Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-8bljj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-05T07:21:50.909Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Dealing with life changes: humour in painful self-disclosures by elderly Japanese women

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2009

YOSHIKO MATSUMOTO
YOSHIKO MATSUMOTO*
Affiliation:
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA.
*
Address for correspondence: Yoshiko Matsumoto, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Building 250, Main Quad, Stanford University, Stanford, California94305-2000, USA. E-mail: yoshikom@stanford.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which older people depict verbally the life changes that accompany old age. It reports a study of Japanese elderly women's casual conversations with their friends, during which they talked about their husbands' deaths and illnesses. A frequently observed discourse practice among old people is ‘painful self-disclosure’ (PSD), in which unhappy personal information on one's ill health, immobility or bereavement is revealed and speakers describe themselves using negative stereotypes of old age. During the observed conversations, however, the PSD accounts were frequently accompanied by humour and laughter. This paper examines the complex structure of the PSDs. To exemplify, a simple statement of death and illness given early in a conversation is later elaborated with descriptions of unremarkable domestic events, e.g. complaints about the husband's behaviour. Through shifting the frame of the narrative to quotidian normality, the elderly speakers convert painful life events to everyday matters that they can laugh about. Furthermore, it was found that the humour is sustained through interactions during which the hearers often laughed with the speaker. The study suggests that the disclosure of age-related negative experiences is not necessarily uniformly gloomy, but rather is combined with expressions of personal and social identities and nuanced and modulated through a complex resolution of the speaker's intentions and social expectations.

Keywords

humournarrativeconversationself-disclosureinteractionJapanese womenframesdeath
Type
Research Article
Information
Ageing & Society , Volume 29 , Issue 6: Discourse, identity and change in mid-to-late life: inter-disciplinary perspectives on language and ageing , August 2009 , pp. 929 - 952
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Apte, M. L. 1985. Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York.Google Scholar
Bateson, G. 1953. The position of humor in human communication. In Foerster, H. von (ed.), Cybernetics: Ninth Conference. Josiah Macy Jr Foundation, New York, 1–47.Google Scholar
Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chandler, New York.Google Scholar
Bergson, H. 1911 [1899]. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Macmillan, New York.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. 1978. Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena. In Goody, E. N. (ed.), Questions and Politeness. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 56–290.Google Scholar
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boxer, D. and Cortes-Conde, F. 1997. From bonding to biting: conversational joking and identity display. Journal of Pragmatics, 27, 3, 275–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chafe, W. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Chafe, W. 2007. The Importance of Not Being Earnest: The Feeling Behind Laughter and Humor. Benjamins, Amsterdam.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coupland, N., Coupland, J. and Giles, H. 1991. Language, Society and the Elderly: Discourse, Identity and Ageing. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.Google Scholar
Coupland, J., Coupland, N. and Grainger, K. 1991. Intergenerational discourse: contextual versions of ageing and elderliness. Ageing & Society, 11, 2, 189–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duranti, A. and Goodwin, C. 1992. Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language 11, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Eckert, P. 1984. Age and linguistic change. In Kertzer, D. I. and Keith, J. (eds), Age and Anthropological Theory. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 219–33.Google Scholar
Ervin-Tripp, S. and Lampert, M. 1992. Gender differences in the construction of humorous talk. In Hall, K., Bucholtz, M. and Moonwoman, B. (eds), Locating Power. Berkeley Women and Language Group, Berkeley, California, 108–17.Google Scholar
Giora, R. 1991. On the cognitive aspects of the joke. Journal of Pragmatics, 16, 5, 465–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goffman, E. 1974. Frame Analysis. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Guggenbühl-Craig, A. 1980. Eros on Crutches: Reflections on Psychopathy and Amorality. (Translation of Seelenwüsten by G. V. Hartman.) Spring, Irving, Texas.Google Scholar
Gumperz, J. J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hay, J. 2000. Functions of humor in the conversations of men and women. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 6, 709–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jefferson, G. 1984. On the organization of laughter in talk about troubles. In Atkinson, J. M. and Heritage, J. (eds), Structures of Social Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 346–69.Google Scholar
Keltner, D. and Bonanno, G. A. 1997. A study of laughter and dissociation: distinct correlates of laughter and smiling during bereavement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 4, 687–702.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Koestler, A. 1964. The Act of Creation. Macmillan, New York.Google Scholar
Kotthoff, H. 2006. Gender and humor: the state of the art. Journal of Pragmatics, 38, 1, 4–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, W. and Waletzky, J. 1967. Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience. In Helm, J. (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. University of Washington Press, Seattle, Washington, 12–44.Google Scholar
Matsumoto, Y. 2005. ‘We'll be dead by then!’ Comical self-disclosure by elderly Japanese women. In Ettlinger, M., Fleisher, N. and Park-Doob, M. (eds), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, California, 268–79.Google Scholar
Matsumoto, Y. 2007. Dealing with changes: discourse of elderly Japanese women. In McGloin, N. H. and Mori, J. (eds), Japanese/Korean Linguistics 15. CSLI Publications, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 93–107.Google Scholar
Matsumoto, Y. 2008. Discourse of the elderly from the speaker's point of view. In Mori, J. and Ohta, A. S. (eds), Japanese Applied Linguistics: Discourse and Social Perspectives, Continuum International, New York, 188–210.Google Scholar
Nikander, P. 2009. Doing change and continuity: age identity and the micro–macro divide. Ageing & Society, 29, 6, 861–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norrick, N. R. 1993. Conversational Joking. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana.Google Scholar
Norrick, N. R. 2000. Conversational Narrative: Storytelling in Everyday Talk. Benjamins, Amsterdam.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norrick, N. R. 2003. Issues in conversational joking. Journal of Pragmatics, 35, 9, 1333–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norrick, N. R. 2009. The construction of multiple identities in elderly narrators' stories. Ageing & Society, 29, 6, 901–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ochs, E. and Capps, L. 2001. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Raskin, V. and Attardo, S. 1994. Non-literalness and non-bona-fide in language. Pragmatics and Cognition, 2, 1, 31–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ryan, E. B., Giles, H., Bartolucci, G. and Henwood, K. 1986. Psycholinguistic and social psychological components of communication by and with the elderly. Language and Communication, 6, 1, 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ryan, E. B., Hummert, M. L. and Boich, L. 1995. Communication predicaments of aging: patronizing behavior toward older adults. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 14, 1/2, 144–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schiffrin, D. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge University Press, New York.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siebers, T. 2004. Disability as masquerade. Literature and Medicine, 23, 1, 1–22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tannen, D. 1979. What's in a frame? Surface evidence for underlying expectations. In Freedle, R. (ed.), New Directions in Discourse Processing. Ablex, Norwood, New Jersey, 137–81.Google Scholar
Tannen, D. 1989. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge University Press, New York.Google Scholar
Thorson, J. A. 1985. A funny thing happened on the way to the morgue: some thoughts on humor and death, and a taxonomy of the humor associated with death. Death Studies, 9, 3/4, 201–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ziv, A. 1984. Personality and Sense of Humor. Springer, New York.Google Scholar