Contemporary Student Jokes: the Body of Texts and Their Genetic Relations. Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, 2012, 6(2), pp. 97 – 117. (original) (raw)
Related papers
The origin and classification of Russian jokes (anecdotes) as a folklore genre
Russian jokes (anecdotes), the most popular form of Russian humour, are short fictional stories or dialogues with a punch line. It's quite a recent fenomena of Russian folklore and the origin of it is still unclear. Russian anecdotes as a folklore genre became very obvious only in the XX Century. In the XIX Century the word "anecdote" borrowed itself from French meant a short story about some funny event. And even V. Ya. Propp didn't differ folk novelistic stories from anecdotes. Most probably the modern genre of anecdotes is a result of transformation of short novelistic stories from middle-age epoque (in Latin, later in French) under the influence of folk novelistic stories: "Anecdotes were born by shortening and simplification of the topic of folk novelistic stories while retaining main characters" (Yu. I. Yudin, 1976).
About the special issue on Humour and Folklore - Introduction
Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 2009
This special issue on Humour and Folklore contains 15 articles by 18 contributors. Ten studies are in English, three in Russian, one is in French, and one in German. This issue grew from seven panels and plenary lectures on humour research presented in Hungary in 2007 at the International Symposium “Humour and Linguistics/Folklore” organized by Anna T. Litovkina and Péter Barta at the Illyés Gyula College of Education (Szekszárd, 14–16 September 2007). The program committee accepted proposals for papers on focused topics that examined humour in relation to linguistics or folklore. Of special interest, however, were contributions on the following: (1) Proverbs, Sayings and Idioms; (2) Tales; (3) Riddles; (4) Anti-Proverbs; (5) Graffi ti; (6) Jokes; (7) Rumour and Gossip; (8) Punning; (9) Sexuality, Taboo and Insults; (10) Drinking and Food; (11) Festivals, Fairs and Harvest Traditions; (12) Cognitive Linguistics; (13) Language Teaching.The working languages of the Symposium were English, German, French and Russian. The symposium featured 46 speakers from 13 countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Poland, Russia, Spain, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the USA). Besides a two-hour round-table discussion and four plenary lectures, there were a number of sections on themes such as: JOKES; PROVERBS, SAYINGS AND IDIOMS; INTERFACES; COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS; HUMOUR AND CULTURE.
Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 2009
This special issue on Humour and Folklore contains 15 articles by 18 contributors. Ten studies are in English, three in Russian, one is in French, and one in German. This issue grew from seven panels and plenary lectures on humour research presented in Hungary in 2007 at the International Symposium “Humour and Linguistics/Folklore” organized by Anna T. Litovkina and Péter Barta at the Illyés Gyula College of Education (Szekszárd, 14–16 September 2007). The program committee accepted proposals for papers on focused topics that examined humour in relation to linguistics or folklore. Of special interest, however, were contributions on the following: (1) Proverbs, Sayings and Idioms; (2) Tales; (3) Riddles; (4) Anti-Proverbs; (5) Graffi ti; (6) Jokes; (7) Rumour and Gossip; (8) Punning; (9) Sexuality, Taboo and Insults; (10) Drinking and Food; (11) Festivals, Fairs and Harvest Traditions; (12) Cognitive Linguistics; (13) Language Teaching. The working languages of the Symposium were English, German, French, and Russian. The symposium featured 46 speakers from 13 countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Poland, Russia, Spain, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the USA). Besides a two-hour round-table discussion and four plenary lectures, there were a number of sections on themes such as: JOKES; PROVERBS, SAYINGS AND IDIOMS; INTERFACES; COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS; HUMOUR AND CULTURE.
