Article Title：99 nuns giggle, 1 nun gasps: The not-all-that-Christian natural class of Christian jokes
Abstract：
Encouraged by the existence of the folk label for the group of Christian or religious jokes, this paper assumes Christian humor as a subgenre in its own right. This assumption is supported by an exemplary analysis of these jokes as a group of texts that are intended or perceived as similar, thus constituting a natural class. Within this class the status of truly Christian jokes in terms of script oppositions (Raskin 1985) will be defined, and for Christian jokes in terms of family resemblance (Wittgenstein 1953). An internal hierarchy within this joke class will also be proposed and justified based on their analysis in terms of the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo and Raskin 1991) and in relation to prototypicality effects. One central finding is that the joke class of Christian jokes is shallow, in the sense that very limited knowledge of specifically Christian scripts makes them Christian and is necessary to appreciate them.
Keywords: humor; religion; Christianity; joke classification; GTVH
DOI: 10.1515/humr.2003.003
Source：HUMOR-INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMOR RESEARCH
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