The place and role of God’s name in the semantic script of “God jokes”

Abstract

According to the Bible, a disrespectful use of God’s name may be perceived as blasphemous or at least profane. In order to avoid the risk of violating that religious and linguistic taboo, sensitive language users representing the Judeo-Christian world have developed various euphemistic ways of referring to God. On the other hand, however, jokes that include God’s name and laugh at him are not uncommon in Western culture. Assuming a linguistic-semantic perspective, the present paper examines a group of “God jokes”, which are jokes that contain God’s name and were tagged with the word god in the collection entitled “The best god jokes”, published on the website unijokes.com. The aim of the study is to identify the place and role of God’s name in the semantic script of “God jokes”, or in other words, to check “how much” God there really is in the text of jokes that are supposed to laugh at God, potentially violating the religious taboo. Following the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Raskin and Attardo 1991; Attardo 2001), the use of God’s name is analyzed in the knowledge resources of the semantic script of a joke: the target, the script opposition, the situation, the narration, and the language.