A joke outside its original circle

Text A: an original contemporary practice extract.

My brother and I always called our disastrous camping trip the luxury holiday. I put the phrase into the speech for his wedding, then read it to a friend who had not been there. She thought I was mocking the accommodation his partner had chosen for their honeymoon. The phrase was clear to me because it carried a story I had not supplied to her.

I asked my brother whether he wanted the camping story included. We kept a short version with enough explanation for the room and removed the honeymoon comparison my friend had imagined. The joke had not suddenly become unkind between us. It needed reconsidering when the people listening no longer shared the memory that made it affectionate.

Text B: an original contemporary practice extract.

Our repair club jokingly called a volunteer the missing screw after he spent an afternoon searching for a part in his own pocket. He laughed with us and used the name himself. When I drafted it into the newsletter, a new member asked whether it meant he was unreliable. The printed phrase supplied a judgement without the afternoon that had produced it.

I showed the draft to the volunteer. He preferred a plain account of the repair, without the nickname, for readers he did not know. I changed it and kept the joke out of the public caption too. His enjoyment of it among friends had not given the same words the same meaning everywhere. A wider audience required a new decision, not simply a larger copy of our private laughter.

Both texts describe the decisions about sharing the jokes more widely.

What similarities do the decisions about sharing the jokes more widely share in these extracts? Use evidence from both texts to support your answer.