Gender and joking: On the complexities of women's image politics in humorous narratives

The present article contributes to contextualization research, genre analysis, and gender studies. It deals with anecdotes in which a female narrator humorously presents her own personal misadventures or inadequacies. In my corpus of informal dinner conversations among good friends from the German academic milieu, I have found many instances where women presented comic perspectives on themselves; only one man did this.(1) In contrast to psychological gender research, which frequently shows a tendency for women to depreciate themselves in their humor (women regard jokes at their own expense as funnier than do men), I prefer to view the phenomenon in the context of complex conversational image politics. I use Erving Goffman's concept of face to describe personal faces or identities. In detailed data analyses, it can be shown how female narrators organize their presentations so that other people do not laugh at their expense, but rather at the expense of the norms which they mock collectively by laughing at them. Drawing on a theory of interactional perspective, we can tell from listeners' reactions that they share the narrator's perspective. The comparison of my data with Jefferson's 'troubles talks' (1979) shows the relevance of an early keying of the humorous modality. In self-mockery, tellers try from the very start not to give the impression of having a problem. In making jokes about their own experiences, the women in my corpus communicate specific sides of their personal identity. Instead of ascribing fixed, essentialist humor styles to men and women, I favor analyzing humorous episodes in natural contexts. Finally, I see a need to explain why men seldom employ complex forms of self-mockery, as compared to what many women do. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.