com/watch?v=Gyuo9ZH3frE. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
51 Margaret Cho, Persimmon Diet, available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF1pIMgE
8FA&spfreload=10. Retrieved 20 July 2016.
52 Joan Rivers performing, available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNUkLzi46OI&sp
freload=10. Retrieved 12 July 2016.
53 Victoria Wood – Talking About Having a Baby LIVE, available at: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Qwkpba2zOV4&spfreload=10. Retrieved 25 July 2016.
54 “Bridget Christie does not like babies” – BBC Room 101: Series 5, Episode 7, available
at www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DP_fai-FpM. Retrieved 25 July 2016.
55 Dr Annie Evans, Menopause Facts, Signs & Menopause Symptoms Part 4, available at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CY4D9qfCiU. Retrieved 26 July 2016.
56 Dr Annie Evans, Menopause Facts, Signs & Menopause Symptoms Part 1, available at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1RtnxKy8TI. Retrieved 26 July 2016.
57 Videos available at the choir’s official website: www.ootboxford.com/. Retrieved 2
August 2016.
58 Video clip available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvH1LLZeef4&index=4&list=R
D4THO9-N--k4. Retrieved 27 January 2017.
59 “Little Britain meets Robbie Williams” Comic Relief 2009. Available at: www.youtube.
com/watch?v=AJ8e6UVpLNg. Retrieved 27 January 2017.
60 Emily Howard from Little Britain with Sting, available at: www.youtube.com/watch?
v=gM7O8PMNdtA&index=5&list=RD4THO9-N—k4&spfreload=10. Retrieved 27
January 2017.
4
THE LANGUAGE OF JOKES ONLINE
In the early days of the internet, users had a somewhat passive relationship
with its content. Although initially they could access and view the content of
web pages, they were unable to interact effectively with what appeared on their
screens. Thanks to the innovations of Web 2.0, today users can interact more
actively in a virtual environment and with a certain amount of ease. No longer do
they passively access websites and simply look and/or read, as they are now able
to engage dynamically with content and interact with other users in real time.1
More importantly, users can now generate, upload and display their own content,
manipulate the content of others’ as well as react, and build upon the interaction
of others. At the time of writing, many people spend a large part of their daily
lives online and engage in a wide range of activities that are digitally driven. Such
online activities can be carried out anywhere there is a wireless connection to link
an electronic device such as a smartphone or a tablet to the gigantic network such
is the World Wide Web. Furthermore, Web 2.0 has enabled, amongst other things,
social networking, media sharing, bookmarking and tagging. In fact, the focus of
Web 2.0 is very much on users’ collaboration and sharing. And what can be more
collaborative and worthy of sharing than humour?
It is at present possible to carry out numerous activities within at least two par-
allel worlds. While we can take part in various actions online such as browsing,
chatting and finding directions, we can also engage in commercial activities like
banking, calling a cab and shopping as well as playing games and participating
in leisurely activities, at the same time we can (still?) carry out exactly the same
undertakings in the real world too. According to Weitz (2017), the “fullness” of
online life is still in its “teenage years” as many people straddle reality and a vir-
tual environment. Moreover, and importantly, just as humour is an integral part
of real life, it plays a significant role in the digital environment of the internet
too. To demonstrate this, Weitz examines an episode of the ABC sitcom Modern
DOI: 10.4324/9781315146348-5
122 The language of jokes online
Family that is entirely filmed through the lenses/screens of numerous devices and
asserts that the misunderstandings that create the humour in this particular episode
serve as a “state-of-the-artform cultural snapshot and comic critique of a rabidly
networked lifestyle that many of us know so well”.2 A much darker, satirical view
of this lifestyle is also portrayed in the aptly named series Black Mirror.3
Verbal language is of utmost importance in users’ relationship with the inter-
net; after all, it is principally words that drive the internet. When we look for
something via a search engine, we do so by typing words onto a screen by means
of a keyboard. The alphanumeric keyboard governs and mediates users’ relation-
ship with the massive network of the World Wide Web. As for conversational
interaction, although chatting, as the word itself implies, can be carried out
vocally, with participants speaking synchronously, so-called chatting online actu-
ally involves reading and writing. Indeed the foundations of social networking
are written messages and their responses. Although many social networks also
provide a “talking” option so that users can record a message (e.g. WhatsApp),
the written mode of texting is more prevalent. However, although these texts are
technically written, the language resembles that of speech rather than writing.
Someone posts a thought in writing and others read and then perhaps evaluate
it with a thumbs up signal indicating a “like”; they might share it with others
thus making the original message “go viral”. Even though important networking
sites such as Instagram and Pinterest are primarily based on pictographic rather
than verbal content, written captions attached to visual materials as well as verbal
responses in writing to each pictorial post are inescapably present and constitute
a significant part of these texts in their entirety.
When we think of online humour, so-called internet memes spring to mind.
These often take the form of a text applied to an image to create a humorous
effect, but memes may also occur in the form of video clips, gifs or hashtags.
Starting with examples of purely verbal online humour, the following is an
overview of some of the different types of computer-mediated humour available
on a variety of virtual platforms and easily accessible on our diverse screens.
Conversational humour online
Given that we know humour is a social activity, is humorous activity mediated by
a smartphone, say, any different to face-to-face joking, and if it is, in what way?
Have users needed to adapt the conversational rules of joking outlined by Norrick
(1993, 2000) to the virtual environment? And what about timing? In a space where
it is beyond the poster’s control exactly when other users pick up another person’s
remark, will this time lapse affect responses? Furthermore, when someone posts a
witty comment, he or she will presumably expect friends and followers to appreci-
ate the quip. But what if someone with whom we are not familiar reads our witty
post – or rather what we consider to be a witty post? If we are unsure about the
person with whom we are communicating – after all, the internet is a place where
we may not have met our interactants in real life – a wisecrack can be a way of
The language of jokes online 123
testing the waters to see if a person will align with us. If they share our values
and if they find the same things funny as we do, we have every reason to believe
that there is room for comity. On the other hand, as we do not really know our
audience, the Wild Wild West of the internet can also be a place where there is a
high risk of causing offence. A joke about a socially delicate subject that touches
politics or religion, for example, is launched into unchartered waters and our unfa-
miliar audience may be sensitive to these topics and take offence. Humour may
indeed hurt the feelings of others when it wrongly estimates their comfort zone.
With humour, we need to tread carefully. With internet humour, more so.
Signalling laughter online
As pointed out by Glenn (2003: 42), while it is common for people to report
the speech of others word for word, it is unlikely that we would report someone
else’s laughter by uttering the expression “ha ha ha”. Over and above the fact
that the expression has something of a sarcastic overtone, we do not actually
laugh in such a well-ordered and regular manner. Yet it is unexceptional to “write
down” laughter using items like “haha”, “ha ha ha” or “hee hee hee” even though
these canonical transcriptions are nothing like the sound of real laughter. In fact,
these multiples of “ha” (or indeed “he/e”) are quite common in online interaction.
A Facebook study on “e-laughter” carried out in 2015 observed how over the
course of a week, users transcribed laughter. First, the study revealed that dur-
ing the week under observation, 15 per cent of users who posted comments had
used at least one “e-laugh”. For the purpose of the survey, an e-laugh included
any way of conveying laughter in online communication by typing variants of
“haha” (e.g. “hahaha”, “haahhhaa” etc.), “hehe”, “lol” or else the use of emoji
(Adamic et al. 2015; Lobrutto 2015). As in real-life writing, “haha” (as well as
variants thereof) appears to be the preferred way to express laughter and is used
by 51.4 per cent of Facebook users. The acronym “lol” (“laughing out loud”)
was popular with mainly older users, suggesting that it is possibly going out of
fashion in this context.
Second to the use of “haha” came the use of emoji, smiley-type faces, with
33.7 per cent of subjects. The report claims that in this study, when laughter was
expressed using an emoji, a single emoji is used 50 per cent of the time and people
rarely posted a string of more than five identical consecutive emoji. This suggests
that emoji may offer a concise way to convey various forms of laughter online. As
Weitz quite rightly highlights, “Despite the inability of our bodies to accompany
us into the virtual sphere, we seem unable to ignore their insistence on playing
parts in the online humour transaction” (2016). The large set of disembodied
smiley faces or the need to type colon+dash+left-facing brackets into our emails
and into our online conversation in general, reflects the need to include physi-
cal behaviour within the virtual sphere. Skype, a programme that allows users
to make telephone calls from computers, goes a step further by including a set
of animated emojis portraying entire bodies engaged in a wide range of actions.
124 The language of jokes online
Earlier we discussed how laughter is a characteristic feature in that by shar-
ing virtual content we find funny with others, we are encouraging them to
laugh with us. Web 2.0 allows users, amongst other things, to allow others
to hear our laughter. Vlogger Alonzo Lerone posts videos of things he finds
funny on YouTube and on his Facebook page together with his own running
commentaries. So, for example, he will typically film himself together with
a screenshot of an amusing tweet someone has posted that he reads aloud
while laughing. In particular, he retweets Gordon Ramsay’s “roasts” from
the celebrity chef’s Twitter account (see below). Ramsay’s “roasts” are not
his recipes for joints of meat, but good-natured jokes that he makes at the
expense of his followers for the amusement of others. Ramsay, in this “angry
chef” persona, encourages his followers to post photographs of their disastrous
dishes, after which he will post derogatory comments that are intended to be
funny. Lerone will read out the tweets and often burst out laughing because of
the obnoxious looking dishes and Ramsay’s clever/rude/hilarious responses.
Users see and hear Lerone laughing alongside the tweet and post appreciative
comments and emojis and, in the space for users’ comments known as “BTL” –
below the line – they will typically post appreciative comments like “I like
watching you laugh” as Lerone’s contagious laughter encourages us to laugh
with him.4 A sort of echo of laughter happens as we laugh at the awful look-
ing dish someone has subjected to Ramsay’s scrutiny; we laugh with Ramsay
at his clever response, but above all, we laugh with Lerone. This is a sort of
game of Chinese boxes where users laugh at someone laughing at something/
one else who was encouraged by a third person to provoke laughter in the
first place. This interconnectivity is further highlighted in emulations of this
game. Like most successful people, Lerone has his imitators. In particular,
there is a vlogger who also comments on Ramsay’s tweets but without show-
ing his face and using a very high pitched voice reminiscent of Alvin and
the Chipmunks and, above all, a Chipmunk style laugh.5 Significantly, users
are irritated by this laugh, and BTL, we find much criticism of his laughter.
Comments include: “Are those that funny you have to laugh out loud after
reading each of them?”; “The laugh is so over the top fuck, Gordon what do
you rate this laugh, fucking dreadful?” and “Ok fk these, I just can not stand
that FKN voice, Ugh AND annoying FAKE ASS LAUGH”. It could well be
that readers have simply distinguished Lerone’s true laughter from the other
poster’s affected laugh, something that the human brain is primed to differen-
tiate (Hurley et al. 2013; Provine 2000).
Ping-pong-punning
One of the features of wordplay that has remained constant over time must surely
be the occurrence of a phenomenon that I have labelled “ping-pong-punning”
(PPP) (see Chapter 1). In a real-life joke-capping session people will typically
The language of jokes online 125
take turns at telling a succession of jokes, with each joke being different from
the next and separated by laughter or at the very least by the verbal evaluation
of the joke by other listeners. The phenomenon of PPP is quite different from
joke-telling proper as it consists of a series of puns that while being uttered by
different speakers, do not stand out from surrounding discourse within separate
joke frames or formats. PPP sessions consist of diverse speakers who intertwine
instances of wordplay within the principal surrounding discourse. These witty
remarks are not framed and rarely take on the semblance of a formulaic joke.
However, similarly to what occurs in a session of joke-capping, a string of puns
arising in “ping-pong” style will tend to be non-intermittent. PPP is further simi-
lar to joke-capping in that something in the ongoing regular, albeit informal,
discourse prompts someone else to tell a joke or to emit a pun that will trigger
more of the same. As with joke-capping, that first witticism will stimulate oth-
ers, in turn, to do the same resulting in a lengthy succession of jokes and/or puns
on related subject matter or belonging to a similar cycle. Unlike joke-capping
however, PPP involves someone who deliberately picks up and puns and/or
plays upon an ambiguous word or phrase contained within an ongoing conversa-
tion. Conversation participants follow with banter containing other puns that are
in some way semantically connected to the initial pun or wordplay. In contrast
to joke-capping, in PPP there are no actual jokes involved. In fact, when the
phenomenon of PPP occurs, the tendency is for the whole discourse to border
on the nonsensical, although it will contain a clear leitmotiv. The following
exchange evolved as part of an informal conversation involving Peter, a person
with a broken arm:
Initiator: “No ’arm in it, eh Peter?”
