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Air quotes refers to the action of using one's fingers to make quotation marks in the air during speech. The practice of gesticulating punctuation is typically done with both hands held up, with the index and middle fingers on each hand curled down during the phrase being "quoted"; a common variant is to temporarily curl the fingers at the beginning and end of the phrase.
An early adopter of this action was Ben Elton, who frequently used it during his stand-up comedy routines.
This is often used to express some degree of satire, sarcasm, irony or euphemism.
Among the actors who have lampooned this behavior:
There is also an entire Friends episode based around Joey not understanding how air quotes work.
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