Culture in the creation of jokes about women

Abstract

The humorous discourse is imbued with extralinguistic references, social and cultural factors, in addition to the already well known procedures and metalinguistic self-reference(s), hence its translation and interpretation with the same humorous load becomes complex. This is due to different linguistic complexities involved in its Construction, and the cultural powers conferred. On the basis of this approach, this paper aims to examine the universal and the particular in the transfer of joke(s) about women from one culture to another. For this goal we have selected a pair of seemingly different cultures (the Arabic and the Spanish ones), though they metaphorically belong to the Mediterranean culture. As a result of our research, we will try to figure out how women are depicted in the jokes from those cultures following several parameters: physique, intellect and morality.