Participant 1: “Yeah got to hand it to you”.
Peter: “That’s not funny”.
Initiator: “Put my nger on it have I?”
Participant 2: “’Armless enough”.
Chiaro 1992: 115
Peter’s arm in plaster prompts four independent yet simultaneously concatenated
puns roughly based on the semantic field of limbs. The punsters play on the
acoustic similarity of the terms “arm/(h)arm”, “armless/(h)armless” as well as on
idioms containing the terms “hand” and “finger”. PPP resembles a battle of wits
in which each participant tries to top, or at least match, the attempt at punning
produced by the previous punster. It is likely that PPP occurs more frequently in
social interaction than joke-capping sessions, as the latter are feats of memory
and jokesters position themselves front-stage as they recite their joke, whereas the
former consists of on-the-spot and off-the-cuff inventive in which single partici-
pants are only foregrounded for the space of a short quip (Chiaro 1992: 113–17).
PPP originated as a strictly conversational phenomenon that could only occur in
126 The language of jokes online
oral communication. Today, as diverse types of writing on the internet resemble
speech more and more and as social interaction seems to take place as much as,
if not more, online than in real life, predictably this type of wordplay frequently
occurs online too, albeit in written form: it reflects spoken language.
So, while the actual way of playing PPP has remained constant, what has
changed is its occurrence on a variety of virtual platforms. This makes sense if
we consider that much social networking does occur in real time just like con-
ventional conversation does. PPP would be impossible or would at least lose
its verve, if it occurred in the mode of traditional written communications that
require time to be read and for a riposte to be written, parties being both tempo-
rally and spatially distant. Social networking occurs in real time and thus provides
an ideal platform for PPP to flourish. Nonetheless, it is true that others will not
necessarily immediately pick up a post on a virtual platform. Furthermore, what
we post is likely to remain there forever. This would suggest that the practice of
PPP online is radically different from its live counterpart. If we look at the exam-
ples of PPP in Chapter 1, though, it emerges that chains of puns are not always
created in real time and ripostes to puns are not always posted immediately.
The timeline in Figure 1.1 illustrates that while a punning response can indeed
be posted within minutes, i.e. closely enough to real time, reactions can also
occur after several hours. The first pun on the word “correctness” in Figure 1.2
“correct-egg-ness” appears on 12 January at 20.32. However, someone picks it
up and revises it with the term “corr-egg-ness” only the following day at 14.02.
Interestingly, the initial punster may not necessarily even see the rejoinder. Thus,
in a sense, this changes the essence of PPP that should be all about quick thinking
and immediate rejoinders. Furthermore, the rectification/modification of the first
pun “correct-egg-ness” to “corr-egg-ness” appears to remain hanging, unobserved
and unchallenged by the initial punster, who only responds and challenges some-
one who criticizes him with “Did you read about puns in a textbook and not really
understand” so that another separate exchange becomes embedded within the ini-
tial ping-ponging discourse. This embedded discourse also contains an example
of PPP with two adjacent puns created by two speakers (“Dairy me” followed
four hours later by “Eggsactly”); there is no response to “corr-egg-ness”. In other
words, paradoxically, PPP online appears at times to lose its real-world time rules.
It ceases to be an event in which speed is an essential element; pun – immediate
evaluation – simultaneous and swift rebuttal.
Therefore, in virtual life, we can never be sure when an instance of wordplay
we post on Facebook for example, will actually be seen. If I want to post a clever
riposte, I have all the time in the world to do so thus losing the spontaneity of live
PPP and transforming my extemporaneous rejoinder into something closer to a
well thought out enactment. So, this type of verbal play online resembles (comic)
literature that is written to be read at a distance from the author both in terms of
time and place. In fact, the concept of conversational adjacency pairs becomes
difficult to apply to online PPP because of the possibility of a time lapse between
the time of posting the initial quip and its pick-up time by others. Not only that,
The language of jokes online 127
but a member of a chat or a thread can leave the conversation at any time, just as
they may return at any time at a different point within the whole thread. Absurdly,
PPP online both is, and at the same time is not, about comity.
PPP BTL
Many national newspapers now appear in online formats and contain a function
that enables readers to post comments directly below articles. The online ver-
sion of UK daily newspaper The Guardian has a thriving community of readers
who regularly post in the “comment is free” sections of the paper. The number
of people who participate in these BTL comment sections can sometimes be so
high as to create lengthy threads of observations and remarks. These threads seem
to follow many rules of real-life conversation, as they are extremely interactive
with participants making remarks on each other’s comments, agreeing, disagree-
ing, getting angry or even participating in trolling. Consequently, as these rolling
threads resemble traditional oral interaction and conversation, they often display
instances of PPP. Whether the subject of the preceding article is serious or light-
hearted, it is common practice for someone to start punning in the comments
section and for other posters to notice the pun and follow suit.
An article in The Guardian online regarding the excessive amount of sugar
contained in breakfast cereals (Usborne 2016), triggered numerous comments
from readers that included many witticisms. In truth, the journalist himself was
quite liberal with puns in his article although the content itself was serious.
Regarding the amount of sugar contained in one cereal, Usborne claims that “It
is not the first time Special K has been ‘oat of order’” after which he apologizes
for the pun with a “(sorry)” – journalist’s brackets. Usborne also plays on brand
names in his article with “Dreaded Wheat”, “Confessquick” and “Cheatabix”. A
lengthy thread of comments from readers follows the article and at one point (at
14.47) a reader, unexpectedly, inserts a complete joke about muesli, picked up by
a would-be ping-pong-punster almost three hours later (at 17.26) with “Is there a
raisin you posted this sad tale here?” (Figure 4.1)
FIGURE 4.1 Ping-pong-punning below the line (“muesli”)
128 The language of jokes online
As I pointed out in 1992, recipients do not necessarily evaluate jokes by
laughing, but also verbally. BTL laughter is only possible with the use of smi-
leys, emojis and verbal conventions. However, someone evaluates the “muesli”
joke within three minutes of its being posted with the comment “Nice one”.
Interestingly the muesli joke is a real joke in terms of form and structure; it is a
one-liner and the “reason/raisin” evaluation seems ironic; it highlights the story-
like structure of the muesli joke by referring to it as a “tale” thus exemplifying a
different type of play from that normally expected in an online feed.
An article about a policy in the Italian city of Turin to promote vegetarianism
not only triggers fiery comments from Guardian readers, but also some punning
(Kirchgaessner 2016). The mayor of Turin who had had the idea of promoting
vegetarianism is a member of Italy’s Five Star Movement, so, in answer to a
post claiming that “Her policy is nuts” – punning on the term “nuts” both as a
vegetarian food and as a slightly batty person – someone replies “Five star nut
roast”. The comment is followed by a string of puns related to food from others
(Figure 4.2) such as “Let’s hope she’s not telling porkies” in which the punster
cleverly combines the concept of pork – meat – with that of lying (“pork pies” are
“lies” in Cockney rhyming slang, hence “porkies” in mainstream English). The
string of puns ends with “doughnut take her policy lightly” as it is a “big dill”.
Puns may be the lowest form of wit, but they are possibly one of the highest
forms of mental dexterity.
FIGURE 4.2 Ping-pong-punning below the line (“nuts”)
The language of jokes online 129
In July 2016, Brexit and its surrounding narrative provided a good excuse
for ping-pong-punsters on Guardian BTL threads to engage in witty inven-
tiveness, as the portmanteau “Brexit” itself paved the way for dozens of others
based on the names of other EU member states.6 Encouraged by the neologisms
“Brexit” and “Bremain”, posters participated in a lengthy battle of wits in which
they alternated serious discussion around the crisis affecting the EU and novel
portmanteaux such as “Czechout”, “Italeave” and “Fruckoff”, etc. (Figures 4.3
and 4.4). Especially interesting in these threads is the meta-discourse regarding
the puns themselves, “Quitaly?” says one poster. “Man that’s a low humor pun”
retorts another (Figure 4.3). Furthermore, the (un)seriousness of some partici-
pants is unclear. “All words are made up!” says one contributor, while another
wonders “whether these things are genuine, or just made up in order to invent
new words” (Figure 4.4.) Again, punsters argue about the exactness of each port-
manteau. Should it be “Portugoer”, “Portugout”, “Portugaleave” or “Portugone”?
“Spanish Armadoor” or “Spaxit”? “Quitaly”, “Ex.it”, “Filtaly” or “Italeave”? The
inventiveness is endless and every so often, someone tries to enter the thread with
FIGURE 4.3 Ping-pong-punning below the line: Brexit portmanteaux 1
130 The language of jokes online
a serious comment that posters completely ignore. In fact, it appears that any sug-
gestion for a portmanteau goes unless a contributor tries to put a stop to the play:
“These portmanteaus are getting worse and worse”, says one contributor who is
promptly met with the punning rejoinder: “Don’t be so bregative” (Figure 4.5).
Trolling, the practice of disrupting online discourse by posting inflammatory
messages with the intent of provoking an emotional response in readers seems to
be impossible when surrounded by people with a good sense of humour.
Of course, it is not always the case that a pun or a joke made by a commentator
turns into PPP. Participants in online humour do not notice all instances of word-
play; neither will a single wisecrack necessarily trigger PPP. In fact, participants
may completely ignore a pun, as in the case of a person who interrupted a long
thread in which readers reacted BTL to a satirical cartoon by Steve Bell that fea-
tured an image of the corpse of the late conservative anti-migration parliamentarian
Enoch Powell. A heated debate followed this cartoon consisting of 516 comments.
In the midst of a serious argument by readers on the issue of Brexit, migration and
politics, there is a sudden interruption as one reader posts, “Rule Theresa, Theresa
rules the graves” in reference to the image of the (Tory) corpse in the cartoon and
(Tory) Prime Minister Theresa May. Other pundits completely ignore the joke that
remains hanging there all alone amidst serious political debate.7
FIGURE 4.4 Ping-pong-punning below the line: Brexit portmanteaux 2
FIGURE 4.5 Ping-pong-punning below the line: Brexit portmanteaux 2
The language of jokes online 131
BTL communities
There is a marked tendency for groups of Guardian newspaper readers to meet
up online, seemingly deliberately, to comment BTL on a newspaper feature. This
occurs with many regular features from political and economic issues to articles
on beauty and fashion and is the case for followers of Rhik Samadder, a journalist
who writes a weekly column in The Guardian in which he regularly describes a
quirky kitchen aid he has put to the test. Samadder writes in a tongue-in-cheek man-
ner using saucy double-entendres as he describes gadgets such as sausage stuffers,
milk makers, pizza scissors and the like. After trying out the device, in his “Inspect
a gadget” article (Inspector Gadget?) Samadder explains what the object is, how it
works, its “redeeming features” and whether it should go to the “counter, drawer,
back of the cupboard?” The comments in the thread that follows each weekly article
contain lengthy concatenations of puns by readers. Mostly verging on the double-
entendre, provoked by the journalist himself, these threads mainly occur in real
time and, as in real life, contributors (seem to) actually know each other person-
ally. Samadder’s first review appeared in May 2015 when his assessment of a cake
server received 62 comments from readers while, two years later in March 2017,
his review of “Silicone bagel moulds – holy snack heaven!” was followed by 756
comments, and his review of “onion goggles” in April 2017 by 806. Many of the
commentators – especially the punsters – are regulars, as each week they emerge
online as soon as the article appears, greet each other, wait for one another, note
when a regular is missing, apologize for being late and generally adopt the rules of
real-life conversational etiquette. Samadder’s review of a coconut grater opens with
the headline, “Coconut grater – an ugly pleasure of the flesh”, clearly provoking his
regulars to contribute with double-entendres, was followed by 493 comments.8 A
handful of contributors who emerge as leaders each week, dominate in the creation
of puns as can be seen in Figure 4.6. In fact, two punsters practically take over the
feed as they produce 10 out of 11 puns in a stretch of PPP, all of which are based on
the names of chocolate confectionary available in the UK and use a wide variety of
punning techniques. A third contributor evaluates this string of PPP after the ninth
pun, “Thank you for being the inspiration that spawned so many replies, haven’t
giggled so much for ages”. However, the contributor who is being thanked and
who actually triggered the puns does not actually take part in the long succession of
chocolate-based banter. It is also clear from the last two posts of the PPP session,
that the person who posted the tenth quip, was actually responding to the eighth
pun, “don’t milka it too much” telling that particular punster not to be a “smartie”.
