Abstract

Using interactional sociolinguistics, I analyze two versions of a narrative chronicling the humorous antics of a prankster called Zimmerman who, along with the narrator, was a seminary student in the Midwestern United States in the 1950s. To explore the interactional function of telling stories about pranks, I compare two versions: one which is more performative, the other which feels more like a summary, calling attention to differences in narrative evaluation accomplished through use of such linguistic features as reference, deixis, and contextualization cues. I argue that both versions accomplish moral positioning for the narrator, and work to construct and negotiate his identity as someone who values cleverness, finding humor in the playful defiance of authority. However, by contrasting a telling in which this evaluation is accomplished internally to one in which evaluation is largely external, I hope to highlight how evaluative devices contribute to meaning-making through narrative performance in the relatively understudied genre of prankster tales.