Where the Structural Meets the Personal: Mother-In-Law Humor Between a Joke Cycle and Joking Relationships in Belarus

Abstract

The paper discusses the status of mother-in-law humor in the context of humorous family communication in contemporary Belarusian families. The humorous communication is represented by widespread canned jokes that portray the wife’s mother as an ill-natured and imperious character, and by personal humorous stories and other personal forms of humorous communication. Canned joke texts reflect structural issues and are impersonal, but the practice of joke-telling is not. During my fieldwork among Belarusian couples, motherin-law jokes were often contextualized in the tellers’ own family relationships. Thus, no clear-cut distinction was made between canned jokes, teasing, and other forms of family humor. The examples of mother-in-law jokes and other forms of mother-in-law humor, as well as the practices and reflections connected to them, open up the floor for discussing the interconnections between the cultural codes that lie at the basis of the jokes and the emic practices of joke-telling. The paper also explores the ways in which mother-in-law humor adds a new dimension to the anthropological concept of joking relationships.