JOKING AS A SEMIOTIC PRACTICE AND MEANS OF SPIRITUAL SURVIVAL. A PRAGMA-LINGUISTIC AND STYLISTIC APPROACH (original) (raw)
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Political humour, as an indispensable part of popular culture, played a complex role under communism in Romania. It was a catalyst of the general discontent towards the catastrophic effects of Ceaușescu's megalomaniac dictatorship, a forbidden, dangerous means of expressing opposition. This dynamic part of folklore captured and exposed essential aspects of life in communism, from the permanent fear of the Securitate to the ever-growing ridicule of the presidential couple and their acolytes. Unforgiving jokes targeting the Ceaușescus, now almost forgotten, rendered the grotesque portraits of the abusive, illiterate leaders of a totalitarian regime, radically contrasting with the official discourse that glorified them as heroes of socialism and parents of the nation. Drawing from a rich body of theoretical approaches to political humour and, particularly, political folklore, I intend to critically reread Romanian political humour of the communist era regarding Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu in order to question its role in transforming the public perception of autocratic power. Authors such as Egon Larsen, Dana Maria Nicolescu Grasso, Christie Davies and Eliott Oring, among others, have closely explored the complex territory of this limited yet significant cultural realm. I also intend to explore its specific traits as a potentially particular genre and re-evaluate some divergent theoretical stances that view gallows humour in a dictatorial regime either as a concrete protest or as a means of rerouting and defusing resentment. The creative richness of this rather dominant part of Romanian political humour of the 70s and 80s could reveal a unique territory in which caricature is nurtured by everyday despair.
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Although one of the most influential figures of Romanian Communism, Elena Ceaușescu has been the subject of a rather limited literature exploring her historical figure. I intend to revisit the political humour of Romanian communism in order to reveal the manners and strategies employed by this type of folklore in affirming the hyperbolized clichés that defined the dictator’s wife in the public mind of that age. I also intend to bring into discussion the common traditional prejudice that blamed Elena Ceaușescu for her husband’s catastrophic politics that impoverished and isolated Romania in the Eastern Bloc.
he Discourse on Humour in the Romanian Press between 1948-1965
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Once the official proclamation of the Romanian People's Republic takes place, on the 30 th of December 1947, the process of imposing new cultural values on society gradually permeates all areas of Romanian social life. Humour also becomes part of this process of transforming the social and cultural life, often regarded as a powerful weapon with which to attack 'old' bourgeois mentalities. According to Hans Speier, the official type of humour promoted by an authoritarian regime is political humour, which contributes to maintain the existent social order, or plays its part in changing it-all depending on those holding the reins over massmedia. 1 Taking the Soviet Union as a model, the Romanian new regime imposes an official kind of humour, created through mass-media: the press, the radio, literature, cinematography, and television. This paper analyses the Romanian discourse on humour, reflected in the press,
Miscellanea Posttotalitariana Wratislaviensia, 2016
The article endeavors to show that "resistance through culture" in totalitarian regimes is part of a social and political dynamic that is complicated and paradoxical. I claim that a discursive analysis of power relationships and of the rapport between the private and official idioms in the political context of communist totalitarian societies can evince the daunting complexity of some forms of resistance-through-culture discourse. My main argument is that, with the appropriate critical instruments, cultural discourse analysis can broach the intricacies and paradoxes of power relationships in oppressive environments and can ground a more accurate and unprejudiced moral evaluation of resistance through culture as a phenomenon typical of totalitarian cultural politics.
Humour, Language and Protests in Romania
Humour, Language and Protests in Romania, 2018
This paper documents the phenomenon of resistance through language during Romania’s communist period and in the massive street protests of February 2017, enacted through the poetic function, as theorized by Roman Jakobson. This ensemble of social bonds, enabled by the focus of the message for its own sake, the moral aspect of crafting messages and the process of coding and decoding them, is referred to in this thesis as “poetic solidarity”. In both cases, the vocabulary of the resistance opposed and sabotaged the wooden language of the system, seen as an ideology: during communism, through a tradition of subversive jokes, and in more recent times, through what has been dubbed as “an explosion of creativity”, manifested in the signs displayed during Romania’s biggest protests since its 1989 revolution. The research starts by examining the context of communist Romania and exploring the way in which Romanians used humour to resist the extensiveness of cultural censorship and political pressure. It then reviews the social and political evolution in Romania in the decades after 1989, and specifically the new wave of protests which began with 2012, focusing on the events of February 2017. Here, the messages created and displayed during these protests are discussed as examples which serve to illustrate the notion of poetic solidarity and shed light on why the signs emerged as a distinct layer in the discourse of the protests. Finally, the research discusses the politics of exclusion contained by this solidarity and the main themes in the discourses of a profoundly divided Romania.
Miscellanea Posttotalitariana Wratislaviensia, 2017
The author of the article focuses on showing that resistance through culture is part of a social and political dynamic that is complicated and paradoxical. He claims that a discursive analysis of power relationships and of the rapport between the private and official idioms in the political context of communist totalitarian societies can evince the daunting complexity of some forms of resistance-through-culture discourse. The author argues that with the appropriate critical instruments, cultural discourse analysis can broach the intricacies and paradoxes of power relationships in oppressive environments and can ground a more accurate and unprejudiced moral evaluation of resistance through culture as a phenomenon typical of totalitarian cultural politics.
Romanian Humor, 2020
Without disregarding the contribution of different research areas (philosophy, aesthetics, literary studies, anthropology, etc.) to the multifaceted aspects of humour, this chapter offers a bird's eye view on pragmatic approaches to Romanian humour.
Romanian humour in a nutshell (co-autor)
Romanian Humour, 2020
Without disregarding the contribution of different research areas (philosophy, aesthetics, literary studies, anthropology, etc.) to the multifaceted aspects of humour, this chapter offers a bird's eye view on pragmatic approaches to Romanian humour.