“The Husband Returns From a Business Trip”: Disciplinary Views on Adultery in an Anecdote

Abstract

This research proposes sociological, linguistic, folklore (psychoanalytic and structuralsemiotic) approaches to the analysis of the contemporary anecdote about adultery. Academic interpretations of satirical texts are quite different, but they allow us to explain the popularity and cultural reproduction of anecdotes about married life, gender stereotypes, the reasons for the women demonizing and men derision, as well as the modern specifics of a joke and recreation of its laughing effect. However, the viability of such stories about female infidelity is connected not only with the communicative situation. The article also analyzes the unified structure of the plot, developing around a trick, and the connection between medieval fabulous stories about “women’s tricks” and modern jokes with a typical beginning “the husband returns from a business trip”. Such anecdotes often use the same plots with a trick, motifs and formulaic beginning, as well as anecdotal stories about women’s cheating. In a contemporary joke, there is no explicitly pronounced didactics and morals, but it has some similarities with fabulous stories – exposure of its fictional status, formulaic beginning, plotting caused by tricks and savvy of characters, comic denouement and laughing effect.