Introduction
Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was known for using barzellette, or ‘short funny stories’, before, during, and after his political meetings, and even during parliamentary sessions. He was considered gifted at this, even if, from time to time, he produced serious, although ‘unintentional’, gaffes or slips that the international press picked up (cf. Hill Reference Hill2001, Reference Hill2008; Lempert & Silverstein Reference Lempert, Silverstein, Lempert and Silverstein2012). After a political speech to a national audience in Naples on May 13, 2011, Berlusconi launched into a barzelletta Footnote 1 about a trip he took in which he met a beautiful blonde woman absorbed in reading a book. Here is how he told this short story to the Italian audience at this political meeting.
At the end of his story, Berlusconi extended his hand to introduce himself to this beautiful blonde woman, and uttered ‘Mohammed Esposito’—Esposito being a typical Neapolitan last name. Footnote 4
I use Berlusconi's humor to introduce the role of barzellette in political events, and, in particular, to demonstrate the use of migrant otherness. In this segment, the unintentional tacit, racialized understanding of sexuality that is associated with the figure of the ‘Arab’Footnote 5 calls to mind circulating stereotypes of Northern African migrants, especially those from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, who are often represented negatively in the Italian media (Montali, Riva, Frigerio, & Mele Reference Montali, Riva, Frigerio and Mele2013). In this barzelletta, Berlusconi also pairs Southern Italians and foreign migrants—the latter having become the new ‘internal other’ in Northern Italy, as I describe later.
This article examines the performative power of multidialectal language play in race-based humor. I explore how short, humorous stories, or barzellette, in Northern Italy are at times performed to position certain immigrant groups, especially the so-called extracomunitari (a derogatory term used across the Italian peninsula meaning ‘immigrants from outside the EU’), and how these stories exploit language variation. More specifically, I show how individuals supporting two conservative political parties (Liga Veneta ‘Veneto League’ and Veneto Stato ‘Veneto State’) perform barzellette with frequent shifts from Standard Italian into Veneto dialect as they enact and mock immigrant voices. Multidialectal language play here is not only a resource for expressing ‘tacit racism’ (Hill Reference Hill2008), but also for positioning audiences who are its hearers. By mocking migrants in their local dialect, Veneto speakers iconicallyFootnote 6 model the jokes’ ‘concealment’ or ‘containment’—as if limiting their jokes’ accessibility and potential offensiveness to an imagined audience of Italian-speaking migrants by choosing Veneto dialect over Standard Italian. In his classic work with Hindi-English bilingual speakers, Gumperz (Reference Gumperz, Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz1976) discovered that the direction of a code-shift provides important clues about the intentional illocutionary force of an utterance. In his words, ‘what at the societal level are seen as norms of language usage or symbolic affirmations of ethnic boundaries are transformed here and built upon in conversation to affect the interpretation of speakers’ intent and determine effectiveness in communication’ (Gumperz Reference Gumperz, Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz1976:39–40). Thus, for Gumperz, code choice between the ‘they’ code (or the code of the ‘threat’ language, or, in this case Standard Italian, the language of the Italian State) and the ‘we’ code (or the code indexing more intimate relationships, in this case Veneto dialect) is an approach that can determine and affect the interpretation of an utterance.
Generally speaking, it is not unusual for code- and style-shifting to be used as a strategy of containment, not only because the target code—Veneto dialect—may be relatively unintelligible (cf. Wirtz Reference Wirtz2007) to some Italian overhearers, but also because the shift can iconically model that very inaccessibility, thus framing the event metapragmatically (Silverstein Reference Silverstein and Lucy1993) as unintelligible, tabooed, as something that should be avoided or concealed (Fleming & Lempert Reference Fleming and Lempert2011). Although unintelligibility can vary, given the different degrees of knowledge of Veneto dialect among speakers in the targeted audience, the very fact of trying to conceal problematic moments of jokes or to overshadow their implications purportedly makes the jokes inaccessible to all but insiders. Thus, multidialectal language in joke-telling plays an important role in positioning audiences in Veneto: by concealing supposedly offensive remarks at particular moments of the joke (usually the climax of a short story), the performer emphasizes the divide between insiders, the ones who understand and speak the local code, and outsiders, the ones who do not share the code, such as migrant groups in the present case. As Fleming & Lempert (Reference Fleming and Lempert2011:8) clarify, such thinly disguised forms of speech try to alleviate ‘the risk of transgression and fix appropriate, often morally inflected, relations between speaker and the hazardous agent or object’, which, in the present case, are jokes mocking migrants. Yet, proscription often ironically enhances the performative strength of tabooed speech acts (Fleming & Lempert Reference Fleming and Lempert2011), such that the efforts at containment exaggerate the boundaries of inside and outside and heighten the exclusionary politics of this joke-telling. While barzellette in the Veneto region can be delivered in Standard Italian, many speakers use their local dialect as a resource for humor, and when they do, not only is the story addressed to audiences who are presumed to ‘share’ this code, but, when the objects of humor are migrants, such shifts can also enact the latter's exclusion (cf. Dickinson Reference Dickinson2007).
