ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 focuses on barzellette, or ‘short funny stories,’ as they are performed by Northern Italian joke-tellers. These narrative practices have an old history in Italy, and they have been very common in various sociocultural settings, ranging from formal political addresses and speeches to more informal situations, such as dinner events and other similar gatherings among friends. Three complete barzellette are fully analyzed: 1) a barzelletta enacted by former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, after one of his formal political speeches; 2) a barzelletta performed during a dinner event in a Northern Italian town; 3) a barzelletta performed by a Venetan professional joke-teller, in which he uses both codes available: standardized Italian and Venetan. This chapter shows how Italian joke-tellers covertly enact racialized stances by positioning migrants as outsiders, while creating intimate bonds with the immediate or imaginary audience. The audience members are then positioned as “insiders,” who can share the local code, while non-speakers of Venetan, such as Italians from other regions and migrants, are positioned as “outsiders,” as individuals who do not share the code and the prestigious past of the Veneto region. When these practices emerge, they may not only subtly solidify circulating ideologies about language, race, and migrant communities, but also create imaginary, shifting boundaries in heterogeneous communities of practice.
