ABSTRACT

The sociocultural analysis of humor demands less focus on individual jokes and more attention to repertoire; that is, attention to bounded corpuses of humorous texts associated with particular social groupings. Successful communication does not necessarily depend upon the accurate reception and decoding of each and every component signal. Communications systems tend to be redundant. While no situation of performance could ever include even more than a few of the texts in the repertoire, even small assemblages could collaborate to reveal the thematic similarities and oppositions basic to the articulation of the message of the whole. Concomitant with the iteration of particular chizbat texts was the iteration of chizbat themes. Redundancy in the chizbat repertoire is not limited to the mere iteration of texts and themes. The chizbat’s message is also articulated at other levels. For example, there is a very strong usage in the chizbat of motifs involving guise and disguise, demeanor and dissimulation.