Jokes can help reproduce normative structures, as in cases of teasing (see Dundes Reference Dundes1987; Attardo Reference Attardo1994) or ritualized ‘joking relations’ between kin (Radcliffe-Brown Reference Radcliffe-Brown1940; see also, Handelman & Kapferer Reference Handelman and Kapferer1972), just as they can be used to comment critically on a wider society. Focusing on the interactional and discourse frames and structures of jokes, linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists (Sacks Reference Sacks and Bauman1974; Sherzer Reference Sherzer1993, Reference Sherzer2002) have considered joke-telling within broader social and cultural contexts, beyond the immediate interaction in which it is told, rather than as an isolated act whose text can be analyzed on its own. This capacity of jokes to comment on the sociocultural surround comes not only from the content of jokes, through the ‘what is said’,Footnote 7 or denotational text, but also through the manner in which jokes are delivered, or their interactional text (for this distinction, see Silverstein Reference Silverstein and Keith Sawyer1997; Wortham Reference Wortham2001). The performativity of joke-telling, which includes their capacity to create sociability, sharedness, and a range of other pragmatic acts, has recently begun to receive more scholarly attention. While anthropological research has often addressed humor as embedded in the cultural practices under study (Oring Reference Oring and Raskin2008; Raskin Reference Raskin2008), sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have started to explore more systematically the performative qualities of joke-telling rather than, for example, their apparent versus opaque meaning per se—this being one way of theorizing how jokes ‘work’. This has resulted in descriptions of diverse pragmatic functions of joke-telling as embedded in various sociocultural contexts such as supporting HIV patients (Black Reference Black2012), constructing identity (Bucholtz, Skapoulli, Barnwell, & Lee Reference Bucholtz, Skapoulli, Barnwell and Lee2011; Managan Reference Managan2012), and assessing the ‘racial’ in US public discourse (Hartigan Reference Hartigan2009). Similar to the cases explored in this article, but focusing more on bivalency and speech play in multilingual environments in the Czech Republic, Dickinson (Reference Dickinson2007) analyzes how bivalent linguistic meaning is a resource for asserting the joke-tellers’ narrative authority, since participants can take different and competing alignments during their storytelling. Dickinson's migrants’ stories demonstrate that interactions between different ethnic groups serve ‘as icons for ethnic and economic power relations’ (Dickinson Reference Dickinson2007:236). In these stories, Czechs emerge as well off and bright, although very attached to money, Ukrainians come across as not very smart, but generous and with good intentions, while Russians are mostly mobsters. In the joking stories analyzed in this article, immigrant groups (in this case typified as ‘Arabs’) emerge as stereotypically aggressive and violent, sexually potent and desirable, and not very talented at learning the Italian language.