Figure 4.6 is an illustration of the timeline of digital PPP. Unlike in real life,
people can come and go from a virtual conversation, add comments to a com-
ment posted at any time and generally can be unaware of surrounding discourse.
Whereas in real life when someone enters an ongoing conversation they will
eventually be filled in, or else they themselves will contextualize and under-
stand the discussion, in online discourse, someone who enters this virtual fray in
media res will not necessarily have caught up with all that was said previously.
132 The language of jokes online
Thus, online discourse runs the risk of becoming non-linear. Occasionally the
same pun is repeated in different places within the same thread. This seems to
be especially evident in longer stretches of PPP. A reader needs to reconstruct
both the timeline and adjacency pairs that are no longer physically online. It can
become confusing to outsiders who attempt to read these threads post hoc, as it
is not always clear who is responding to whom. Of course, a newcomer (newbie)
could catch up by reading the entire thread from the beginning – as well as other
threads below similar articles – but as that might involve reading several pages of
comments, it would not always be feasible. Furthermore, a reader needs to recon-
struct both the timeline and adjacency pairs created by posters who are no longer
physically online. Another problem is inclusion. Threads contain numerous “in-
jokes” that contributors make to one another that are quite incomprehensible to
a newbie. This incomprehensibility exemplifies the necessity for shared knowl-
edge resources in the uptake of humorous discourse. Significantly, in-jokes create
FIGURE 4.6 Ping-pong-punning below the line (“confectionary”)
The language of jokes online 133
comity amongst those who are included and understand the jokes, but exclude those
on the outside looking in. Comments amongst contributors following Samadder’s
articles exemplify a similar kind of exclusion that may occur in real-life joking
when for lack of knowledge we may find that we are unable to be amused by the
banter of others. This is especially common in inter-cultural exchanges in which
there may be a lack of common ground in terms of both language and shared
cultural knowledge.
There appears to be a lot of self-awareness in these comic communities as
people partake in a sort of performance of the self they wish to portray online.
Not only do regular contributors to Samadder’s reviews consistently congratulate
the journalist for his comic abilities, but they also pat each other’s backs for each
other’s skills in creating lengthy stretches of puns connected to the gadget under
scrutiny; they also post parodic poems, songs and funny stories. Much as we eval-
uate verbal humour in real-life discourse, we also do so online. Following one
of Samadder’s most popular articles, a review of the “Ham Dogger” – a device
to stuff bread rolls with a sausage (I know, the mind boggles), amongst the 667
mostly witty comments that follow the article (and 438 “shares”), evaluation is
rife.9 Someone who suggests the article was “rude” – albeit in a positive sense of
appreciation of its raciness – is followed by a contributor who attempts his or her
hand at irony (Figure 4.7) and gains 39 “likes” followed by 21 ripostes. However,
it is evident from some of the replies that not everyone picks up the irony in “How
low the readership of this great paper must have sunk to find smut in a harmless
gadget review!” Online, in fact, it is hard to distinguish irony from trolling. After
15 posts, the friendly banter gets very out of hand, with the ironist having to post:
FFS! It was a fucking trolly wee joke; do you honestly have any doubt in
your mind? In which case, if you do, I suggest we part paths now and we
have nothing more to say to each other (that sounds harsh, but what the fuck
else am I meant to do?).
FIGURE 4.7 Ping-pong-punning below the line
134 The language of jokes online
Another regular to the community ends up having to act as moderator “xxx is
just joining in with the joke, not taking you for serious! After all we have all
read your comments over the years”. This is a clear example of how it is easy to
misunderstand the intent of others within an online environment where, unlike in
a real-life situation, it is not easy to contextualize the surrounding milieu and thus
the appropriateness of what we are about to post. Devoid of so much “real-life”
information, it is challenging to understand the context sufficiently to grasp the
intention of the poster.
Threads containing long stretches of PPP also appear in online newspapers dur-
ing live coverage of televised events. It is, of course, fairly common for viewers
to post comments on social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter
during live television programmes so that their posts and/or tweets will appear in
real time on the lower part of the TV screen as they watch. However, if we wish
to examine the interaction and flow of banter between more than a couple of
viewers, newspaper threads occurring in real time and at the same time as a TV
programme provide a goldmine of material for humour scholars.
The examples that follow have been extracted from live feeds in The Guardian
newspaper online in which a group of fans of The Great British Bake Off (GBBO)
comment and generally chat about what they are watching on screen, as they
watch it. As have devotees of Rhik Samadder’s articles discussed previously,
these GBBO fans have created a small online community that interacts each week
during the programme in real time. Until 2016, journalist Heidi Stephens was
responsible for the weekly live coverage of the programme, while for the 2016
series, Stephens was replaced by Samadder in “The Great British Bake Off 2016
Episode x as it happened”. At the same time as the journalist provides a commen-
tary, in the BTL comments section readers/viewers provide their comments too.
Here too, it is clear from how contributors interact with one another in the
thread that they know each other, at least virtually. In fact, they make use of
communicative and politeness strategies that would be adopted in real-life con-
versation such as greetings, apologies and so on, just like contributors to the
comment section following Samadder’s articles on kitchen gadgets. The differ-
ence here is the presence of another screen, i.e. a television screen. This is because
as well as a smartphone or tablet, contributors are also watching a TV screen. Of
course, this is not to say that they might be watching GBBO from the same device
from which they are typing, but even so, they are privy to a more complex text
than that of a traditional newspaper article and its accompanying photographs.
GBBO itself sports dialogues coupled with moving images as well as written text,
illustrations, music, special effects, graphics, etc.
Figure 4.8 illustrates an example of PPP captured from a special episode of
GBBO that involves competitors making a flan.10 We have a rather different style
of wordplay from those examined so far as one participant opens up play by
simply playing with the word “flan” – “Isn’t flan a lovely word flanflanflanflan-
flan” to which another responds “Not as good as tart tarttarttarttarttart” while a
third joins in with an attempt to joke on the term “pie”. While we are not strictly
in the realm of puns, we are still dealing with humorous discourse and wordplay.
The language of jokes online 135
A fourth participant joins the fray by analysing her love of the term “ratatouille”.
The entire exchange consists of 6 moves made by 5 players in the space of 11
minutes. The players are there online throughout the exchange as each move fol-
lows another in rapid succession. Journalist Heidi is slightly confused as to what
to call the dish the contestants are baking, “I would argue strongly that a pie
without a top is a tart, or maybe a flan, but definitely not a pie”, she writes. In
fact, the third contributor does not engage in wordplay but directs his riposte to
“Not as good as ‘tart’” to Heidi, “Not if it’s supposed to sound like pie, eh Heidi?”
However, a more traditional “punning” exchange occurs towards the close of the
thread when one participant hopes that life is “flan-tastic” for the others, which is
followed by the response “flan-queue very much”.
Contributors to all the threads described are very much aware of their linguistic
flair for punning and wordplay. They encourage one another to play with words
and they constantly evaluate each other on their display of clever banter. This type
of linguistic activity highlights the extent to which the internet is language driven.
Hashtaggery
Twitter is a social network that allows users to post short messages known as
“tweets” that are restricted to 140 characters. In a sense, this limit in the number of
characters is a challenge in itself, a sort of a game. In addition, Twitter users signal
messages according to subject matter with an appropriate hashtag – # – followed
by a word or phrase. Many hashtags promote largely humorous tweets:
FIGURE 4.8 Ping-pong-punning below the line (“Bake off”)
136 The language of jokes online
#crazy #epic #friend #friends #fun #funny #funnypictures #haha #hilari-
ous #humor #instafun #instagood #instahappy #joke #jokes #joking
#laugh #laughing #lmao #lmfao #lol #photooftheday #silly #TagsForLikes
#tweegram #wacky #witty
However, if as Highfield (2015) asserts, “play and silliness are popular strategies
for the coverage and presentation of the topical and mundane online” and Twitter
is a suitable vehicle for presenting “the topical”, it follows that all that is newswor-
thy (and boringly un-newsworthy) will incite joking. Unsurprisingly, the subject of
politics and those engaged in politics takes up a large amount of space on this plat-
form and Twitter hashtags can be inventive, funny and politically charged in order
to target those in power. Numerous hashtags in 2017, for example, target President
Donald Trump, such as #AnnoyTrumpIn3Words. As the hashtag suggests, contribu-
tors have to think up ways to restrict their badinage to a mere three words in a manner
that should supposedly annoy the President.11 The tweets for this hashtag include
references to the notorious wall the President wishes to build between the USA and
Mexico, his dislike of minority groups as well as his infamous hairstyle (Figure 4.9).
FIGURE 4.9 Examples of “hashtaggery”
The language of jokes online 137
Another of the abundant humorous hashtags regarding Donald Trump is
#DonaldTrumpTheMovie.12 Here users go to town with parodic tweets that
include “Sexist And The City #DonaldTrumpTheMovie” that obtained 353 likes;
“Scumbag Millionaire #DonaldTrumpTheMovie” that gained 1,046 likes and
“One Combover The Cuckoo’s Nest #DonaldTrumpTheMovie” with 400 likes
(Figure 4.9). What is significant is the number of times users “re-tweet” these
messages to other users. The “Scumbag Millionaire” tweet was shared 357 times.
If each person who receives the tweet shares it with at least one person who in
turn will re-tweet to others, it is easy to see how virulent these verbal gags can
become. If it is true that humans are physiologically wired both to connect with
others and to laugh with others (Hurley et al. 2013; Provine 2000), it should
come as no surprise that someone who thinks up or reads something funny should
want to connect with others through the wireless medium so they will laugh at
this too. Even though another person may be on the other side of the planet, they
will laugh at something that we have generated, and above all, that we both sup-
port – especially in the case of political banter. If once we would have casually
slipped, “Have you heard the one about the POTUS?” into our conversation and
thereby gained consensus through the affiliative laugh of our interlocutor, today
we have the means to greatly multiply the number of people who will be amused
by what amuses us within a few seconds. Of course, we need to be careful in the
face of an unknown audience. The following exchange was recorded from natu-
rally occurring conversation:
Initiator: “What’s rich and thick and full of clots?”
Participant 1: “I’ve no idea”.
Participant 2: “I don’t think I’m going to like this”.
Chiaro 1992:104
The second participant anticipates that the joke she is about to hear will criticize
the Tory party with which she sympathizes. In real life, we can put a stop to such
awkwardness quite quickly, but online, where users are often invisible and pro-
tected by pseudonyms, a gaffe may easily offend and in a worse scenario possibly
lead to verbal aggression, hate speech and even much worse scenarios. In fact,
there are numerous closed groups on Facebook where people with similar extrem-
ist political ideas post humorous materials knowing that others will appreciate
them because they are politically like-minded. In the privacy of a closed group,
these people who are on the same wavelength may joke to their hearts’ content
knowing they will not irritate or shock those of differing political tendencies,
neither will they themselves be attacked by those who do not share their points of
view or sense of humour.
However, seeing our posts shared and liked makes us feel good about our-
selves. Studies suggest that Facebook activity stimulates the release of dopamine,
a “feel good” chemical in our brains. Making others laugh, seeing that others “like”
what we post, appears to give us a chemical high.13 Unknowingly, the internet has
provided us with the tools for positive face strategy.
138 The language of jokes online
Finally, it is traditional to poke fun at the establishment, institutions and espe-
cially at leaders (see Chapter 1), but what such hashtags allow us to do is, first,
to rise to an intellectual challenge (e.g. to mock a President in three words or
manipulate a film title). Second, hashtags render our output visible to thousands
of other users in real time. As we can see, then, the language of jokes is no dif-
ferent from what it has always been. However, the many ways and modes we
convey jokes has changed, and perhaps it has never been so true that the medium
is the message.
