Some Characteristics of Tamil Jokes

A. Parimalagantham, Ph.D.

Introduction

This paper describes the structure of Tamil jokes and how creative writers use jokes to bring about laughter and sometimes social awareness in their readers.

Laughter is specifically human. Humor, subtle and not so subtle, is put to various uses in human interaction. Individuals and communities build on the innate human propensity for laughter to meet various ends. We use both verbal and nonverbal means to create laughter. Telling jokes and acting out jocular moments have been an integral part of social and cultural living in all human societies.

Paucity of Jokes in the literatures of Indian Languages

Generally speaking, humor and jokes are not widely depicted in literary creations in Indian languages. References are made to the humorous episodes, and statements that so and so character or hero or heroine laughed, smiled, etc. But the actual jokes are not listed in any elaborate manner. Sanskrit drama has provision for vidushaka, who may perform the role of a jester, commentator, with great wisdom. This character is given the duty to create jokes and hilarious moments. But this has not resulted in widespread use of jokes in literary creations.

Tamil Situation

In ancient and medieval Tamil literature there are only a few jokes. Since prose was not extensively used in ancient and medieval literature for literary creation, there were very few conversational pieces that communicated humor and related jokes in such literature. Pun on the word is a poetic or prosodic device in Tamil literature. Humor is recognized in classical Tamil grammars as an important part of literary experience. Subdivisions of humor are identified in Tolkaappiyam, the earliest Tamil grammar. However, we do not find their elucidation and exploitation in Tamil literary works in any significant manner.

Tamil did develop a special genre based only on the pun on the word and through the exploitation of polysemy. However, such literature was didactic in some cases, and, in most cases, those creative works focused more on the skill and craft of the poets in creating such works. Humor was largely not part of the purview of such literature.

One could, however, trace the slow development of humor and consequent laughter in other genres such as Kuravanji later on.

The adoption of prose as the major medium of literary creation and emergence of drama as an widespread spectator art led to the expansion of the potential of creative writers to cover jokes as part of their creation. The role of Vidushaka and comedian became crucial in spectator events, such as drama.

Data

The data for this paper is collected from several Tamil weekly magazines such as aanandavikaTan, kumudam, kumkumam, varamalar, etc. The jokes were collected on the basis of the problems they seek to focus on.

Method of Analysis

I collected nearly fifty jokes. These jokes are analyzed and classified on the basis of the social factors represented in the jokes, such as Occupation, Education and Social Gatherings, etc.

Structure of Jokes in Tamil

1. Tamil jokes are told between at least two persons. Both may interchange their role as speaker and hearer.

2. Jokes are usually part of a conversation. Thus, there are oral elements involved in narrating a joke.

3. There are jokes or jocular moments in which only acts, with no oral utterances, convey the meaning and intent of jokes.

4. The jokes contain minimum two or three internal parts or divisions. That is, jokes may be narrated in several stages.

5. The stages of jokes may occur either simply as conversation or as conversation with pictures and/or physical acts.

6. Mostly, the jokes are presented in the form of question and answer.

7. Pun on the word seems to be the most commonly used strategy.

8. Words with multiple meanings (polysemous) are more commonly exploited for creating jokes and to create laughter. The speaker choose intends one meaning of the word, and the listener-interpreter chooses another meaning of the same word in this situation.

9. Sometimes words from the spoken and written language which convey different and hilarious meanings are used.

10. Presuppositions of speaker and listener may be different for the same situation and this results jocular moments.

How Jokes Operate

1. The change of words may change the meaning and it creates laughter.

2. The syntactic structure of the joke may produce laughter.

3. The semantic deviation may induce the people to laugh.

4. Acts performed on their own may provoke laughter.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Attitude towards Mother Tongue - A Study of the Tribal Students of Orissa | Computer-mediated Communication in a Bilingual Chatroom | Compensation Strategies for Speaking English Adopted by Engineering Students of Tamil Nadu - A Study | Acquisition of English Intransitive Verbs by Urdu Speakers | Community, Culture and Curriculum in the Context of Tribal Education in Orissa, India | Auxiliary Verbs in Modern Tamil | Getting Around 'Offensive' Language | Noun Morphology in Kuki-Chin Languages | A Plea for the Use of Language Portals in Imparting Communication Skills | Advances in Machine Translation Systems | A Comparative Study of the Effect of Explicit-inductive and Explicit-deductive Grammar Instruction in EFL Contexts | Lexical Choice and Social Context in Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence | The Voice of Servility and Dominance Expressed through Animal Imagery in Adiga's The White Tiger | Phonological Analysis of English Phonotactics of Syllable Initial and Final Consonant Clusters by Yemeni Speakers of English | Effective Use of Language in Communicating News through Political Emergency | Helping the Limited English Proficient Learner Learn the Second Language Effectively through Strategy Instruction | P.S. Sri's The Temple Elephant: A Bestiary with Socio-Political and Spiritual Message | Papers Presented in the All-India Conference on Multimedia Enhanced Language Teaching - MELT 2009 | A Phonological Study of the Variety of English Spoken by Oriya Speakers in Western Orissa - A Doctoral Dissertation | HOME PAGE of November 2009 Issue | HOME PAGE | CONTACT EDITOR

Some Characteristics of Tamil Jokes

A. Parimalagantham, Ph.D.

Introduction

This paper describes the structure of Tamil jokes and how creative writers use jokes to bring about laughter and sometimes social awareness in their readers.