If considered within a ‘participation framework’ (Goffman Reference Goffman1981), code-shifts to Veneto dialect during joke-telling could possibly be interpreted as socially problematic, especially in cases where joke-tellers mock migrant groups (who can be present as audience members), as in the examples presented in this article. These code-shifts seem to align participants in the interaction with broader visions of who belongs to the Italian nation state (the insiders—Veneto speakers who can share the code) and who does not (the outsiders—the migrant groups) (for insiders/outsiders relationships see also Jaffe, this issue). This multilingual language play in the Veneto region, and in Italy more generally, has analogues elsewhere in Europe, as Frekko's (Reference Frekko2011) work, for example, demonstrates. Drawing on Woolard's (Reference Woolard1995, Reference Woolard, Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity1998a, Reference Woolard1998b) work on bilingualism and code-switching between Catalan and Castilian in Spain, Frekko demonstrates that the use of the state language Castilian in a Catalan radio talk show can be a strategy of containment. While Catalan is supposed to be the language of the talk show, Frekko (Reference Frekko2011:83) notes a significant use of Castilian in the interactions between the host and the callers. Thus, although Castilian is not ‘proscribed’ in Catalonia, she argues that this code is used creatively by certain speakers while ‘simultaneously containing it’, at their discretion, and creating bonds with only certain speakers who understand the code. As I demonstrate in this article, the interplay between Standard Italian and Veneto dialect during joke-telling presents similar containment issues. Veneto joke-tellers manage to convey problematic remarks while at the same time discursively containing them, superficially disguising them so that only certain speakers (the insiders who understand and speak Veneto dialect) can receive them. By doing so, they exclude other speakers. Thus, on the one hand, by producing these problematic remarks, Veneto joke-tellers heighten discriminatory exclusion; on the other hand, this very act is interactionally coercive since joke-tellers position the immediate listeners as insiders who are presumed to share the local code, and thus the view, of the speaker. Through an analysis of the performative power of multidialectal language play in barzellette, this article explores not only how joke-tellers position their audience members but also how they regulate accessibility to their jokes by code-shifting to Veneto dialect.
Race and racializing discourse in joke-telling
Berlusconi's story and the cases under scrutiny in this article reveal how race and racializing discourses are embedded in sociocultural practices, including views on the condition of migrants in the nation-state. This is in line with recent research in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics. In a special issue devoted to ‘complicating race’, Alim & Reyes (Reference Alim and Reyes2011:380) unveil new directions to ‘recast the relationship between language and race’ since race needs to be studied as part of other social dimensions such as gender, class, sexuality, and so forth (Alim & Reyes Reference Alim and Reyes2011; Bucholtz et al. Reference Bucholtz, Skapoulli, Barnwell and Lee2011; Chun Reference Chun2011; Reyes Reference Reyes2011). In her analysis of immigrant narratives in the Italian region of Tuscany, Valentina Pagliai (Reference Pagliai2011:E96) reminds us that racism is not an individual concern, but rather ‘[i]t is produced in interaction’. As Pagliai (Reference Pagliai2011:E97) demonstrates, in Italy, many cases of racializing discourses are ‘commonsensical and unmarked’, not only due to the strong influence of the mass media and the political parties that makes racism taken for granted, but also because speakers often do not react to such discourses in order to save face. To show disapproval of these jokes, or to try to consider them not funny at all, would be interactionally problematic. Joking discourse in general coerces listeners to just play along and laugh as the preferred response (see Sacks Reference Sacks and Bauman1974). By not showing disapproval, participants tacitly affirm and hence reproduce racializing discourses in everyday talk. In this sense, Berlusconi's barzelletta is tacitly racist: it contains racializing language that is ‘unmarked’ for the Italian audience to which the joke is addressed (see also Pardo Reference Pardo2013; Koven Reference Koven2013). Responses to tacit racism vary in practice, of course. While the joking format may in general coerce listeners to play along, in some cases reluctance, resistance, or even avoidance may occur. In her research on the Lega Nord’s (‘Northern League’) register and the Bergamasco dialect,Footnote 8 Cavanaugh (Reference Cavanaugh2012:92) found that speakers who show a prolocal or prodialect orientation often fall into ‘interdiscursive traps’, ‘which link speakers to undesired stances and thus evaluations of their social, cultural, economic, and political environment’. Because conservative politics in the region politicize dialect preservation, speakers who support dialect revitalization or simply communicate in dialect risk being taken to share the political views of a leghista, a follower of the ‘[Northern] League’, with a strong attachment to regional roots, traditions, and language as well as a strong defense of this patrimony against the new immigrant groups who are viewed as a threat (Perrino Reference Perrino2013). Because of this interdiscursivity, dialect avoidance may occur from those who wish to avoid the political associations that often come with dialect use. When jokes are used in a particular political climate without apology, they can become powerful political statements, such as, for instance, the expression of an alliance with anti-immigrant political parties like the Lega Nord.
Similar to the cases presented in this article, joking has also been studied as a performative tool for making racist remarks in public and political discourse (Jacobs-Huey Reference Jacobs-Huey2006; Hill Reference Hill2008). As Hill (Reference Hill2008:41) argues, while stereotypes and slurs are generally categorized as ‘racist’ because ‘they are made salient by referentialist and performative linguistic ideologies respectively’, other types of speech or performances are less discernible, but they are nonetheless part of a ‘covert racist discourse’.