The hashtag, however, is not simply restricted to categorizing or tagging tweets
on the Twitter platform, after migrating to Facebook and Instagram it has now
made its way into everyday speech. Rather like the term “lol” that is no longer
limited to online communication but is also used in speech, it is quite common
amongst younger people to punctuate their speech with the term “hashtag”. This
migration from internet to real life exemplifies how writing and speech influ-
ence each other. If tweets (and short message texts in general) exemplify speech
in writing – in the sense that although technically they are written they actually
mirror speech rather than writing – it should come as no surprise that people utter
the word “hashtag” too. As, in the past, a more formal style of writing favoured a
more formal manner of speech; today the opposite occurs with the informality of
much written online language seeping into speech.
When the verbal meets the visual: in and around
internet memes
The computer-mediated humour we have looked at so far has been purely ver-
bal in form. Online communities argue and chat with words, and the basics
of Twitter are set within a character count limitation. Let us now move on to
consider what may well be the most popular form of online humour, namely the
so-called “internet meme”.
Richard Dawkins (1976) first introduced the concept of the cultural meme as
“a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation”, more specifically a sort
of behavioural equivalent of a biological gene. Dawkins’ examples of cultural
memes include, amongst other things, tunes, styles of dress, styles of architecture
and catch phrases. For instance, in the 1960s, Mary Quant invented the mini-skirt
and very soon women and girls the world over were wearing similar skirts. These
millions of copied skirts were not identical to Quant’s original prototype, but in
essence, they were simply different versions of the same short skirt. If we com-
pare the memetic component of the mini-skirt to the biological theory of natural
selection, we see that mini-skirts vary in shape, colour and even length; people
replicate them easily worldwide and they respond positively to the concept of
“fitness”. Mini-skirts are “fit” because they successfully “competed” with other
objects of fashion to survive and endure through the 1960s, 1970s and beyond.
Mini-skirts survive within a cultural meme pool, as opposed to a biological
The language of jokes online 139
genepool. Eventually, the midi and the maxi-skirt replaced the mini, but Quant’s
short skirt continued to evolve and exists to the present day, thereby underscor-
ing its cultural fitness. Jokes, especially those belonging to a cycle (e.g. lightbulb
jokes, blonde jokes etc.) are instances of culturally transmitted memes.
The world online is rife with memetic activity. When we think of memes
today, we might visualize stock images of personalities in particular poses,
funny videos and different versions of the same humorous picture with a clever,
but always divergent, caption materializing on our smartphones via Facebook,
Twitter or WhatsApp. These memes become viral as they quickly spread through
the internet. In the same way as Dawkins’ social memes (such as the mini-skirt)
caught on and spread very quickly, humorous internet memes act in a similar way.
Bjarneskans et al. (n.d.) compare contemporary memes online to more traditional
examples of memetic texts such as the “Kilroy was here” graffiti of the 1970s and
1980s in which the fact that the Kilroy phrase was actually scrawled on walls was
part of the message itself (see Chiaro 1992). Seeing “Kilroy was here” in differ-
ent unrelated places around the world was likely to raise a smile of recognition.
Why write on a wall? “Because it’s there”, declares a famous graffito.14 The same
is true of internet memes. The fact that memes travel and are spread online is
actually part of the message. lolcats and gifs, stock character memes and photo-
shopped politicians can only exist through the medium of the internet. The effect
of the image alone would not be the same in a newspaper or on a TV programme –
also because of the fact that “old” media do not allow us to share images in the
same way, with so many people and with such immediacy. If in the past, we
would need to travel widely to experience the wealth of the world’s graffiti, nowa-
days the digital equivalent of graffiti comes to us. Furthermore, this content no
longer comes to us on a distant screen, but on our smartphones – in our pockets,
in our handbags and in our hands, thus almost becoming part of the private space
of our bodies. We live in a face down society, connected to each other and con-
stantly checking our electronic gadgets in fear of missing out – FOMO. This is
in contrast to what was once a face up society before we engaged with each other
electronically. Although this memetic behaviour occurs privately, in reality it is
inextricably linked to an extremely public space that is the online environment, so
that public and private spheres mingle and merge. We laugh alone and we laugh
together – albeit at a distance in space, and probably in a time lapse of anything
from a split second onwards. Last, but certainly not least, it is important to note
that users can create their own memes and, above all, adapt pre-existing memes
with the aid of many available tools that generate them.
We choose the people with whom we decide to share a humorous meme and
we do so because we believe that they will share our sense of humour. We feel we
are socially gelling with the recipient by saying, “Hey, you will find X, Y and Z
funny/silly/hilarious too. You and I are alike”, thereby creating more positive face
politeness. If we were to print out a few images of a popular stock character meme,
say that of Gene Wilder in the persona of Willy Wonka, leaning on his hand with
140 The language of jokes online
a clever catchphrase framing his face and then hand out the copies to members of
our family, it would not be the same as posting the meme on Facebook. Similarly,
posting on Facebook would not be the same as forwarding the image to members
of our family via their smartphones. To understand this, we return to the ideas
of Marshall McLuhan. These memes are inseparable from their online abode.
Consider the meta-joke within a meme of Willy Wonka with the caption reading,
“So, I’m a gif now? I guess pictures aren’t enough” (Figure 4.10).
In the same way, millennials tease their elders in scores of posts such as the one
entitled, “Oh dear, Dad tried to print a video” that features the image macro of a
scrunched up sheet of paper with a blank square with a play button in the middle
framing Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water. The post simultaneously mocks Baby
Boomers’ IT inadequacy and their taste in music that has not changed since the
1970s (Figure 4.11).15
Still, one significant difference between the example of the mini-skirt as a
meme and many internet memes is their restricted fitness. It is unlikely that we
will still be laughing at Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn in the parody of the
viral Thor trailer in 2027.16 Just as the seemingly endless memes regarding Silvio
Berlusconi’s hair transplant have lost their edge, so will those regarding Donald
Trump’s quiff and orange tinted skin. This is because an important feature of
internet memes is their here and nowness. Unlike the possibilities for updating
the traditional targets of oral jokes occurring in old media, it would be difficult
to find a way to update these memes. We might easily substitute the names of
the President, politician and the Pope in the parachute joke in Chapter 1 with the
names of those holding the same positions of authority today. The same cannot
be done with these somewhat fleeting images referring to a particular moment
FIGURE 4.10 Manipulation of an image macro
The language of jokes online 141
in political time. Crucially, internet memes are part of our consumer throwaway
society and cannot be refreshed or updated precisely because of their specific link
to the present moment. Moreover, a meme that is frozen in the moment clashes
with the concept of “fitness” as, on the one hand, a meme such as the Thor trailer
has 2.5 million views; on the other, it is likely to be outdated long before 2027.
When we look back at the early internet parodies of the post-9/11 warmongering
in the form of movie posters featuring then President George Bush and his entou-
rage, we find they have lost their relevance and hence their humorous impact.
Shifman, the scholar who has devoted much research to computer-mediated
humour, defines the internet meme as: “(a) a group of digital items sharing com-
mon characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which (b) were created with
awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via
the internet by many users” (2014: 41). She then divides them into nine meme
genres that she places under three different headings: “documentation of real life
moments”, “explicit manipulation of mass-mediated content” and “a new universe
of digital and meme-oriented content” (2014: 18). Shifman does not claim these
categories to be either comprehensive or watertight as there are many fuzzy edges
between one category and the next. We also need to consider cross-pollination
where user generated content might appear alongside commercial production of
memes (Weitz 2017). However, Shifman’s categories are a good starting point
to attempt to unravel some of the humorous content roaming around the internet.
There is an immeasurable amount of humorous material online and much of it
is memetic in nature. In order to obtain a representative sample of all possible
instances it would require extensive data mining that is beyond the scope of this
chapter. Thus, what follows is an overview of a self-selected assortment of internet
memes that were popular around the time of writing.
FIGURE 4.11 Sharing “deep purple”
142 The language of jokes online
Real-life moments
Of course, social network sites are places where users may present to others what-
ever they please about themselves whether in writing or in the form of a snapshot
or a video, or indeed a mixture of all three. Cameras on smartphones not only
allow users to take photos and make videos but they also allow them to manipulate
and enhance results. Users can upload their photos and videos onto platforms such
as YouTube and Facebook or simply send them to family and friends. However,
apart from cute images and videos of babies, toddlers and pets, there are several
other categories of funny “real-life moments” that users can generate, share and
with which they allow others to align with them.
Countless compilations of video clips posted on YouTube are of the “funny
moment” variety, namely home videos of people having accidents while carry-
ing out everyday tasks. People fall off trees, bump into walls and belly flop into
swimming pools. These slipping-on-a-banana-skin moments are funny because
the victim is not seriously hurt and usually participates in the laughter thereby
signalling that it is OK for others to laugh too. We, the audience know that all is
well and good with the victims and that we are free to laugh with them.
Shifman includes photofads within her “real-life moments” category (2013).
Photofads refer to a sort of online game in which people take a photo of them-
selves posing in a certain way before sharing the picture online. There have been a
number of fads in which people take photos of themselves “planking” (balancing
face-down in a plank position); “owling” (crouching like an owl in odd places);
posing as mannequins or even pretending they are dead. These poses are doubly
memetic, both in the act of people copying each other’s poses and in the continuous
repetition of the appearance of the pose itself online, as users attempt to trump each
other as they appear in different environments or else think up the most extreme
variation of the pose. In terms of meme, the fitness of each photofad is short-lived.
I would like to include photobombing in this category too. Photobombing
involves accidentally or purposely putting oneself into the view of someone taking
a photo, usually by jumping up behind those posing. In this sense, photobomb-
ing is a sort of virtual practical joke. Whether purposeful or accidental, the photo
will go online and the effect is comic. Well-known personalities tend to engage
in photobombing (e.g. Benedict Cumberbatch and Donald Trump) as they know
that their popularity will gain them numerous “likes”. Whether this was the inten-
tion of Queen Elizabeth II when she photobombed a couple of Australian athletes
taking a selfie is dubious; however, the snapshot did go viral (Figure 4.12). The
smile on Her Majesty’s face reflects her awareness of what she is doing thereby
increasing the comic intent of the photobomb.
Related to photobombing are occurrences of people posing for a group pho-
tograph and deliberately disrupting it by surreptitiously making a “V sign” or, as
Silvio Berlusconi was prone to do, the cuckold sign behind the head of a personal-
ity, without them being aware that this is happening. Again, these photos go viral
very quickly but just as quickly lose their impact.
The language of jokes online 143
Challenges
Diverse online challenges fall into the category of “real-life documentation”. The
“ice-bucket challenge” of the summer of 2014 involved people throwing a bucket
of ice and water over their own or another person’s head in order to raise money
worldwide for research into motor neurone disease. Numerous heads of state and
media personalities took part in the challenge together with members of the pub-
lic. The point of the challenge was to film and then post the event online for others
to view and enjoy. Obviously, personalities like Bill Clinton and Italy’s Matteo
Renzi received more views than my (not so famous) brother Joe Chiaro did.
Manipulated content
This type of content may well make up the bulk of memes on the internet. Taking
an image, or making a video clip and transforming it, even minimally to humorous
ends, we create what appears to be the type of humour that many of us are engag-
ing with right now. These visual/verbal memes are easily accessible, they simply
arrive on our gadgets, we swipe right in order to access them, we consume them,
share them and move on to the next memes that have landed in our pockets. Being
mainly visual, unlike verbally dense written texts, memes do not require much
cognitive effort in order to be understood and appreciated. Memes are a reflection
of a consumer society that is visually oriented and fast moving. I would go as far
as defining traditional jokes in terms of slow humour, while memes exemplify
fast humour – or better still, McHumor. We see them; we laugh and move on to a
newer more topical meme. However, it is nonetheless essentially verbal language
that surrounds, sustains, supports and contextualizes these memes.
FIUGRE 4.12 Queen Elizabeth II photobombing Australian hockey players’ selfie
144 The language of jokes online
Churchill’s notorious “V sign”, Fonzie’s (Henry Winkler’s) “thumbs up” and
Einstein sticking out his tongue are frozen photographic moments that are con-
tinually replicated online.17 These images are reminiscent of the works of art by
Andy Warhol in which he would create a pattern by repeating the same picture
over and over. Likewise, the same, or almost the same, image of an iconic person-
ality will endlessly be repeated across the web. However, once verbal content is
added to the visuals, they cross over into Shifman’s second category of “explicit
manipulation of mass-mediated content”.
