Where the structural meets the personal: Mother-in-law humour between a joke cycle and joking relationships in Belarus

Sociology and Communications and the Centre for Comedy Studies Research will be hosting Anastasiya Fiadotava (Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore at the University of Tartu, Estonia). See her abstract below.

The paper discusses the status of mother-in-law jokes in the context of family joke telling in Belarusian families. A typical mother-in-law joke in Belarusian folklore is a canned joke that targets wife’s mother. Jokes on this topic are quite widespread in Belarusian folklore; most of them follow similar scripts and portrait mother-in-law as an evil and bossy character that is often tricked by her son-in-law. Canned joke texts are impersonal and structural, but the practice of joke telling is not. During my interviews with Belarusian couples, mother-in-law jokes were often placed in the context of family relations and regarded as a reflection of the attitude towards one’s own mother-in-law. Thus no clear-cut distinction was made between telling canned jokes, teasing and other forms of family humour. Some of the forms of humour that were cited during the interviews can also be traced to the practice of joking relationships in emic perspective. The examples of mother-in-law jokes and the reflections surrounding them open up the floor for discussing the interconnections between the cultural codes that lie at the basis of the jokes, topical homogeneity of a joke cycle and emic understanding of joke telling.

Anastasiya Fiadotava is a PhD student at the Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and a visiting PhD student at Brunel University. In her thesis she focuses on genres and topics of family humorous folklore and emic reflections on humour and humorousness. Her research interests include folkloristics, cultural anthropology and cultural history.

All wellcome!