What are the meanings of the covert of covert discourse? While there are different ways of being covert, or contained, I focus on the tacit exclusion of migrant others. During joke-telling performances, joke-tellers position migrants as outsiders, while positioning the immediate audience members as insiders, who share the local code in which the joke is transferred. Thus, containment performs exclusion, by heightening the insider-outsider divide that is created (see also Jaffe, this issue); by excluding migrants, such containment treats them as ‘other’, which is a way of tacitly, and mostly unintentionally, being racist. Additionally, containment also simultaneously positions the listener as an insider, as someone who allegedly shares the language—which arguably helps make it safe for him or her to play along and accept the joke. While Berlusconi's joke at the outset of this article was entirely in Standard Italian, the second joke, discussed below, features code-shifts into Veneto dialect. Before turning to the analysis of how forms of difference and exclusion are enacted in discourse by Veneto joke-tellers, I first contextualize barzellette within Northern Italy's current political climate.
Barzellette, joke-tellers, and code-shifting in Veneto
In Italy, barzellette Footnote 9 are usually told after a meal with friends or relatives, especially in large gatherings. One or two participants considered ‘good’ barzellette tellers secure attention from the surrounding audience and tell the jokes. Such joke-telling events can go on for some time.
The first barzellette discussed in the scholarly literature were apparently in the form of a ballad or poem, and their topic was usually about love and amusing romantic situations (Pèrcopo Reference Pèrcopo1893). Today, barzellette are mostly of a sexual or political nature and involve such region-based stereotyped figures as Southerners and Northerners with funny stories about Southerners told by Northerners and vice versa. More recently, given the change in Italy's demographics, barzellette have started to feature migrants, especially Muslims from sub-Saharan Africa, Northern Africa, and South Asia. And, under the influence of the fierce anti-immigrant policies of the Lega Nord ‘Northern League’, mocking migrants in barzellette has become more common than mocking Southerners; thus, a new internal ‘other’ has been created in Northern Italy: the extracomunitari (see Quassoli Reference Quassoli2013). As Giordano writes about this shift in their political discourse,
partly because there is now minimal internal migration from the south to the north of Italy, the League has in recent years directed its attention away from the southern Italian ‘other’ to another—according to the League more threatening—other’, namely the increasing number of foreign migrants to Italy, or so-called extracomunitari. (Giordano Reference Giordano2003:222, emphasis in original; see also Giordano Reference Giordano2004)
‘In the past decade, Veneto dialect has become reframed as a political instrument used to defend and revalorize a Veneto identity. Thus, there has been a sustained tendency by Veneto politicians to revitalize Veneto culture, traditions, and dialect (Perrino Reference Perrino2013; see also Jaffe, this issue).
Dialect revitalization in Northern Italy, and in Italy more generally, must be understood in relation to the recent politics of migration in Italy (see Colombo Reference Colombo2013). It is connected with the strong and assiduous anti-immigration policies of the Lega Nord political party (Richardson & Colombo Reference Richardson and Colombo2013)Footnote 10 and of the more recent separatist party Veneto Stato ‘Veneto State’. During the 1970s and 1980s, Italy underwent some major demographic changes from being a country of emigrants, having provided Italian migrants around the world—especially to the United States—to becoming a receiver of immigrants, especially from Northern and Western Africa, India, Eastern Europe, Albania, China, and Russia. These flows of immigrants have triggered strong reactions, such as recent discourses about national culture and identity, including the aggressive anti-immigration politics of the Lega Nord. This conservative party, which enjoyed a lot of popularity and success until very recently, grew from a ‘small movement stressing the ethnic and linguistic distinctiveness of the regions of Northern Italy to a national, mass political party’ (Giordano Reference Giordano2004:64).Footnote 11 Quite a bit of this popularity, in the Veneto region in particular, has been for its strong, anti-immigration platform, and not just for its opposition to Southern Italy.
These anti-immigration efforts go hand in hand with efforts toward regionalization, including local dialect revitalization. The Lega Nord and its various regional subleagues like the Liga Veneta ‘Venetian League’ have been very active in reviving and promoting dialect use (see also Cavanaugh Reference Cavanaugh2004, Reference Cavanaugh2009 for the Bergamasco dialect). The Lega Nord’s promotion of dialects and anti-immigration policies work in opposite directions but complement each other: they defend themselves against foreign migrants while simultaneously drawing a boundary around their region and language.