An “image macro” is a broad term to describe a picture superimposed with
text for humorous effect. These macros can range from the famous image of
Einstein writing on a blackboard or sticking his tongue out to scores of stock
characters from stage and screen, the world’s political arena and beyond. The
Willy Wonka/Gene Wilder meme (487,000 Google hits) is a classic meme fea-
turing “condescending/creepy” Wonka making a sarcastic remark.18 The four
images presented in Figure 4.10 show a few possibilities of the way a stock
meme may be varied and manipulated. The image macro with the reference to
Harry Potter represents the meme’s baseline. Wonka is simply making a sar-
castic remark as is expected of the meme. Countless images of Wonka in the
same stance exist online. Only the verbal text differs from image to image as he
makes a different sarcastic remark. A child dressed up and, in a sense, photofad-
ding Wonka and Johnny Depp, the actor who played the role of Willy Wonka in
the film’s remake, is not only a physical manipulation of the original meme but
a memetic imitation that straddles both Shifman’s previous category of “explicit
manipulation of mass-mediated content” with her category of memes that refer
to real-life moments. Lastly, the meme featuring Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka
literally mirrors the original meme – the actor is actually positioned in reverse
as though looking at Wilder – making a sarcastic and, at the same time, intertex-
tual, remark. These are just four varieties of a single image macro. Multiplying
this by the number of innumerable users and we begin to have an idea of the
breadth and scope of the phenomenon.
Memes as ethnic jokes
Shifman highlights the low percentage of ethnic jokes in a web-based sample
she examines (2007: 202) explaining how this may be due to changes in soci-
ety that now views such jokes as being politically incorrect. There are internet
image macros that target just about every ethnic group on the planet. However,
those targeting Jews and the Italians are, generally speaking, probably those in
the worst possible taste imaginable. Those targeting the Jewish people are usu-
ally Holocaust jokes, those about Italians range from mocking their obsession
with food to their participating in organized crime. While in the main Jews as a
people have overall trumped Holocaust humour by creating their own jokes and
laughing at themselves, Italians are yet to do so. Mintz (1998) has outlined four
developmental phases in ethnic humour. In the first stage, the central group is
The language of jokes online 145
critical of the peripheral group via jokes. During the second stage, the periph-
eral group becomes critical of itself by telling self-deprecating jokes that target
aspects of its own culture. By the third stage, the peripheral group can realisti-
cally laugh at itself. It is not until stage four that those on the periphery can joke
about the centre. Jewish humour is definitely at stage three by now – and possibly
beyond. Italian humour is stuck at stage one.
Here I examine three sets of memes that target Italians; those regarding what is
commonly considered to be Italians’ excessive use of gesticulation, those regard-
ing their obsession with food, and jokes about their military cowardice.
These three subsets of memes in fact are no more than an online equivalent
of traditional ethnic jokes that target Italians, as they play on exactly the same
stereotypes exploited in film, television and comedy in general, things like a
love for food, the importance of family, military inefficacy, organized crime
and so on. An especially virulent internet meme that produces 1.35 million hits
on Google is “How Italians do things” and features people (Italians) carrying
out a range of everyday actions while holding their hand in a finger purse stance
(Figure 4.13). This is a typical Italian gesture in which the fingertips of either
hand are brought together upright and pursed to form a cup, while the hand is
waved up and down. The gesture can mean a variety of things, but Italians tend
to use it especially to implore, “What on earth are you talking about?” or “What
the hell do you want from me?” The image macro simply consists of a close
up of the gesture and the most basic meme features this image and a caption
declaring that “Italian speaking mode” is “on” thereby informing recipients that
knowing the gesture is all that is required in order to communicate in Italian.
However, users replicate the basic meme and apply it to various contexts so that
the gesture appears in a variety of more complex environments. In the simplest
emulations of the hand gesture, the memes consist of selfies of hands cupped
in the “Italian gesture” posing while playing the guitar or the piano, reading a
book, holding a mug of coffee or a smartphone. The suggestion is, of course,
ridiculous as none of these actions would actually succeed with hands held in
that position, but the meme feeds into a typical stereotype regarding Italians who
are allegedly unable to speak without moving their hands. Furthermore, users
create other memes within this sub-genre by manipulating images of objects into
the shape of the hand gesture to create a set of Italian objects.
However, users create other memes within this sub-genre by manipulating
images of objects into the shape of the hand gesture to create a set of Italian objects.
There is an “Italian fork” in the form of a pursed hand and an “Italian plug” in which
its three prongs meet, while a cat (overlapping with the LOLCat category?) illus-
trates how Italian felines argue by moving their paws backwards and forwards.19
So far so good; however, many memes feature the hand gesture positioned
over and covering another body part (Figure 4.13). By superimposing a photo
of the gesture onto a pair of feet we see “how Italians walk”; a de-humanized
mother and baby whose heads are replaced with hands represents an “Italian
mother [who] holds her newborn child for the first time”. To underscore the
The language of jokes online 147
lifetime brevity of these memes, this Italian gesture meme peaked in popular-
ity online on 15 March 2017 and only two days later began to be considered as
being overused.20 On the other hand, these memes remain online long after they
go out of fashion amongst younger internet geeks who presumably created the
memes in the first place.
FIGURE 4.14 A selection of internet memes that compare “human” body parts to
“Italian” body parts
148 The language of jokes online
A different set of memes pokes fun at Italians’ relationship with food. One
image macro consists of the image of a plate of pasta with a superimposed pun-
ning caption that is heavily dependent on the stereotypical Italian-American
accent that reads, “Did you hear about the Italian chef that died” – “He pasta
away”. Again, the term “impasta” (“imposter”) is superimposed over an image
macro of a box of vegan pasta while another meme features a T-shirt with a print
of tomatoes on the front with the slogan that reads “Legalize marinara”. Another
common “Italians be like” image macro displays enormous spreads of food cap-
tioned with phrases like “We are just having a small meal” or “I don’t think I
made enough food” to hone in on Italians’ obsession with abundant food. Again,
an image of hordes of people is captioned with “the family are coming over”.
Essentially, these memes can be pun-based as in the “pasta/marinara” examples,
or they can play on very specific clichés about Italians by juxtaposing images of
amplification (of food, people, etc.) with something an Italian might actually say.
In a sub-category of food related memes we find text book illustrations of differ-
ent parts of the human body, e.g. the eye, the skin, blood cells, etc. The illustrations
are accordingly labelled “the human eye”, “human skin”, “human blood cells”, etc.
and are set against corresponding images of an Italian food item so that the dermis
is compared to lasagne, the eye to a meatball, blood cells to slices of salami, etc.
(Figure 4.14). Notably the Italian body part/foods are not compared to say, US
FIGURE 4.15 A selection of internet memes regarding Italian military
The language of jokes online 149
body parts, but to “human” parts. Thus, as in some Italian hand gesture memes,
Italians are dehumanized in these last memes, which are neither innocent nor jovial.
Finally, a set of very nonsensical memes in which slices of pizza topped with
tomato and cheese replace warships and tanks seem to have supplanted the clas-
sic joke regarding Italian military inadequacy (Figure 4.15). These memes first
appeared in January 2017. The simplest meme replaces the wings of a fighter plane
with slices of pizza and a donkey’s saddle is replaced with a pizza to represent the
Italian cavalry. However, in more surreal memes, triangular pizza slices represent
soldiers or warships. As with other memes discussed earlier, they pivot on the dehu-
manization of Italians, especially when a scantily dressed woman is transformed into
a slice of pizza representing the disguise of an Italian soldier. Over and above the
ethnic slant of the memes, it is interesting how traditionally women are seen as food,
animals or body parts. Here too we have instances of good humour, but bad taste.
Exclusive to the internet
Some internet humour has no real-world equivalent. Shifman includes Rage
Comics in her category of a “new universe of meme-oriented content” referring
to forms of humour that were born online, thrive online but have no correspond-
ence with reality. Rage comics consist of comic strips containing “rage faces”
that are crudely drawn, scribbled sketches of faces or stick people created with
FIGURE 4.16 Countryballs
150 The language of jokes online
software like MS Paint. Each face represents a different emotion. These comic
strips depict a real-life experience that ends in a punchline. While at the time of
writing these rage faces appear to have passed their peak in popularity, some of
the faces like the “Troll face” and the “LOL face” are still prevalent, both online
and, as we shall see, in real life.
“Countryballs” are a similar phenomenon. The first countryball to appear
was Polandball, a cartoon character drawn in the shape of a ball with the white
and red colour schemes of the Polish flag. Polandball wants to go into space
but feels threatened by Germany and Russia. Soon other countryballs appeared
all in the guise of different national flags. The countryball for the USA, which
wears the stars and stripes and cool sunglasses, is egocentric, with no idea of
anything that happens outside the USA but always ready to rush in to bring
“freedoms” whenever required. The UK ball is a man donning a top hat and a
monocle, nostalgic for his lost empire. France always surrenders immediately;
the Netherlands is usually tripping on drugs and loves tulips and windmills; and
so on. Therefore, in a sense we have (yet another) online equivalent of Davies’
ethnic jokes. Figure 4.16 illustrates a Countryball map of Europe in which several
FIGURE 4.17 A selection of lolcat memes
The language of jokes online 151
subjects are actually similar to rage balls, as opposed to the more usual well-
drawn and precise countryballs.
Finally, this category includes the phenomenon of lolcats and “animal
humour” in general. As we saw earlier, according to Critchley, when animals act
in a way that mirrors human behaviour they are seen as endearing. We therefore
smile at photos of cats that according to the person who posted the snapshot,
look like famous personalities or the “bread catting” meme in which kittens are
photographed with their heads poking through a slice of bread.
As cat owners know, cats may often take on a stance of quasi-superiority as in
the image of the “uninterested cat” or they may position themselves in odd places
(Figure 4.17), which is amusing enough to trigger a meme. Of course, the addition
of a cat-based pun enhances the fun, especially when we consider cats’ affected,
grammatically incorrect speech present in many memes.
Criss-cross humour
Communication online is not restricted to bimodal means alone. We have seen
the emulation of real-life conversation in threads and feeds; we have seen purely
visual clips, gifs and images, as well as visual content coupled with verbal ele-
ments typical of memes. However, what is particular about Web 2.0 is that users
themselves can participate and become part of the content they are posting. The
baseline for this could be the vlog (a video blog) in which users can see the speaker
instruct viewers on how to do something – this can be anything from playing the
guitar to making a cake – and as s/he speaks viewers can actually see what s/he
is doing. Therefore, here we have different, distinct narratives all rolled into one.
The viewer can see the vlogger, listen to the instructions and, simultaneously, see
what s/he is actually doing.
A phenomenon that takes multimodality one step further in terms of humour
consists of people who report something funny that they have seen elsewhere
online but instead of simply sharing what they have found, they elaborate and
comment on it. As we have seen, we tend to laugh at the mistakes made by oth-
ers (Chapter 1) and that, furthermore, accidental slips of the tongue are very
similar to deliberately invented wordplay – otherwise so-called “Freudian slips”
would cease to amuse. Hockett provides an interesting example of the comic
self-awareness of a slip of the tongue made by two colleagues as they are driving
to work in Berkeley:
“This is how we go to Berkland and Oakley? – Erkland and Boakley? – no,
Berkland and Erkley? – Darn it Oakland and Berkeley!”
The first slip is an example of metathesis in which the speaker accidentally inverts
the first syllable of the name of each suburb, while in the second accidental slip
he shifts the first sound of the name of the first town onto the second (wrong)
town name. Hockett (1977) suggests that once the speaker is aware of his mistake,
152 The language of jokes online
recognizes its comic potential, and deliberately plays on it by twisting the initial
syllables in different ways. Hockett classifies the example as a “half witticism”.
Accidental jokes such as this are formally similar to deliberate jokes. However,
in the same way we can make people laugh by reporting an amusing incident, we
can also provoke laughter by reporting a linguistic faux pas made by someone
else, as Hockett himself does with the example he provides. In fairness, Hockett
is making a serious point, but he is also amusing his readers.
In old media, people would send examples of amusing utterances made by
small children or ambiguous writings that they had seen to special columns in the
press where they would be published (see Chiaro 1992: 21–4). These examples
allowed readers to laugh with the person who discovered the linguistic mistake
and at the “culprit” of the mistake. In new media, we find dozens of updated
examples of this.
