The semiotics of barzellette in Veneto, Northern Italy

In Italy, barzellette, or ‘short funny stories’, are joke-telling practices that speakers perform in diverse social events with large or small groups of friends, relatives, or colleagues. In Northern Italy, where a strong anti-immigration platform has been implemented by the influential far-right political party Lega Nord (‘Northern League’), barzellette are often performed to talk about migrants and migration issues. In this article, after a brief historical overview of this genre, which has deep roots in the Italian fifteenth and sixteenth-century literary ballads, I examine the semiotics of multilingual play in race-based humor through a linguistic anthropological analysis of one barzelletta that I video-recorded in 2019. I show how speakers of Venetian, the local language of the Northeastern Italian region of Veneto, engage in these short storytelling practices to mock migrants, using approaches that purport to obscure their racist remarks in their local code. Ultimately, I examine how racializing discourses emerge in barzellette through participants’ semiotic and scalar enactments and how racist ideologies thus get solidified in Italy.