Italian Joke (metafolklore)

In my family we know tons of jokes, but we've heard them all so many times that we put numbers on them. So after dinner each day, someone will start, "23!" and everyone will laugh; "46!" more laughter. One day John [or name of anyone who is in the room when telling this joke] came over and saw this happening. He asked what the hell was going on, so we explained it to him. He asked if he could try and we said, "sure." So he says, "20!" and nobody says anything. "53!" and again, silence. "What's going on?" he asks, "why isn't anybody laughing." And someone says, "you just don't know how to tell them!" [pause for laughter]

So he says, "Let me try one more time..." and we all say OK, and he says, "143!" and everyone bursts out laughing.

"Hey, did I tell that one well?"

"Not really, but we hadn't heard that one before!"

ANALYSIS

This is a great example of metafolklore that has to be told in the first person. My father told it in around 1990 in Rome, when we were having dinner and a guest commented on how many jokes we knew. My father tells almost all jokes in the first person, as if it were something that happened to him "the other day," but this joke gains especially from this technique, since one can tell the whole thing up to the first punch line and some people will believe that its a true story.

My father actually ended the joke at the first punch line and then I heard the second version from someone else here in the United States (I have no idea when or where, but it was probably in Los Angeles sometime after 1990) and I now tell the joke with both endings. I tell it whenever I pull out a list I have made of all the jokes I know, which just happens to be numbered. Whenever people laugh at the fact that I have such a list, I tell this story, again as if it were true, about my family. (Incidentally, this joke is number 74 on my list.)

The joke's first punch line is funny because of the impossibility of telling a joke "well" once it has been stripped down to a mere number. We assume that telling a joke well involves the creation of imagery, not the recollection of that imagery by something as cerebral as a number. Actually, that's also what makes the whole premise of this joke funny: the idea that a joke can be told in this way.

The second punch line is funny by its shear absurdity. If the whole point of numbering the jokes is to have them represent a "real" joke, then laughing at a number without it having any referent is completely mad. This can be seen as a statement on the philosophy of language as Frege conceived of it: Each word has a sense (Sinn), or meaning, and a reference (bedeutung), or the actual thing in the world. You can't have a number without a joke, just as you can't have a sinn without a bedeutung.

Collection Data:

Myself

Male, 22

Italian American Student

Italian, English, Spanish, French

Berkeley, California

November 23, 1997