As we saw previously, Alonzo Lerone posts a wide variety of humorous
materials on various online platforms. What is of particular interest here is his
reporting and comments of a (memetic) online phenomenon known as “food
fails” from celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay’s Twitter account. Ramsay who has
4.93 million followers appears to have quite a sense of humour. Ramsay’s follow-
ers will typically tweet a photograph of a dish they, or someone they know, have
just prepared together with queries such as “@gordonramsey what do you think
of my uncle’s chicken?” or @gordonramsey Rate my cream cheese pasta”, etc.
The images of the dishes that posters query are anything but mouth-watering and
Ramsay will typically reply in a very sarcastic or ironic manner expressing his
disgust directly.21 Obviously, Ramsay does not encourage people to post photos
of successful dishes because that would not allow him to respond in a humorous
manner. Now what Lerone does is to make a compilation of both users’ queries
and Ramsay’s responses and comment upon them.22 Followers see the meme, the
photo of the dish and accompanying tweet that Lerone reads aloud. He reads both
question and response in exaggerated tones thereby adding to the amusement of
his followers who see both tweets and Lerone. He also uses a laugh voice as he
tries hard not to laugh, and will often cover his face. When someone asks Ramsay
what he thinks of flight food and the chef answers “I’d rather walk!”, we can see
and hear Lerone in fits of laughter – and that is contagious. Ramsay is funny per
se, he will pun or will just be downright rude, but it is Lerone’s laughter and com-
ments that more than double the fun.
Lerone is criss-crossing categories. He is using tweets (someone else’s) that in
turn rely on user generated content from elsewhere that he points out to his remote
audience. He films himself reading out the tweets and reacts. His followers then
react to his reaction. This chain reaction continues in the copied version posted
online by his imitator.
Meme transference
Finally, Figure 4.18 is the ultimate example of criss-crossing. It illustrates the way
in which internet memes transfer, almost by osmosis, into real life. The sweatshirt
The language of jokes online 153
FIGURE 4.18 An example of osmotic meme transference
of the girl in the photograph (taken in Berlin) has the image of a rage face printed
on the back.
While we are used to merchandise that cashes in on box office successes, such
as products on sale at Disney stores that sell goods that reference the latest Disney
film, at one point someone came up with the idea of making money by creating
goods that mirror the kind of things that thrive on the web. A commercial website
like “Red Bubble” sells everything from clothes and stationery to home furnish-
ings that cash in on of the popularity of the internet meme. These items sport
either a meme proper, or else a reference to a meme. The site sells T-shirts with
the phrase “Meme Queen” or “Meme Lord” printed on them; duvet covers repeat
the word “meme” dozens of times, mugs that display puns like “You meme a lot
154 The language of jokes online
to me”, etc. In addition, merchandise with popular rage faces, especially the troll
and LOL faces, are also available.
This merchandise exemplifies how what originated as an internet phenom-
enon cross-pollinates into the real world. Take for example T-shirts that sport
the phrase “All your base are belong to us”. This has crossed over into the real
world from a video game called Zero Wing. The translational error found in the
European version of the original Japanese version became an internet meme that
was especially popular in the early to mid 2000s. In 2006, when YouTube had
taken down the site for maintenance, the phrase “ALL YOUR VIDEOS ARE
BELONG TO US” was placed below the logo leading users to believe that the
site had been hacked. YouTube responded to these rumours in “Engrish” with the
phrase: “No, we haven’t be hacked. Get a sense of humor”.
Notes
1 At the time of writing, technology is moving towards (what might be called) Web 3.0
that “will be more connected, open, and intelligent, with semantic web technologies,
distributed databases, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reason-
ing, and autonomous agents” (Spivak 2017).
2 Modern Family, “Connection Lost” Season 6, Episode 16. First aired 15 February 2015.
3 Black Mirror, created by Charlie Brooker. Series 1 and 2 broadcast by Channel 4
(2011–15) and Series 3 and 4 (2016) by Netflix.
4 See Alonzo Lerone’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/ItsAlonzo/?hc_location=ufi.
5 See: www.facebook.com/OfficialMonstah/videos/vb.192772410856761/1047516225
382371/?type=2&theater¬if_t=comment_mention¬if_id=1493550164206653.
6 Thread no longer available but consulted at www.theguardian.com/business/econo
mics-blog/2016/jul/26/Italy-economics-banks-loans-crisis-europe on 26 July 2016.
7 Thread including comment available at: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/
2017/jan/31/steve-bell-on-enoch-powell-and-brexit-cartoon. Retrieved 1 February 2017.
8 Article and thread available at: www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/feb/22/kitchen-
gadgets-review-coconut-grater-ugly-pleasure-flesh. Retrieved 14 March 2017.
9 Rhik Samadder, “Kitchen gadgets review: The Ham Dogger – possibilities as endless
as a nightmare”. The Guardian 15 March 2017. Available at: www.theguardian.com/
lifeandstyle/2017/mar/15/kitchen-gadgets-review-the-ham-dogger-possibilities-as-
endless-as-a-nightmare#comments. Retrieved 23 April 2017.
10 The Great Sport Relief Bake Off, Episode four – as it happened. Available at: www.
theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/live/2016/feb/24/the-great-sport-relief-bake-off-episode-
four-follow-it-live#comments. Retrieved 16 August 2016.
11 Ryan Barrell 2016, “Tweeters share hilarious ways they would annoy Donald Trump
with just three words”. Huffpost Comedy UK 8 September. Available at: www.huffing
tonpost.co.uk/entry/annoy-donald-trump-funny-tweets_uk_57d13953e4b0ac5a02
dd6306. Retrieved 23 April 2017.
12 Ryan Barrell 2016. “Twitter is suggesting hilarious titles for ‘Donald Trump the
Movie’”. Huffpost Comedy UK. 2 August. Available at: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/
donald-trump-the-movie-hashtag_uk_57a0492ee4b0459aae5e1b24. Retrieved 23 April
2017.
13 Libby-Jane Charleston 2016. “How Facebook is making us fearful”. Huffington Post
(Australia). Available at: www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/07/03/how-facebook-is-
making-us-fearful/. Retrieved 25 April 2017.
14 Roger Kilroy. 1984. Graffiti. The Scrawl of the Wild. London: Corgi, p. 9.
The language of jokes online 155
15 See “Oh dear, dad tried to print a video”. Available at: http://imgur.com/gallery/NDX
nJqe. Retrieved 26 April 2017.
16 “Snap Election – coming soon”. Available at: www.facebook.com/www.JOE.co.uk/vid
eos/878259955671405/?pnref=story. Retrieved 25 April 2017.
17 Happy Days was a popular US sitcom that was broadcast from 1974 to 1984.
18 For the technicalities and further details see “Condescending Wonka/Creepy Wonka”
at Know Your Meme. Available at: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/condescending-
wonka-creepy-wonka. Retrieved 26 April 2017.
19 See https://media.gihpy.com/media/DoJreqKz4McZG/giphy.gif. Retrieved 24 August
2017.
20 See http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-italians-do-things. Retrieved 27 April 2017.
21 Gordon Ramsay at Twitter available at: https://twitter.com/gordonramsay?lang=it.
22 Alonzo Lerone available at: www.facebook.com/ItsAlonzo/. Retrieved 30 April 2017.
CLOSING REMARKS
Ever since humans began to write, they wrote on walls and much of what they scrib-
bled was supposed to be funny. According to a wall in Pompeii, we discover that in
ad 79, Festus hic futuit cum sodalibus – “Here is where Festus did it with friends”.
Again, in Chancery Lane, London in 1719 someone wrote, “Here did I lay my Celia
down; / I got the pox and she got half a crown”. More recent lavatory graffiti in the
UK includes “Beware of limbo dancers” written at the bottom of cubicle doors and
the punning OOAQICI82QB4IP, a traditional graffito to be found in women’s public
conveniences. However, not all the so-called “scrawl of the wild” are about sexual
encounters. Graffiti that are more sophisticated include the classic “Queen Elizabeth
rules UK?” a spin-off of the “Arsenal rules OK” meme, literary oriented quips like
“Oedipus phone your mother!” and homemade philosophy such as “Life is a heredi-
tary disease!” (Kilroy 1984). Graffiti exemplify humour created by the people for
the people. Today, Banksy, the well-known graffiti artist sends out serious messages
through drawings that are both ironic and funny. Originally, Facebook adopted the
wall metaphor to label the space where people could post their thoughts and messages.
This has now been replaced by a timeline, but many postings are still humorous.
There is a strong parallel between today’s internet memes and graffiti. Indeed,
between memes and joke cycles in general. However, graffiti are a more fitting com-
parison because, like internet memes, they are created to be seen and/or read, but as
with all joke cycles, they are open to manipulation. A classic graffito reports two
strikingly similar quotes:
To do is to be – Rousseau
To be is to do – Sartre
Beneath the two phrases we find a witty rejoinder which creates a new combina-
tion of “do” and “be” resulting in “Do be do be do” – Sinatra (Chiaro 1992: 72).
DOI: 10.4324/9781315146348-6
Closing remarks 157
The cycle of “OK” graffiti also works on the alteration of an original frame
(“Arsenal rules OK”) to memetically become things like “Absolute zero rules
0°K°”; “French diplomacy rules, au quay”, etc. Similarly, today an internet meme
will generate numerous variants. The “We shall overcomb” meme that was popu-
lar just before the election of President Donald Trump exists in countless variants.
In one meme, his combover is in the shape of the American eagle, in another
the famous quiff contains a comb, while each image macro differs in colour or
else in the President’s pose. In other words, in these examples, the image macro
changes rather than the words. On the other hand, many memes are of the same
image macro framed with words that change with each meme. The “one does not
simply [walk into Mordor]” meme featuring Sean Bean in the part of Boromir
from the film version of The Lord of the Rings exemplifies the potential of a single
image macro.1 The original Tolkien quote, “One does not simply X into Mordor”
is typically substituted with another verb which is often related to the subject of
an image and “Mordor” with another location that has relevance to the situation
depicted in the image.
Humour is extremely pervasive in Britain. The British are able to joke at times
and in places where ludic behaviour would be inappropriate in other cultures.
Joking comes to the British as second nature. From irony to understatement, we
are unable to restrain ourselves from adding a sprinkling of wit in everyday dis-
course. More than our passion for gardening and discussing the weather, humour is
an important value in UK culture. And possibly, the fact that the English language
has become the world’s most prominent language, the language of, amongst other
things, the internet, may well be one of the reasons why the internet itself has
become the stage for so much humour and silliness. After all, the step from using
another language and appropriating the cultural values attached to that language
is a small one. If that value involves a positive emotion such is humour, then long
live global humour.
Finally, an important question remains unanswered. Is there such a thing as
only joking? The sheer quantity of truth underlying the internet memes made by
the people for the people reflects anger and a need to be heard. This rebellion is
created with a smile on the faces of the thousands of people who generate the sea of
politically based humorous content on line. But there is no “only joking” about it.
Note
1 For a variety of examples of this meme, see: www.google.it/search?q=trending+m
eme&client=firefox-b-ab&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj35_
Xu-tjTAhVMkRQKHV-qD_sQ_AUIBigB&biw=1147&bih=566#tbm=isch&q=one+do
es+not+simply+meme. Retrieved 5 May 2017.
REFERENCES
Aarons, Debra. 2012. Jokes and the Linguistic Mind. New York: Routledge.
Adamic, Lada, Mike Develin and Udi Weinsberg. 2015. Facebook Research. “The
not-so-universal language of laughter”. Available at: https://research.fb.com/the-not-
so-universal-language-of-laughter/#fn1. Retrieved 15 February 2016.
Alexander, Richard J. 1997. Aspects of Verbal Humour in English. Tübingen, Germany:
Gunter Narr Verlag.
Apte, Terri. 2009. What Do You Want from Me? Learning to Get Along with the In-Laws.
New York: W.W. Norton.
Aristotle. 1970. Poetics. (Translated by Gerald F. Else). Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press.
Attardo, Salvatore. 1994. Linguistic Theories of Humor. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Attardo, Salvatore and Victor Raskin. 1991. “Script theory (re)visited: Joke similarity
and joke representation model”. Humor, International Journal of Humor Research 4:
293–347.
Bateson, Gregory. 1953. “The position of humour in human communication”. In Heinz von
Foerster, Margaret Mead and Hans-Lukas Teuber (eds.) Cybernetics, Circular, Casual
and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems. Transactions of the Ninth
Conference. New York: Josiah Macey Jr. Foundation, 1–47.