Laughter is specifically human. Humor, subtle and not so subtle, is put to various uses in human interaction. Individuals and communities build on the innate human propensity for laughter to meet various ends. We use both verbal and nonverbal means to create laughter. Telling jokes and acting out jocular moments have been an integral part of social and cultural living in all human societies.

Paucity of Jokes in the Literatures of Indian Languages

Generally speaking, humor and jokes are not widely depicted in literary creations in Indian languages. References are made to the humorous episodes, and statements that so and so character or hero or heroine laughed, smiled, etc. But the actual jokes are not listed in any elaborate manner. Sanskrit drama has provision for vidushaka, who may perform the role of a jester, commentator, with great wisdom. This character is given the duty to create jokes and hilarious moments. But this has not resulted in widespread use of jokes in literary creations.

Tamil Situation

In ancient and medieval Tamil literature there are only a few jokes. Since prose was not extensively used in ancient and medieval literature for literary creation, there were very few conversational pieces that communicated humor and related jokes in such literature. Pun on the word is a poetic or prosodic device in Tamil literature. Humor is recognized in classical Tamil grammars as an important part of literary experience. Subdivisions of humor are identified in Tolkaappiyam, the earliest Tamil grammar. However, we do not find their elucidation and exploitation in Tamil literary works in any significant manner.

Tamil did develop a special genre based only on the pun on the word and through the exploitation of polysemy. However, such literature was didactic in some cases, and, in most cases, those creative works focused more on the skill and craft of the poets in creating such works. Humor was largely not part of the purview of such literature.

One could, however, trace the slow development of humor and consequent laughter in other genres such as Kuravanji later on.

The adoption of prose as the major medium of literary creation and emergence of drama as an widespread spectator art led to the expansion of the potential of creative writers to cover jokes as part of their creation. The role of Vidushaka and comedian became crucial in spectator events, such as drama.

Data

Method of Analysis

I collected nearly fifty jokes. These jokes are analyzed and classified on the basis of the social factors represented in the jokes, such as Occupation, Education and Social Gatherings, etc.

Structure of Jokes in Tamil

1. Tamil jokes are told between at least two persons. Both may interchange their role as speaker and hearer.

2. Jokes are usually part of a conversation. Thus, there are oral elements involved in narrating a joke.

3. There are jokes or jocular moments in which only acts, with no oral utterances, convey the meaning and intent of jokes.

4. The jokes contain minimum two or three internal parts or divisions. That is, jokes may be narrated in several stages.

5. The stages of jokes may occur either simply as conversation or as conversation with pictures and/or physical acts.

6. Mostly, the jokes are presented in the form of question and answer.

7. Pun on the word seems to be the most commonly used strategy.

8. Words with multiple meanings (polysemous) are more commonly exploited for creating jokes and to create laughter. The speaker choose intends one meaning of the word, and the listener-interpreter chooses another meaning of the same word in this situation.

9. Sometimes words from the spoken and written language which convey different and hilarious meanings are used.

10. Presuppositions of speaker and listener may be different for the same situation and this results jocular moments.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Ergativity in Pahari Language | The Robustness of Free Reading in Second and Foreign Language Education | Conversational Cloze as a Measure of Ability in English in Indian Schools | Teaching the Intangibles - The Role of the English Teacher | Failures and Disillusionment in Naipaul's Miguel Street | Issues and Problems in Ph.D. in English - Degree Quality Assurance in Pakistan | Socio-Linguistic Constraints of Code Switching in Hindi-English-Kannada Multilinguals | Nature of Perception according to Gautama | The Quintessence of Sports Psychology and Language | Some Characteristics of Tamil Jokes | Lexical Opposites in Tamil | The Fire and the Rain - Deriving Meaning for Modern Life from Myths | Realilty and Challenges for Tamil in a Multilingual Environment - Tamil in Malaysia: An Essay in Tamil | Teaching and Learning a Classical-Modern Language - Some Thoughts Relating to Tamil | HOME PAGE of December 2009 Issue | HOME PAGE | CONTACT EDITOR