Given the peculiar linguistic landscape of the Italian peninsula, the revalorization of Veneto dialect is better contextualized if one considers it historically. Italy was unified in 1871, before which it was fragmented into many small states, each with different languages that evolved directly from Latin in contact with the local codes (the vernaculars). While the Tuscan ‘dialect’ benefited from its literary use by famous writers, such as Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Francesco Petrarca, and became what today is referred to as Standard Italian, the other vernacular languages (referred to as dialetti ‘dialects’ by many Italians) have continued to survive until today, thanks to their intensive everyday use (De Mauro Reference De Mauro1963), alongside Standard Italian, the national language. While the latter is the language that most speakers communicate with and understand, Italians also make a wide use of the vernaculars, especially at home and on informal occasions such as meetings with friends of the same town or neighborhood and local festivals. In Veneto, older generations have the tendency to use the local dialect more often and with everyone, while younger speakers use it only in family settings and with close friends. This reflects the level of education and the fact that many young speakers often go to other regions to attend university. In these cases, several varieties of Veneto dialect emerge—some that are associated with different areas in the region and others that blend with Standard Italian.Footnote 12
The Liga Veneta has been promoting not only the use of Veneto dialect, but also its recognition as a separate language at the European level. New dictionaries of Veneto dialect have been produced and new forms of media in Veneto have been created, such as Veneto radio programs and Veneto TV shows. Veneto dialect is now taught at the elementary level through the use of books and comics in Veneto for children, as for example a book entitled LEPANTO: La Gran Bataja ‘LEPANTO: The big battle’ featuring the historical battle of LepantoFootnote 13 (Venete Reference Venete2010). During my fieldwork in Veneto in the summer of 2012, I noticed that at the train station in the Veneto town of Padova ‘Padua’ there were three-sided posters advertising the alcoholic aperitif ‘spritz’, considered traditional in this region. One side of one poster read: Par bevar un Spritz no ghe vol un privé, serve na piassa,Footnote 14 whose corresponding Standard Italian is per bere uno spritz non ci vuole un posto privato, serve una piazza, ‘to drink a Spritz [one] doesn't need a private place, [one] needs a piazza’. Another side of the same poster reads, bevitelo ancaa casa where anca is in Veneto dialect meaning ‘drink it at home as well’ (for more details on the use of these posters, see Perrino Reference Perrino2013).
These signs, and many others, demonstrate a strong revitalization of the local dialect in the Veneto region, transforming this code into a political emblem of regional group membership. This sense of bounded groupness has emerged in Veneto oral narratives and joke-telling as well, where, strategically, speakers use code-shifts at specific moments of their telling to make specific comments or remarks.
My corpusFootnote 15 consists of jokes that I collected both from different age sets and a wide range of events: I looked at barzellette told during dinners (which bear some similarities to stand-up comedy formats), during folkloristic events in towns, such as sagre, or ‘local festivals’, and during political speeches or rallies delivered live, on television, and on the internet. At political rallies in Veneto, for instance, many speakers ended up telling barzellette. Such joke-telling performances were common in rallies and oratory, both at a regional and even national level, as the anecdotal barzelletta at the outset has demonstrated. I pay special attention to the role of dialect use in barzellette, as a containment strategy to deliver remarks that might be perceived as offensive by certain speakers, particularly in discursive environments where immigrant groups (especially from Northern and Western Africa, Albania, China, India, and Russia) are represented, and mocked. As I mentioned above, while joking remarks on immigrants might be felt as unmarked (Pagliai Reference Pagliai2011) for many Italian speakers today, still it might be problematic to deliver them openly without at least seeming to contain them (perhaps to maintain a supposedly antiracist self-image), especially considering the constant growth of the immigrant population in the peninsula.
Joke-tellers usually take the stage and start telling jokes, while shifting from Standard Italian to Veneto dialect from time to time.Footnote 16 These code-shifts often happen in ordinary conversation as well, but jokes in general are a frequent environment for them. For example, while I was conducting fieldwork in Veneto at a state-run hospital (I was the only participant present with the doctors), code-shifting from Standard Italian into Veneto dialect was also common among doctors. A doctor I was interviewing once noticed a group of Senegalese migrants in the waiting room just outside his office, switched into Veneto dialect, and said the following to a nurse:
(2) vardacomeche i ze arivai stiqua, in sinquanta per far vedare el puteo, ahhhh benon semoa posto e i ze tui bei scuretti, eh?