Baym, Nancy. 1995. “The performance of humor in computer-mediated communication”.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 1(2). Available at: http://onlinelibrary.
wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1083-6101. Retrieved 9 October 2017.
Bergson, Henri. 1900. Le rire. Essai sur la signification du comique. Paris: Alcan.
Billig, Michael. 2005. Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour.
London: Sage.
Billingsley, Amy. 2016. “Humoring feminist philosophy: The politics of ameliorative and
counter-ameliorative humorous wordplay”. University of Oregon: Unpublished PhD.
Bing, Janet. 2007. “Liberated jokes: Sexual humor in all-female groups”. Humor,
International Journal of Humor Research 20(4): 337–66.
Bing, Janet and Joanne Scheibman. 2014. “Blended spaces as subversive feminist humor”.
In Delia Chiaro and Raffaella Baccolini (eds.) Gender and Humor: Interdisciplinary
and International Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 13–29.
References 159
Bollettieri Bosinelli, Rosa Maria. 1994. “Film dubbing: Linguistic and cultural issues”. Il
traduttore nuovo, XLII(1): 7–28.
Brown, Callum G. 2006. Religion and Society in Twentieth Century Britain. Oxford, UK:
Routledge.
Bucaria, Chiara. 2009. “Translation and censorship on Italian TV: An inevitable love
affair?” Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics 6: 13–32.
Bucaria, Chiara. 2010. “Laughing to death: Dubbed and subtitled humour in six feet
under”. In Delia Chiaro (ed.) Translation, Humour and the Media. London: Bloomsbury,
222–37.
Bunch, Sonny. 2015. “Hillary Clinton’s laugh is, objectively speaking, grating and awful”.
The Editor’s Blog. 15 October. Available at: http://freebeacon.com/blog/never-laugh/.
Retrieved 15 February 2016.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity. London:
Routledge.
Chafe, Wallace. 2007. The Importance of Not Being Earnest. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Chiaro, Delia. 1992. The Language of Jokes, Analysing Verbal Play. London: Routledge.
Chiaro, Delia. 2004. “Translational and marketing communication: A comparison of print
and web advertising of Italian agro-food products”. In Beverly Adab and Cristina Valdés
(eds.) The Translator. Special Issue. Key Debates in the Translation of Advertising
Material. 10(2): 313–28.
Chiaro, Delia. 2008. “Verbally expressed humor and translation”. In Victor Raskin (ed.)
The Primer of Humor Research. Berlin: De Gruyter, 569–608.
Chiaro, Delia. 2009a. “Issues in audio visual translation”. In Jeremy Munday (ed.) The
Routledge Companion to Translation Studies. London: Routledge, 141–65.
Chiaro, Delia. 2009b. “The politics of screen translation”. In Federico M. Federici (ed.)
Translating Regionalised Voices in Audiovisuals. Rome: Aracne, 27–42.
Chiaro, Delia. 2010a. “Translation and humour, humour and translation”. In Delia Chiaro
(ed.) Translation, Humour and Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 1–29.
Chiaro, Delia. 2010b. “Translating humour in the media”. In Delia Chiaro (ed.) Translation,
Humour and the Media. London: Bloomsbury, 1–16.
Chiaro, Delia. 2013. “Passionate about food: Jamie and Nigella and the performance
of food-talk”. In Cornelia Gerhardt, Maximiliane Frobenius and Susanne Ley (eds.)
Culinary Linguistics: The Chef’s Special. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 83–102.
Chiaro, Delia. 2016a. “Filthy viewing, dirty laughter”. In Chiara Bucaria and Luca Barra
(eds.) Taboo Comedy: Television and Controversial Humour. London: Palgrave.
Chiaro, Delia. 2016b. “Mimesis, reality and fictitious intermediation”. In Rachele Antonini
and Chiara Bucaria (eds.) Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation in the Media.
Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang, 23–42.
Chiaro, Delia. 2017. “Humor and translation”. In Salvatore Attardo (ed.) The Routledge
Handbook of the Linguistics of Humor. New York: Routledge.
Cicero, M. Tullis. 1965. De Oratore, Libri tres. Heidesheim, Germany: Olm.
Coates, Jennifer. 2007. “Talk in a play frame: More on laughter and intimacy”. Journal of
Pragmatics 39(1): 29–49.
Coates, Jennifer. 2014. “Gender and humor in everyday conversation”. In Delia Chiaro
and Raffaella Baccolini (eds.) Gender and Humor: Interdisciplinary and International
Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 147–64.
Critchley, Simon. 2002. On Humour. Routledge: London.
Cronin, Michael. 2004. Translation Goes to the Movies. London: Routledge.
Davies, Christie. 1990. Ethnic Humour around the World: A Comparative Analysis.
Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press.
160 References
Davies, Christie. 1998. Jokes and Their Relation to Society. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Davies, Christie. 2002. The Mirth of Nations. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Davies, Christie. 2011. Jokes and Their Targets. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana
Press.
Davies, Christie. 2012. “The English mother-in-law joke and its missing relatives”.
Israeli Journal of Humor Research, 1(2). Available at: http://sfile.f-static.com/image/
users/122789/ftp/my_files/International%201-2/1-Christie%20%20Davies%20
mother%20in%20law.pdf?id=11369076. Retrieved 15 February 2016.
Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Delabastita, Dirk. 2005. “Cross language comedy in Shakespeare”. Humor: International
Journal of Humor Research 18(2): 161–84.
De Mooij, Marieke. 1998. Global Marketing and Advertising, Understanding Cultural
Paradoxes. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Denton, John. 1994. “How a fish called Wanda became Un pesce di nome Wanda”. Il
Traduttore nuovo 42: 29–34.
Dworkin, Andrea. 2006 [1987]. Intercourse. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Egoyan, Atom and Ian Balfour (eds.). 2004. Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and
the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.
Franzini, Louis R. 1996. “Feminism and women’s sense of humor”. Sex Roles 11(12):
811–19.
Freud, Sigmund. 1977 [1905]. Jokes and Their Relationship to the Subconscious.
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Fry, William F. 2010 [1963]. Sweet Madness. A Study of Humor. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction.
Glenn, Phillip. 2003. Laughter in Interaction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Glenn, Phillip and Elizabeth Holt (eds.) 2013. Studies of Laughter in Interaction. London:
Bloomsbury.
Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Grice, Paul. 1975. “Logic and conversation”. In Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.)
Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, 41–58.
Groch-Begley, Hannah. 2015. “Media return to deriding Hillary Clinton’s laugh: ‘The
cackle’, ‘a record scratch’, and other tired attacks from the debate”. Media Matters
for America, 14 October. Available at: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/10/14/media-
return-to-deriding-hillary-clintons-laugh/206136. Retrieved 15 February 2016.
Gulas, Charles, S. and Marc G. Weinberg. 2010. “That’s not funny here: Humorous adver-
tising across boundaries”. In Delia Chiaro (ed.) Translation, Humour and the Media.
London: Bloomsbury, 17–33.
Hall, Jeffrey A. 2013. “Humor in long-term romantic relationships: The association of
general humor styles and relationship-specific functions with relationship satisfaction”.
Western Journal of Communication 77(3): 272–92.
Hall, Jeffrey A. 2015. “Sexual selection and humor in courtship: A case for warmth and
extroversion”. Evolutionary Psychology 13: 1–10.
Highfield, Tom. 2015. “Memeology Festival 04. On hashtaggery and portmanteaugraphy:
Memetic wordplay as social media practice”. Culture Digitally, 5 November 2015.
Available at: http://culturedigitally.org/2015/11/memeology-festival-04-on-hashtaggery-
References 161
and-portmanteaugraphy-memetic-wordplay-as-social-media-practice/. Retrieved 10
March 2016.
Hill, Amelia. 2008. “In-law tensions hit women hardest”. The Guardian, 30 November.
Available at: www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/nov/30/women-family. Retrieved 16
June 2016.
Hobbes, Thomas. 1991. Leviathan. Richard Tuck (ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Hockett, Charles. 1977. “Where the tongue slips there slip I”. In: To Honor Roman Jakobson.
Essays on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday, 11 October 1966, Volume 2. The Hague:
Mouton, 910–36.
Hockett, Charles, F. 1977 [1960]. “Jokes”. In: The View from Language: Selected Essays
1948–1964. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 257–89.
Hoey, Michael. 2005. Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. London:
Routledge.
Holmes, Janet. 2006. “Sharing a laugh: Pragmatic aspects of humor and gender in the
workplace”. Journal of Pragmatics 38: 26–50.
Holmes, Janet and Meredith Marra. 2006. “Humor and leadership style”. Humor 19(2):
119–38.
Holmes, Janet and Stephanie Schnurr. 2014. “Funny, feminine and flirtatious: Humor and
gendered discourse norms at work”. In Delia Chiaro and Raffaella Baccolini (eds.)
Gender and Humor: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives. New York:
Routledge, 165–81.
Hurley, Matthew N., Daniel C. Dennett and Reginald B. Adams Jr. 2013. Inside Jokes:
Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jackobson, Roman. (1959/2004). “On linguistic aspects of translation”. In L. Venuti (ed.)
The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 138–43.
Jardon, Ivor Hugh. 2014. The Best of Sickipedia. Print on demand. CreateSpace Independ-
ent Publishing Platform.
John, Nicholas A. 2012. “Sharing and Web 2.0: The emergence of a keyword”. New Media
and Society 15(2): 167–82.
Katan, David. 1999. Translating Cultures: An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters
and Mediators. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome.
Kilroy, Roger. 1984. The Scrawl of the Wild. London: Corgi Books.
Kirchgaessner, Stephanie. 2016. “Five Star mayor of Turin to create Italy’s first ‘vegetarian
city’”. The Guardian, 20 July. Available at: www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/21/
turin-mayor-italys-first-vegetarian-city-five-star. Retrieved 24 August 2017.
Koestler, Arthur. 1964. The Art of Creation. London: Hutchinson.
Kotthoff, Helga. 2006. “Gender and humour: The state of the art”. Journal of Pragmatics
30(1): 4–25.
Kramer, Elise. 2011. “The playful is political: The metapragmatics of internet rape-joke
arguments”. Language in Society 40(2): 137–68.
Krefting, Rebecca. 2014. All Joking Aside. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins.
Kuipers, Giselinde. 2006. Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke. Berlin:
De Gruyter.
Kuipers, Giselinde and Barbara Van der Ent. 2016. “The seriousness of ethnic jokes:
Ethnic humor and social change in the Netherlands, 1995–2012”. Humor International
Journal of Humor Research 29(4): 605–34.
Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and Women’s Place. San Francisco, CA: Harper and
Row.
162 References
Langer, John. 1981. “Television’s ‘personality system’”. Media, Culture and Society 3(4):
351–65.
Lauer, Jeanette, C. and Robert H. Lauer. 1986. ‘Til Death Do Us Part’: How Couples Stay
Together. London: Haworth.
Lobrutto, Christina. 2015. “Facebook study on e-laughter says ‘lol’ is out, ‘haha’ is in”.
Philly Voice, 15 August. Available at: www.phillyvoice.com/facebook-study-e-laughter/.
Retrieved 15 February 2017.
Martin, Rod M. 2007. The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach. Burlington,
MA: Elsevier Academic Press.
Martin, Rod M. 2014. “Humor and gender: An overview of psychological research”. In
Delia Chiaro and Raffaella Baccolini (eds.) Gender and Humor: Interdisciplinary and
International Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 123–46.
McCrum, Robert, William Cran and Robert Macneil. 2002. The Story of English, revised
edition. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
McGhee, Paul, E. 1971. “Development of the humor response: A review of the literature”,
Psychological Bulletin 76: 328–48.
Mintz, Larry. 1998. Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics. Westport,
CT: Greenwood.
Nash, Walter. 1985. The Language of Humour. London: Longman.
Norrick, Neal R. 1993. Conversational Joking: Humor in Everyday Talk. Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press.
Norrick, Neal R. 2000. Conversational Narrative: Storytelling in Everyday Talk.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Opie, Iona and Peter Opie. 1959. The Language and Lore of Schoolchildren. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
Oring, Eliott. 1992. Jokes and Their Relations. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky.
Orwell, George. 2000. “The art of Donald McGill”. In Bernard Crick (ed.) George Orwell
Essays. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Paolinelli, Mario and Eleonora di Fortunato. 2005. Tradurre per il Doppiaggio. Milan,
Italy: Hoepli.
