the telling situation...

Toasts can be told anywhere--at parties, lounging around bars and streetcorners, on a troopship crossing the boring ocean--but they seem to be told in county jails more than anywhere else.

For the folklorist, the creative act is part of the product; each redaction of the text, each re-creation of the event is to some extent controlled or influenced by the situation. And the situation--involving all participants, their physical and psychological relationships to one another and to the material--can be very complex indeed.