Article published In: Art and the expression of complex identities: Imagining and contesting ethnicity in performance
Edited by Valentina Pagliai and Marcia Farr
[Pragmatics 10:1] 2000
► pp. 87–97
When husbands die
Joke-telling in an Italian ladies’ club in Chicago
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 March 2000
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.10.1.04nar
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.10.1.04nar
This is a paper about women and language. In it women tell jokes, both individually and collaboratively, which are performances of verbal art. It is also a paper about ethnicity and gender, for in their joke telling, these women meld both discourses in seamless fashion. My analysis of a 2 minute 40 second transcript of “talk as play,” (Coates 151) explicates the powerful identity they fashion for themselves. Both this identity and the fun they have with each other are dependent, of course, upon understanding the context of their club, the Collandia Ladies’ Club.
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Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Bing, Janet
Attardo, Salvatore
Attardo, Salvatore
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