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

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.