‘lookhowthey have arrived—these oneshere—fifty at a time, justto have their baby seen [by the doctor]. oh well...and they are beautifully dark, eh?’
This short excerpt, even though it does not contain any explicit jokes, shows that problematic, off-color, and racist remarks all tend to be uttered in Veneto dialect, regardless of whether the focus is on migrants or not. As I mentioned earlier for the Berlusconi joke, these remarks might have passed through as unmarked since there was no reaction from the nurse. In this way, code-shifting into Veneto dialect at particular moments of the conversation, or of the joke, seems to be a strategy for joke-tellers to try to convey these remarks in a veiled or contained way, or tacitly. This also stems from the very nature of dialect use itself: traditionally, dialects are used in family settings where people engage in conversations that are not part of the public domain (see Gal Reference Gal2002). Thus, the doctor code-shifted into Veneto dialect to create an intimate atmosphere with the nurse, and also to contain his remarks with speakers who do not share the code. Regardless of how receivers of the joke might react, the relevant point is that the code-shift positions receivers as insiders who may be expected to share the views of the speaker. Code-shifting thus becomes a way for speakers to assert their affinity with the audience as they do something that is potentially offensive to migrants who might be present in the audience. Through so doing, however, joke-tellers coerce listeners to align themselves with the joke. By laughing soon after the joke and by showing agreement, listeners reproduce racializing discourse in everyday life.
If code-shifts to Veneto dialect are frequent when speakers make remarks about migrants that could potentially be perceived as socially problematic, one can appreciate what can happen when barzellette are centered on this topic. Indeed, when these short, funny stories are focused on migrants, especially in the current Italian political climate described above, something more is happening. There is a sharp ideological contrast constructed between the voice of the local ‘we’ and the voice of the foreign ‘other’ who is being mocked (see Gumperz Reference Gumperz, Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz1976). The barzelletta I analyze in the following section is a clear example of this containment strategy.
Mocking migrants in a Veneto barzelletta
The professional joke-teller, or barzellettiere, Toni Davanzo works for a Veneto Language TV channel and performed the barzelletta shown below. He usually appears on a program called Cronache Venete: Una Goccia nel Mare dell'Informazione ‘Veneto chronicles: A drop in the ocean of the news’).Footnote 17 As their website states:
è una trasmissione che ha l'ambizione di trattare temi e problemi a sfondo socio-culturale, eventi e manifestazioni varie lungo il territorio del Veneto Orientale, dando, con i propri microfoni, voce al cittadino.
‘[this] is a program that aims to explore themes and problems with a sociocultural background as well as various events and performances on the territory of East Veneto, by giving, through [our] own microphones, the voice to the [Veneto] citizen.’
This program, broadcast in Veneto dialect, is another example of a revitalization project supported by the political parties of Liga Veneta and Veneto Stato I described earlier. This barzellette teller usually recounts one of his short, funny stories at the end of each program, and the space reserved for him is entitled in Veneto dialect, Vutu saver l'ultima?, which in Standard Italian is Vuoi sapere l'ultima?, meaning ‘Would you like to know the latest [news]?’. The viewers of this program are mostly Veneto speakers residing in the region where the channel broadcasts Veneto news and a wide range of shows. One of Toni Davanzo's barzellette Footnote 18 reads as follows.
Davanzo's barzelletta, performed in Veneto dialect with code-shifts in Standard Italian and bivalent forms (Woolard Reference Woolard1998b),Footnote 20 is a story about an ‘Arab kid’ who went to an Italian school, and when he arrived in class the first day of school the teacher asked him what his name was. At this point, Davanzo imitated the sound of Arabic for the child's name, but it was a purposively invented name, just a random combination of sounds, something that the audience might find amusing. The teacher then abruptly interrupted the child, asked him to use an Italian name instead of his Arabic name, and assigned him the name Giovanni. The teacher wished to do so to avoid any ethnic differences among the kids in the class—all the other children being Italian—perhaps, in an effort to integrate foreigners by erasing any perceptible otherness, or simply because the teacher did not want to have any difficulty pronouncing names among his or her students. At the end of this short story, the punchline is this: The child answered the teacher by saying that in just one day of being Italian he ran into two extracomunitari Footnote 21 who beat him up. Why should this joke be funny for northern Italians? As mentioned earlier, such jokes unveil circulating stereotypes about certain categories of people, immigrants in the present case, especially those coming from Northern Africa. The climax of the joke indirectly indexes (Hill Reference Hill2008) not only a supposedly aggressive behavior that is stereotypically associated with Northern Africans, but also a generalized sense of their presumed foolishness by committing violence towards each other.
