Folklore: Verbal Art & Group Identity

Introduction

• Impostor syndrome was experienced despite an impressive CV.
• An invitation to speak boosted confidence.
• A personal anecdote about a Leonard Cohen joke illustrates a point about humor.
• The "Malmsteen" joke is considered the funniest thing said in a decade.
• The Momin reference is obscure.

Folklore as a Contemporary Science

• Folklorists study human interaction, artistic communication, and informal culture in small groups.
• Folklore is categorized into verbal art, custom, and material culture.
• Verbal art is the focus, especially how performances relate to a sense of "we-ness."
• A group is bound by shared artistic expressions and understandings, creating a sense of identity.
• This identity is built on shared references.
• Performance and expressive content mediate and reinforce group belonging.
• This concept applies to various groups, from couples to nation-states and global fan cultures.
• Shared artistic practices lead to a sense of commonality, even beyond face-to-face communication.
• Historically, folklore studies involved collecting texts for preservation.
• Older versions were believed to be more authentic and prone to being lost or devalued.
• Folklorists grapple with the historical association of folklore with nationalism.
• Modern folklore focuses on performance within contexts and sees texts as adaptive recreations.
• Technology, especially recording media, changed the focus from texts to performances.
• Changes in text are now seen as adaptations to the context rather than errors.
• Memory is not the primary consideration; recreation and adaptation are more important.
• The shift moved folklore from text as inheritance to creative recreation.
• A received packet of information is revisited and adapted based on the audience's expectations.
• This concept relates to art history theory, contrasting thick and thin works.
• Folklorists recognized creativity within a context, even without traditional content.
• New forms were emerging, driven by North American references.
• These new forms adhere to communal ownership, informal transfer, and meaningfulness to performers.
• There are expectations of form, even if the content is new and unique.
• The folklore field moved from text to performance to context.
• There have been some reductio ad absurdum exercises in looking at eliminating tradition.
• People still understand their performances as operating in a tradition, even with unique creation.
• Concepts re: tradition are gloriously and joyfully revisited.
• Michael Dylan Foster's concept of the "folkl-esque" addresses this understanding.
• Speech events have set units with a beginning, middle, and end that can be extracted and used separately.
• Whether a text has integrity outside lab conditions and multiple contexts is a question.
• Eliot Oring's abstraction of jokes from context is challenged, despite his folklorist background.
• Verbal humor has cognitive, aesthetic and moral apprehensions
• Humor requires linguistic competency, recognition of a joke frame, and an understanding of incongruity.
• Evaluation of the triggering mechanism and the relationship with the teller is also important.
• Robert Georges' work emphasizes the social dynamics within storytelling events.
• Storytelling events involve people who know each other and bring pre-existing relationships to the act.
• Social identity pairings, like Storyteller and listener, have mutual responsibilities, rights, and privileges.

The Nuances of Performance

• Expectations exist for good performance based on local standards and competencies.
• The Storyteller has the right to finish the narrative as long as they meet those expectations.
• Social identity pairings factor into the evaluation.
• Evaluation of storytelling often depends on the context.
• Social identity pairings include spouses, coworkers, and boss-employee relationships with different hierarchical aspects.
• Tales are affected by how the audience perceives the Storyteller and vice versa.
• Relationships can range from deep (thick) to shallow (thin).
• People engage with larger groups daily, where relationships are more distal and based on shallow connections.
• Media also facilitates artistic performances where people are not co-present.
• Motivations are driven by the establishment of markets and the intent to achieve greater competency.
• Joke aggregators on platforms like TikTok use AI voices.
• Examples like Reader's Digest jokes and latrinalia illustrate varying levels of context and relationship.
• Stand-up comedy is presented as ludic casual conversation but often lacks the existing social relationships.
• Comedians cultivate a reputation to resemble the knowing shared in intimate relationships.
• Autobiographical stand-up relies on the audience's understanding of social categories and expectations.
• Comedians cultivate a parasocial reputation through recordings and interviews.
• The audience evaluates jokes based on their sense of who the comedian is.
• Damaged social relationships can retroactively change the evaluation of the material.
• Shattered relationships affect the listener's ability to invest in the performance.

Risk and Responsibility

• The joke act exposes one to vulnerability of assessment, and evaluations are potential vulnerabilities.
• Humor speech acts are meant to encourage reactions, like laughter, but there are responsibilities
• Richard Bauman's work highlights the accountability a performer assumes for communication beyond its referential content.
• Engaging in a weak joke has the responsibility of an exercise in soft and loving patriarchal power.
• The father takes the privileged position where they can define the situation by imposing an unwelcome joke upon their family.
• The weakness of the joke is something that is endured and the reactions are witnessed with joy.
• Dad joke challenges on YouTube and other platforms often involve refraining from laughter as an additional challenge.
• Reactions of others being unable to refrain is part of the joy.
• Dad joke challenges can include terrible jokes or homophobic, ablest, racist, sexist jokes.
• Seth Meyers uses the jokes Seth can't tell segment on Saturday Night Live that is made out of well-crafted diverse staff.
• The clear jokes done by a group of people from a straight white male would fall flat due to the um heteronormative white supremacy within our country.
• Michael Chey and Colin Jo swap jokes to read out on stage shows that a joke can be read but show great risk and responsibility for the speaker.

The Value of Joy

• One main motivation for participating in folk events is the joy to be had.
• Glleefulness, camaraderie and pleasure is often had.
• Joking is simply fun and is key to the bonds that we have to each other.
• We are reaffirming the bonds with each other and that fun has often been discounted in serious work.
• Jokes as a pleasurable things and why the folk tell them.
• The Cohen story success comes from the son having joy in the spontaneity and the father's delight.