Volume 20, Issue 4

Females have formerly been under-represented in jokes. Many scholars have claimed that joke making is primarily a male activity, particularly in the domain of sexual jokes. In this paper, I discuss sexual jokes that women share with each other both in all-female groups and by e-mail. After reviewing some widely held assumptions about women and jokes, I explore liberated women's jokes, including their structure, use of stereotypes, and subversive ideas. Finally, I discuss why humor theory is incomplete without the inclusion of a female perspective and suggest that women should tell more jokes.

Research on humor has tended to focus on its production. The understanding of humor, perhaps because it is more difficult to document, has received somewhat less attention, especially from a sociolinguistic perspective. The present paper addresses this gap by using examples of humor in crosscultural interaction to propose ways in which two earlier models suggesting how humor is perceived (Carrell 1997) and supported (Hay 2001) may be further developed. These examples show that joke competence is a somewhat dynamic construct, that understanding can be partial and that lack of full understanding need not preclude appreciation. In addition, I suggest that interlocutors' understanding of the wide variety of functions of humor must also be taken into consideration in any broader theory of how humor is perceived and understood. As understanding, like language use, is interactively constructed, I call for a view of humor comprehension that is social, as well as cognitive.

How do we communicate forms of humor across cultures, languages and styles? What are the common features of accommodation and translation of humor between groups and languages? How do we exploit differences between cultures and languages to create humor? This article addresses these and related questions based on data from conversation, interviews, canned jokes, the electronic media and literature.

The present article focuses on David Levi jokes—an Israeli joke cycle—as a catalyzing agent in the evolution of Israeli identity. Although the manifest referent in the jokes is a concrete political and ethnic figure, the article argues that the actual referent is the whole of Israeli society. The cumulative effect of composing, hearing, recalling and especially repeating these elements, all in a spirit of self-mockery, enables mediation of national ambivalences and vulnerabilities. Through these jokes, an Israeli Levantine identity is internalized as teller and listener “try on” aspects of the Levantine national self through imagery, language, and gesticulation. Characteristic of these jokes are riddles conveyed through a meta-linguistic device. The joke-telling event is thus in effect a mimetic model of the interaction between the linguistic and the social, which enacts certain relationships pertaining to belonging and identity; as such, it is a unique prism for exploring the cultural matrix within which the construction of identity is carried out.

Etan Boritzer: What is Funny? Santa Monica, CA: Veronica Lane Books, 2004. 32 pp. $14.95. (Peter Derks) Joanne R. Gilbert: Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Change . Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 234 pp. $24.95. (Lawrence E. Mintz) Herman Braet, Guido Latré, and Werner Verbeke (eds.): Risus Mediaevalis. Laughter in Medieval Literature and Art (Mediaevalia Lovaniensia Series 1, Studia 30). Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003. 223 pp. €37.00. (Leslie Zarker Morgan)