Keywords
General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH)
joke
sexist
discourse analysis
laughfactory.com.
How to Cite
Abstract
This research aimed to explore gender stereotypes depicted in online sexist jokes collected from laughfactory.com. Linguistically speaking, jokes as a subtype of humour have become a common phenomenon in our everyday lives. Unfortunately, not all jokes can bring positive vibes for everyone. Yet, these forms of jokes are still commonly found, especially on the Internet. Some online sources, including websites of jokes, present a lot of collections of jokes for fun, but a number of the jokes are categorized as sexist jokes, which might also be regarded as offensive in a certain context. Data were collected from the laughfactory.com website and then were analysed by using the three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH). Results showed that the majority of the humours observed were targeted at women (90%) and a small number was targeted at men (10%). Women were stereotyped as sexual objects, emotionally expressive beings, homemakers, being talkative, being stupid or brainless, and belonging to a lower class than men. Men, on the other hand, were stereotyped as worse than women.
References
American Psychological Association. (2007). ‘Guidelines for psychological practice with girls and women’. American Psychologist 62, pp. 949-979.
Archakis, A., Lampropoulou, S., Tsakona, V., & Tsami, V. (2014). ‘Linguistic varieties in style: Humorous representations in Greek mass culture texts’. Discourse, Context & Media 3, pp. 46-55. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211695814000026
Attardo, S. (1994). Linguistic Theories of Humour. London: Mouton de Gruyter.
Attardo, S. (2001). Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Attardo, S., Hempelmann, C. F., & Di Maio, S. (2002). ‘Script oppositions and logical mechanisms: Modeling incongruities and their resolutions’. Humour 15 (1), pp. 3–46. https://doi.org/10.1515/humr.2002.004
Berger, A. A. (2016). Applied Discourse Analysis: Popular Culture, Media and Everyday Life. San Francisco: Acid-free Paper.
Bergmann, M. (1986). ‘How many feminists does it take to make a joke? Sexist humour and what’s wrong with it’. Hypatia 1 (1), pp. 63–82.
Black, L., & Forro, D. (1999). ‘Humour in the academic library: You must be joking! Or, how many academic librarians does it take to change a lightbulb?’ College & Research Libraries 60, pp. 165-172. Retrieved from http://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/15276/16722
Brannon, L. (2011). Gender: Psychological Perspectives (6th ed.). London: Pearson.
Canestrari, C. (2010). ‘Meta-communicative signals and humorous verbal interchanges: A case study’. Humour 23 (3), pp. 327–349. https://doi.org/10.1515/HUMR.2010.015
Cendra, A. (2016). A Linguistic Analysis of Verbal Humour Found in BBC Radio Drama Series Cabin Pressure: Abu Dhabi. Undergraduate Thesis, Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta.
Cuddy, A. J., Crotty, S., Chong, J., & Norton, M. I. (2010). Men as cultural ideals: How culture shapes gender stereotypes. Working Paper. Retrieved from http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=37849
Davies, C. (2011). Jokes and Targets. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Dionigi, A., & Canestrari, C. (2016). ‘Clowning in health care settings: The point of view of adults’. Europe’s Journal of Psychology 12 (3), pp. 473–488. https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v12i3.1107
Dionigi, A., & Canestrari, C. (2018). ‘The use of humour by therapists and clients in cognitive therapy’. European Journal of Humour Research 6 (3), pp. 50–67. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.7592/EJHR2018.6.3.dionigi
Eagly, A. H. (1987). Sex Differences in Social Behaviour: A Social-Role Interpretation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Eagly, A., H. & Steffen, V., J. (1984). ‘Gender stereotypes stem from the distribution of women and men into social roles’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46 (4), pp. 735-754.
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge.
Foka, A. (2015). ‘Gender subversion and the early Christian east: Reconstructing the Byzantine comic mime’, in Foka, A & Liliequist, J (eds.), Laughter, Humour, and the (Un)making of Gender: Historical and Cultural Perspective. New York: St. Martin's Press, pp. 65-84.
Furnham, A., & Bitar, N. (1993). ‘The stereotyped portrayal of men and women in British television advertisement’. Sex Roles 29 (3/4), pp. 297-310.
Goebel, B. (2011). Humour Writing: Activities for the English Classroom. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Hay, J. (2000). ‘Functions of humour in the conversations of men and women’. Journal of Pragmatics 32 (6), pp. 709–742. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(99)00069-7
Hempelmann, C. F., & Ruch, W. (2005). ‘3 WD meets GTVH: Breaking the ground for interdisciplinary humour research’. Humour 18 (4), pp. 353–387. https://doi.org/10.1515/humr.2005.18.4.353
Holmes, M. (2007). What is Gender? Sociological Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Joke Bank - Sexist Joke. (n.d.). Retrieved October 26, 2017, from Laugh FACTORY: http://www.laughfactory.com/jokes/sexist-jokes/
Jorgensen, M., & Phillips, L. J. (2002). Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
Kotthoff, H. (2006). ‘Gender and politics: The state of the art’. Journal of Pragmatics 38, pp. 4–25. https://doi.org/doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2005.06.003
Kuipers, G. (2015). Good Humour, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Laineste, L. (2008). ‘Politics of joking: Ethnic jokes and their targets in Estonia (1890s–2007)’. Electronic Journal of Folklore 40, pp. 117–146.