Unlike Berlusconi's barzelletta at the outset of this article, delivered entirely in Standard Italian, this barzelletta strongly features Veneto dialect, progressing in intensity over the course of the joke-telling. Indeed, while Veneto dialect was present from the start of the barzelletta (see lines 1, 2 and 4, for example), Davanzo does not use it in his reported speech at first. When Davanzo directly reports the teacher's speech in lines 3 and 5, for instance, he uses Standard Italian, not Veneto dialect (line 3, buongiorno ciao ciao come ti chiami? ‘good morning, hello hello what's your name’; line 5, no no no no no fermo fermo là fermo là ‘no no no no no stop stop there stop there’). However, in the climax of the story beginning at line 26 (ea matina elva a scoea ‘the morning hegoes toschool’) when the child returns to school and is addressed by the teacher, both the narrator Davanzo and the voice of the teacher speak consistently in Veneto dialect, not Standard Italian. Even the foreign boy now speaks dialect (a sign of his rapid assimilation?), and delivers the punchline in dialect at line 34 (che me gha sgionfà de bote sacranon ‘who covered me with damned punches’). The fact that the boy speaks the local dialect shows how he is brought into the voice of the insider, as he reports on his parents’ violent actions against him. In a sense, it is as if he were against his own parents, speaking as a rebaptized Italian person, thus an insider, against his outsider, extracomunitari, parents. All of the voices (the teacher's, the child's, the two parents’, and the narrator's) increase their shifts to Veneto dialect steadily at every line. This insider/outsider interplay is common in such code-shifts: both the child and the doctor I mentioned in my earlier example code-shift at particular moments of the interaction, creating an intimate space among insiders, and leaving out those outsiders who are supposed not to share the code. In this way, the story as a whole moves from Standard Italian into Veneto dialect: the more the barzelletta progresses in its intensity, the more code-shifts in Veneto dialect the teller uses until the final line, line 34, where the storyteller reaches the climax of the barzelletta in which he uses a blasphemous expression (sacranon), which is derived from ancient French (sacré nom de Dieu), insulting the name of God. By code-shifting into Veneto dialect in this barzelletta, Davanzo not only positions the listener as complicit and as a participant in the joke (through laughs and applauses), but, at the same time, he excludes the ‘other’, the migrant groups in this case, who might not be fully fluent in Veneto dialect and thus might not understand the subtleties of the joke.
In (3) above, immediately in line 4, the child pronounces his name by uttering nonsensical sounds to make his name resemble Arabic, but it is gibberish instead, which is received by the audience as hilarious, given their laughter. These nonsensical sounds resembling Arabic recall Berlusconi's barzelletta with which I opened this article: Italians seem to have solutions for Arabic names to assign when they need to refer to them in joke-telling or in other social situations.Footnote 22 Analogous to cases of mock Spanish described by Hill (Reference Hill2001, Reference Hill2008), Davanzo mocks the typical Arabic sound in a nonsensical fashion instead of uttering a meaningful name for the child. This imitation of Arabic sounds is recurrent throughout the barzelletta and it is thus another means by which the storyteller is tacitly racist. Similarly, at line 17 and line 23 first the mother of the child and then his father reprimand him when he says that he has an Italian name, Giovanni, and they both repeat these Arab mocking sounds to remind him of his Arabic name instead. The presence of these nonsensical Arabic sounds coupled with code-shifts into Veneto dialect reinforces the boundaries between those who are insiders—and can share the code—and those who are outsiders—that is, immigrants, who not only cannot share the code of Veneto dialect, but who cannot even speak Italian correctly. Davanzo's use of different voices may be compared with Chun's (Reference Chun2004) case of the comedian Margaret Cho who, through the revoicings of her mother during her on-stage performances, manages to mock Asians in different ways, including producing stereotypical Chinese accents and nonsensical syllabic sequences (see also Vigouroux, this issue). It is through these different voices that the storyteller Davanzo is able to deliver his jokes without seeming the main responsible agent, as he redistributes responsibility by including the audience members as tacit, and thus complicit, participants (see Sacks Reference Sacks and Bauman1974; Hill & Irvine Reference Hill and Irvine1993). The listeners are positioned as if they shared the same code and, by extension, as if they shared the same view on the humor that is being performed. In a sense, through his telling, Davanzo is able to convey his remarks without taking responsibility for them since the attribution of these remarks is diffused and shared not only among these various voices that he performs, but also by having the listeners participate by laughing and sharing the same code.
