Every joke calls for a public of its own. -Sigmund Freud, yokes and their Relation to the Unconscious There has long been a certain disciplinary disinclination toward focusing serious anthropological attention on jokes. This is evidenced by the dearth of studies that treat actual joke telling in a given society, as opposed to the comparatively long history of anthropological interest in that kin behavior known as the "joking relationship" (for an overview see Apte 1985:29-66). This lack of disciplinary interest in jokes is also apparent in their complete absence from that otherwise comprehensive guide to anthropological questing, Notes and Queries on Anthropology, first published by the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874 and last revised in 1951.' The history of this Victorian omission and its 20th-century disciplinary sequelae is a subject for future study. 2 For the present article, suffice it to note that while multiple generations of anthropologists diligently collected the "stories, sayings, and songs" they heard in the field and readily recognized these as "integral elementls] of culture" (RA11951:206), they left the joke to languish where it lived.In the past two decades, however, anthropologists have joined linguists and folklorists in significantly extending the study of speech acts and their contexts under the rubric of verbal performance (Basso ). Joke texts and contexts are now recognized as worthy of anthropological attention. Indeed, several anthropologists have taken jokes seriously enough to begin to theorize about them. 3 Prominent among the advanced theories is the notion that jokes are inherently disordering and disorganizing phenomena. 4 Elliott Oring writes, for instance, that the task of the punchline, which he sees as the critical distinguishing feature of the joke as a literary genre, is to "disrupt the listener's traditional categories and expectations" and to "transform the perspective of the listener" through "an abrupt cognitive reorganization" (1992:92, 85, 83). In the same vein Mary Douglas (1975), in something of a twist on Victor Turner's liminal terrain, has gone so far as to suggest that a joke is an antirite. Whereas Turner (1977) celebrates the core of ritual as a moment of "anti-structure"In this article, I analyze a sequence of dirty jokes embedded in a monologue performed on the south Indian Tamil popular stage. In this performance I do not find vulgarity but rather a reflection of its practiced, anxious use-in-avoidance. I analyze the two separate linguistic footings the performer uses for making moral and immoral comments and the social values that are affirmed by this split. I highlight the narrative connections established in this context between fear of the foreign and fear of the female, consider what such connections index about the remnants of Victorian sexuality in postcolonial Tamilnadu, and discuss the locally reinscriptive effects of such a gendered performance, [gender, humor, verbal performance, south India, theater, postcolonialism, ...
