Intertextuality and/in political jokes

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to explore the interplay between intertextuality and humor in contemporary political jokes. The intertextual allusions included in such texts involve (con)texts projected as ‘shared’ knowledge by joke tellers. However, they may render joke comprehension a demanding task, thus excluding potential joke recipients from the ingroup joke tellers attempt to construct. At the same time, the intertextual presuppositions of political jokes may foster the ideological alignment between joke tellers and joke recipients, as they are based on specific evaluations of sociopolitical affairs, which need to be accepted by recipients wishing to establish coherence. The data examined here comes from a large corpus of the Greek jokes on the current financial crisis.