The present article contributes to contextualization research, genre analysis, and gender
studies. It deals with anecdotes in which a female narrator humorously presents her own
personal misadventures or inadequacies. In my corpus of informal dinner conversations
among good friends from the German academic milieu, I have found many instances where
women presented comic perspectives on themselves; only one man did this. 1 In contrast to
psychological gender research, which frequently shows a tendency for women to depreciate …