Lew, R. (1996). An Ambiguity-Based Theory of the Linguistic Verbal Joke in English. Doctoral Thesis, Adam Mickiewicz University.
Lisdiantina, A. (2013). An Analysis of the Occurrence of Sexism in Blonde Joke Websites. Undergraduate Thesis, Sanata Dharma University, Language and Arts Education. Retrieved 12 October 2018, from https://repository.usd.ac.id/4599/2/091214069_full.pdf
Martin, R. A. (2007). The Psychology of Humour: An Integrative Approach. Burlington: Elsevier Academic Press.
Masaeli, B., & Heidari-Shahreza, M. A. (2016). ‘A linguistic analysis of Persian online jokes in light of general theory of verbal humour’. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Language Research 3 (7), pp. 230–239.
McGraw, P. (2011, September 14). ‘The importance of humour research’. Retrieved November 2, 2017, from Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-humour-code/201109/the-importance-humour-research
Mehl, M. R., Esparza, N. R., Slatcher, R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2007, August). ‘Are women really more talkative than men?’ Science 317, p. 82. doi:10.1126/science.1139940
Parkins, R. (2012). ‘Gender and emotional expressiveness: An analysis of prosodic features in emotional expression’. Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication, pp. 45-54.
Pasaribu, T. A., & Kadarisman, A. E. (2016). ‘Coding logical mechanism and stereotyping in gender cyber humours’. A Journal of Culture, English Language Teaching & Literature 16, pp. 22-48. doi:10.24167/celt.v16i1.485
Prentice, D., A. & Carranza, E. (2002). ‘What women and men should be, shouldn’t be, are allowed to be, and don’t have to be: The contents of prescriptive gender stereotypes’. Psychology of Women Quarterly 26, pp. 269–281.
Ross, A. (1998). The Language of Humour. London: Routledge.
Royo, M., Aldas, J., Kuster, I., & Vila, N. (2001). Sexism and Gender Role Portrayals in Spanish TV Commercials. Retrieved November 20, 2017, from www. researchgate.net/profile/Ines_Kuester_Boluda/publication
Shade, A. R. (1996). Licence to Laugh: Humour in the Classroom. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing.
Shifman, L., & Lemish, D. (2009). ‘Between Feminism and fun(ny)mism’. Information, Communication & Society 13 (6), pp. 870-891. doi:10.1080/13691180903490560
Stephens, D. P., & Phillips, L. D. (2014). Freak, gold diggers, divas, and dykes: The sociohistorical development of adolescent African American women's sexual scripts. Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.com/publication/225572638_Freaks_Gold_Diggers_and_dykes_The_sociohistrorical_development_of_dolescent_African_Maerican_women_sexual_sripts
Szymanski, D. M., Moffitt, L. B., & Carr, E. R. (2011). ‘Sexual objectification of women: Advances to theory and research’. The Counseling Psychologist 39 (1), pp. 6–38. doi:10.1177/0011000010378402
Thomae, M., & Pina, A. (2015). ‘Sexist humour and social identity: The role of sexist humour in men’s in-group cohesion, sexual harassment, rape proclivity, and victim blame’. Humour 28 (2), pp. 187–204. https://doi.org/10.1515/humour-2015-0023
Tosun, S., Faghihi, N., & Vaid, J. (2018). ‘Is an ideal sense of humour gendered? A cross-national study’. Frontiers in Psychology, 9 (Feb), pp. 1–8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00199
Tsakona, V. (2009). ‘Language and image interaction in cartoons: Towards a multimodal theory of humour’. Journal of Pragmatics 41, pp. 1171–1188. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2008.12.003
Verhellen, Y., Dens, N., & Pelsmacker, P. d. (2014). ‘A longitudinal content analysis of gender role portrayal in Belgian television advertising’. Journal of Marketing Communications 22, pp. 1-19. doi:10.1080/13527266.2013.871321
Weatherall, A. (2002). Gender Language and Discourse. New York: Routledge Inc.
Wu, C. L., Lin, H. Y., & Chen, H. C. (2016). ‘Gender differences in humour styles of young adolescents: Empathy as a mediator’. Personality and Individual Differences 99 (162), pp. 139–143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.05.018