This barzelletta contains other similar moments in lines 10, 11, and 12 when the teller, after naming the child with the Italian name Giovanni, says that it would be good to do so ‘so that there are no ethnicities [i.e. ethnic differences], so that there are no differences, so that there are no differences among kids [in the classroom]’ (in modo cheno ghe sia etnie, cheno ghe sia differense, cheno ghesia e:::::::h differenze fra bambini). Since the classroom is supposedly composed of all Italian children and an Arab one, the teacher decides to name the new child with an Italian name to miraculously erase all ethnic differences. The final lines of the barzelletta reach the climax of the joke when the teller puts a blasphemous expression in the mouth of the child himself at line 34 (che me gha sgionfà de bote sacranon ‘who covered me with damned punches’). And, through so doing, the joke-teller not only contains his racist remarks by switching into Veneto, but by using dialect and by putting it in the mouth of the immigrant child, he also creates a stronger, and disconcertingly bonding, effect on the audience who shares this code. By laughing loudly, the audience becomes complicit with the storyteller. First, the storyteller assigns problematic remarks to the mouth of three different voices (the child's, his mother's, and his father's); then he starts using code-shifts more steadily till the climax that is delivered almost entirely in Veneto dialect. This crescendo-like effect of the barzelletta creates a hilarious and almost absurd, although certainly disturbing, effect. By sharing the code, the storyteller creates a bond with the listening audience who thus becomes complicit in excluding some of his listeners—here the migrant groups—who do not share Veneto dialect.
Conclusions
What is the significance of mocking migrants in Veneto dialect at this historical and political moment in Northern Italy? Given the conditions of dialect politicization in Veneto, mocking migrants in dialect would likely mean, ideologically speaking, more than what the usual shifts into dialect would typically mean. In general, shifting from Standard Italian into Veneto dialect is a distinctive way to iconically model indexical containment. It is containment in the sense that the problematic indexical associations of one's speech—such as sexual and sexist remarks, off-color and racist remarks—are supposedly mitigated by the framing of that speech in a local, in-group code—in dialect, in aligning with being a Veneto speaker. The problematic speech is discursively set apart as ‘not public’ (even if, in reality, it may be easily understood by all those co-present). The metaphoric containment of the strong indexicality of utterances like the ones discussed above puts these utterances ‘off-record’, at the same time that it sharpens the contrast between Veneto speakers and immigrants. By code-shifting into Veneto dialect, Davanzo positions the audience members as complicit and as participants in the joke, and thus he creates a strong bond with them. At the same time, Davanzo performs an exclusion of the ‘other’, the migrant groups in this case, and therefore puts clear boundaries between insiders and outsiders.
At this historical moment in Veneto, given the strength of conservative, anti-immigrant politics and the link between dialect revitalization and this politics, this divide may be acquiring a new significance. The sharp divide projected is that between the ‘we’ of dialect users—that is to say, insiders, ‘locals’, speakers of the local dialect, who have deep roots in their regional history that predate the Italian nation-state—and the foreign migrant ‘others’, outsiders, who have been targets of anti-immigrant policy and prejudice. Within this participation framework, the divide between the insider ‘we’ and the outsider ‘they’ seems to mirror an image of who is considered an Italian citizen and who is not. In a sense, this image adds different scales to Gumperz's (Reference Gumperz, Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz1976) notion of a ‘we’ versus a ‘they’ code, by showing how the code-shift in the immediate interaction is iconic of the ‘we’/‘they’ in Veneto, and in Northern Italy more generally. Mocking migrants in Veneto dialect thus sharpens the ideological boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’, serving as one more defense against people constructed as neither Italian, nor citizens.
appendix: transcription conventions
- ::::
syllable lengthening
- -
syllable cut-off
- .
stopping fall in tone
- ,
continuing intonation
- ?
rising intonation
- ( )
speaking softly
- [ ]
transcriber's comments