Phillips, Adam. 2001. Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis.
London: Faber and Faber.
Plato 1975. Philebus. In J. C. B. Gosling (ed.). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
Provine, Robert R. 1996. “Laughter”. American Scientist 84(1): 38–45.
Provine, Robert, R. 2000. Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. New York: Viking.
Raskin, Victor. 1984. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Dortrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel.
Redfern, Walter. 1984. Puns. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Ritchie, Graeme D. 2004. The Linguistic Analysis of Jokes. London: Routledge.
Rossato, Linda. 2009. “The discourse of British TV cookery”. Unpublished PhD Thesis,
University of Naples, Federico II.
Rowson, Martin. 2014. “Why the Great British Bake Off needs a sprinkling of smut”. The
Guardian, 8 October. Available at: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/08/
great-british-bake-off-sprinkling-smut-sexual-innuendo. Retrieved 10 August 2015.
Ruch, Willibald. 1993a. “Exhilaration and Humor”. In M. Lewis and J. M. Haviland (eds.)
The Handbook of Emotion. New York: Guilford Publications, 605–16.
Ruch, Willibald. 1993b. “Assessment of appreciation of humor: Studies with the 3 WD
humor test”. In J. N. Butcher and C. D. Spielberger (eds.) Advances in Personality
Assessment. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 27–75.
Sacks, Harvey. 1974. “An analysis of the course of a joke’s telling in conversation”. In
Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer (eds.) Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 337–53.
References 163
Sacks, Harvey. 1978. “Some technical considerations of a dirty joke”. In Jim Schenkein
(ed.) Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction. New York: Academic
Press, 249–75.
Sherzer, Joel. 2002. Speech, Play and Verbal Art. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Shifman, Limor. 2007. “Humor in the age of digital reproduction: Continuity and change
in internet-based comic texts”. International Journal of Communication 1: 187–209.
Shifman, Limor. 2011. “An anatomy of a YouTube meme”. New Media and Society 14(2):
187–203.
Shifman, Limor. 2013. “Memes in a digital world: Reconciling with a concept trouble-
maker”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18: 362–77.
Shifman, Limor. 2014. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Shifman, Limor and Dafna Lemish. 2010. “Between feminism and fun(ny)mism: Analyzing
gender in popular Internet humor”. Information, Communication and Society 13(6):
870–91.
Shultz, Thomas R. and Robert Pilon. 1973. “Development of the ability to detect linguistic
ambiguity”. Child Development 44(4): 728–33.
Sommers, Jack. 2016. “Eddie Izzard hits out at Ian McEwan’s ‘uninformed’ transgender
comments”. The Huffington Post, 5 April. Available at: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/
eddie-izzard-ian-mcewan-transgender-comments_uk_57035dbbe4b069ef5c00a9ed.
Retrieved 30 July 2016.
Sontag, Susan. 2004. “Performance art”. In PEN America Issue 5: Silences, 92–96. New
York: PEN American Centre.
Sternberg, Meier. 1981. “Polylingualism as reality and mimesis as mimesis”. Poetics
Today 2(4): 221–39.
Tannen, Debra. 1994. Gender and Discourse. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Tucker, Grant. 2012. 5,000 Great One-Liners. London: Biteback.
Usborne, Simon. 2016. “Cereal offenders: The breakfast ads that turn out to be flakey”,
The Guardian, 20 July. Available at: www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/
2016/jul/20/cereal-offenders-the-breakfast-ads-that-turn-out-to-be-flakey. Retrieved 24
August 2017.
Vennochi, Joan. 2007. “That Clinton cackle”. Boston News, 30 September. Available at:
www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/09/30/that_clinton_
cackle/. Retrieved 9 February 2016.
Vine, Bernadette, Susan Kell, Meredith Marra and Janet Holmes. 2009. “Boundary mark-
ing humour: Institutional gender and ethnic demarcation”. In Neal R. Norrick and Delia
Chiaro (eds.) Humor in Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 125–41.
Walker, Nancy. 1988. A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Weaver, Simon. 2011. The Rhetoric of Racist Humour: US, UK and Global Race Joking.
London: Routledge.
Weitz, Eric. 2016. “Editorial: ‘Humour and social media’”. European Journal of Humour
Research 4(4): 1–4.
Weitz, Eric. 2017. “Online and internet humor”. In Salvatore Attardo (ed.) The Routledge
Handbook of the Linguistics of Humor. New York: Routledge.
Whaite, John. 2014. “Soggy bottoms and hot buns: Why The Bake Off thrives on innuendo”.
The Telegraph, 23 September. Available at: www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/
11115090/Soggy-bottoms-and-hot-buns-why-the-Bake-Off-thrives-on-innuendo.html.
Retrieved 10 August 2015.
Ziv, Anwar. 1988. “Humor’s role in married life”. Humor 1: 223–30.
Ziv, Anwar. 2010. “The social function of humor in interpersonal relationships”. Society
47(1): 11–18.
INDEX
Aarons, Debra 6, 17, 85
accent 42, 49, 53–5, 58, 61–3, 67, 114,
117, 148
African-American Vernacular English 53
Alexander, Richard 6
alt.com 108
Aristotle 8, 23
Attardo 8, 15–16, 21, 32, 76, 94
banter 3, 12, 36, 38–40, 44–5, 58, 125,
131–35, 137
Bateson, Gregory 21, 32
Bean, Mr 4, 50–1, 56
Bergson, Henri 21
Billig, Michael 10, 45, 70, 77, 89
British National Corpus (BNC) 72,
75, 118
Brand, Jo 37, 43, 45, 98, 107–10
BTL (below the line) 2, 124, 127–28, 134
Bucaria, Chiara 53
Butler, Judith 70, 113
Carlin, George 96
Chafe, Walter 9, 14
Chaplin, Charlie 50, 65
Chiaro, Delia 8, 14, 17–18, 25, 39, 41,
47–8, 52, 62, 64, 67, 79, 125, 137, 139,
152, 156
Cho, Margaret 63, 109
Christie, Bridget 96, 98, 106, 110
chunking 49
class 25, 53, 55, 87
Clinton, Hillary 21, 74–6, 118
Coates, Jennifer 76, 86, 109
comedy 4, 23–4, 35, 37, 45, 49, 50–1, 53,
55–6, 64; scripted 37, 45, 48; slapstick
50; stand-up 10, 71, 93; unscripted
37–8, 42, 45
conceptual blending 16, 18, 117
countryballs 149, 150
Cowell, Simon 44–5
Critchley, Simon 14, 27, 32, 93, 151
Curtis, Tony 112
Davies, Christie 4, 8, 24–6, 30, 63, 76–8,
80, 84–7, 88–90, 92, 150
De Mooij, Marieke 37
dubbing 46–8, 54–5, 113
e-laughter 123
emoji 7, 123–24, 128
Evans, Annie Dr 75, 110
exhilaration 9
Facebook 10, 70, 100, 123–24, 126, 134,
137–40, 142
Far Side, The 27, 93
Freud, Sigmund 21, 23, 26, 64, 90, 151
Fry, William F. 21
gender bending 45, 112–18
General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH)
15–16, 21, 94, 105, 107, 109
globalization 4, 37
Index 165
Goffman, Ervin 14, 51
Google 71, 78, 101, 144–45
hashtag 122, 135–38
Hobbes, Thomas 23
Hoffman, Dustin 112
humour, definitions of 8, 112
humour, theories of: bisociation 8, 21;
incongruity 8; linguistic see GTVH;
superiority 23
humour, types of: acoustic 51–2, 125;
audiovisual 35–7, 48, 52–3, 57;
charged 5, 70–1, 79, 99, 106, 109, 136;
culture-specific 18–19, 25, 48–9, 52,
57–8, 65; non-verbal 2, 50–1; self-
deprecatory 105; styles 38, 45–6, 50,
71, 75, 86, 93, 101, 103–5, 108, 116,
134; visual 2–3, 21, 48–53, 55–6, 59,
62, 102, 138, 143–44, 151
innuendo 26, 42, 45–6
image macro 122, 140, 144–45, 148, 157
Izzard, Eddie 115–16
jokes: about blondes 24, 30–2, 78,
86–90; canny 24–8, 30, 50, 64, 81,
83, 86, 90, 100; dirty 26–8, 77, 86–8,
89, 92; about disasters 3, 24, 31–2, 92;
ethnic 16, 24, 52–3, 77, 89, 144–45,
149–50; feminist 32, 70, 77, 79, 89, 90,
96, 98–9, 111; marriage 77, 80–3;
mother-in-law 16, 77–8, 83–6; about
politics 4–5, 25, 78, 123, 130, 136;
postfeminist 77, 99, 11; about rape
24, 81, 92–7, 119–20; about religion
17, 24, 30, 77, 123; about sex 17, 24,
26–31, 63–4; sexist 15, 74, 77–86,
105–6; stupidity 24–31, 52, 64, 77, 79,
80, 82, 86–9; underdogs 24, 50, 52, 76;
wives 77, 80–3
Kafka, Franz 27, 93
Katan, David 49
Keaton, Buster 50
Kinky Boots 112–15
knowledge resource(s) (KR) 16
Koestler, Arthur 8, 21
Kothoff, Helga 86
Kramer, Elise 92
Kuipers, Giselinde 31, 76, 89
laughter 9–10, 21, 27, 40–1, 57, 64, 71–6,
88, 91, 92, 108–10, 115, 117, 123–25,
128, 142, 152; cackle 71, 74–5; giggle
71–5; guffaw 72, 74–6; “haha” 117,
123, 136
Laurel and Hardy 46–7, 50
Lemish, Dafna 70, 77, 79, 86, 98
Lemon, Jack 112, 114–15
lol 75, 123, 136, 138, 150, 154
lolcats 139, 145, 150–51
Martin, Rod M. 8–10, 26, 76
Marx Brothers 50, 63, 65–6
McGhee, Paul E. 9
McGill, Donald 27, 34, 82
memes 2–5, 8, 10, 19, 122, 138–42,
143–51, 152–53, 156–57
Millican, Sarah 108–9
Mintz, Larry 144
mirth 9
Mrs Doubtfire 112, 113–14
Nash, Walter 6
Nigella Lawson 38–9
Norrick, Neal 14, 21–2, 122
Oliver, Jamie 38–9
Opie, Fiona and Peter 31
Orwell, George 27, 81–2, 93
Philomena 58–9
photobombing 142–43
photofad 142–43
ping-pong-punning 8, 11–13, 124–30,
132–33, 135
Plato 23
Provine, Robert, R. 9, 124, 137
puns 2–3, 8, 12–14, 17–18, 40, 42, 58, 63,
65, 93, 125–29, 131, 133–34, 154
rage comics 149
Ramsay, Gordon 124, 152–53
Raskin, Victor 15, 17, 21, 94
Redfern, Walter 6, 63
ridicule 2–3, 10, 24, 30, 32, 44–5, 61–3,
66, 74, 88
Rivers, Joan 86, 98, 105, 109
Roach, Hal 47
roast 124
RP (Received Pronunciation) 53
Ruch, Willibald 9
Sacks, Harvey 14, 27–8
Shifman, Limor 70, 77, 79, 98, 107,
141–42, 144, 149
166 Index
Shrek 53, 55
Six Feet Under 57
Some Like It Hot 112, 114
Sonntag, Susan 29, 50, 60
stereotypes 54, 62, 78–9, 100, 115, 145
subtitling 47–8
Sopranos, The 59
Swift, Jonathan 3–5, 27, 93
taboo 17, 28, 43, 46, 49, 60–2, 64, 73, 76,
89, 97, 109
Tootsie 112, 114
translation 4, 12, 36–7, 46–61,
63–7, 154
tweets 3, 8, 19–20, 124, 134–38, 152
Twitter 1, 70, 124, 134–36,
138–39, 152
varieties of English 4, 54, 58, 65
verbally expressed humour 17, 21,
36, 48, 57, 71
Walliams, David
Wilder, Billy 112
Williams, Robin 112
Wood, Victoria 110
wordplay 2, 12–13, 19, 36, 42, 52, 57,
63–3, 130, 134–35, 151
World Wide Web 3–4, 7, 10, 78, 121–22;
Web 2.0 10, 121, 124, 151
YouTube 10, 35, 61–2, 75, 98, 105, 110,
124, 142, 154
Zalone, Checco 53
