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Language, Identity and Ethnic Jokes About Stupidity by Christie Davies is a Social Sciences article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Language, Identity and Ethnic Jokes About Stupidity about?

Ethnic jokes about allegedly stupid groups are told in a very large number of countries: such jokes are told about the Poles or Italians in the United States, the Irish in Britain, the Belgians in France or the Netherlands, the Pontians in Greece. Such jokes pin the despised but comic quality of stupidity firmly onto some other group: Only they are stupid, "we" the joke-tellers are not.' Similarities and differences of language between the joke-tellers and the butts of their jokes play a crucial role in this process in two interrelated ways. First, language is one of the most important factors determining the identity of both jokers and butts and in defining the relationship between them such that one of them is able to regard the other as comically stupid and to make jokes about its members. Second, the content and even the structure of ethnic jokes often hinge on differences in the use of language. Both points will be discussed in turn, though they cannot, of course, be rigidly separated. The groups who become the butts of ethnic jokes about stupidity are not strange, esoteric, or alien to those who tell jokes about them but are familiar neighbors who are often part of the same l

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Author

Christie Davies

Published

1987

Language

EN

Field

Social Sciences