From Joke Tales to Demotivators. A Diachronic Look at Humorous Discourse in Folklore
Humor is a trans-genre phenomenon that functions above the established genre rules, challenging them through parody and other subversive practices. At the same time, genre rules have an influence on humorous discourse, but this often works in the negative: the rules are distorted in the process. Humor can thus be seen as counter-discourse, continuously and playfully deconstructing and reconstructing the text through adding new layers of meaning and context. Similarly to discarding genre rules, humor discards taboos and sabotages non-humorous discourse through performing the unexpected and the forbidden
The Hungarian Joke and Its Environs
European Journal of Humour Research, 2016
Hungarian humour went through significant changes in the 20th century. Though the urban middle-class way of living and culture had developed by the early 20th century, they had to coexist all over the country as well as in ethnic Hungarian territories abroad with the traditions of rural culture and folklore until the middle of the century (and, in locked-up areas, till the end of the century). Consequently, Hungarian humour is made up of two important layers of folklore: popular funny stories that have been developing among the peasantry for centuries, and jokes, a genre that emerged from urban oral culture in the last third of the 20th century. The dualism of folk-based and urban culture has been a decisive feature of Hungarian culture during the entire 20th century. Thus the question arises: more than a hundred years later, are there still any fundamental differences between the two types of humour in terms of their ways of thinking or their subject matter, or can we regard Hungarian humour as a unity? In this paper, we compare the thematic categories of popular and urban humour based on the analysis of two large collections. Next, we examine the popularity of major joke categories in Internet sources. Finally, we offer a brief introduction to the contemporary stock of Hungarian jokes by thematic groups.
The “Geometry” of Humor in Russian Formalism: A Non-Psychological Approach
On the Joke and the Joker Conference, Yale University, April 1 2016
Today’s idea of humor compels a psychological reading, but Russian Formalism, which practiced replacing “psychology” with “structure,” offers an alternative. Viktor Shklovsky’s “Toward a Theory of the Comic” analyzes the problem “geometrically,” showing that the structure of jokes [anekdoty] does not guarantee humor, e.g. when the same constructions are found in Dostoyevsky. Elsewhere, Shklovsky writes about puns, defining them as “the intersection of two semantic [. . .] planes on the same sign (word).” Nothing is said about humor. Puns needn’t necessarily be humorous. Hence the question: does humor nest in certain structures, and do they remain humorous when not “funny?” In ancient medicine, humor denoted the four bodily fluids, after which it evolved to mean something comic as when one is whimsical having indulged in one of the four humors instead of keeping them in balance—the condition of physical and mental health. But whimsicality and the comic are not tantamount. Thus the Formalist Evgeniia Zhurbina explained the deliberately disjointed composition of the often not-so-witty Soviet feuilletons as a remnant of the play of wit that historically characterized this genre. This is also true of Shklovsky’s writing, famous for its unpredictable switches between various themes. These texts read as witty, but often they are not “funny” (e.g. “Third Factory”). So are they still humorous? Does humor depend on the comic? These are the questions the paper raises.
Stalin jokes and humor theory (text in English, 2009)
The article, based on two recent collections of Stalin jokes, explores these texts from the standpoint of humor theory. The principal feature distinguishing most of them from satire is that they do not mock their ostensible target. Rather than expressing any relation to reality, they mock all the stupid ways reality can be represented. Viewed from the metalevel, these jokes are parodic in the broadest sense, which includes self-parody. They ridicule not only the official view of reality, but any other views of it as well, including the satirical view. The basic principle underlying these and all other jokes is the clash between the author and the intellectually inferior implicit narrator, who is the principal target of the jokes. As a result, the relevance of Stalin jokes for reconstructing either Soviet reality or people's attitude to it is minimal, whereas their relevance for humor theory is considerable, since they highlight the contrast between satire and humor, specifically black humor.
Multi-ethnic jokes in the Russian language
Językoznawstwo, 2019
The aim of this paper is to study variations and continuities in the targets of multi-ethnic jokes in the Russian language through time in three consecutive periods: Soviet era, post-socialist years and the present time. Multi-ethnic jokes are a subtype of ethnic canned jokes that feature two or more ethnonyms in one text, three being the most usual number of nationalities featured in the text and having, therefore, a tripartite structure. The different nationalities are placed in a special situation that usually entails some kind of competition between them. Our specific goals in this article are: 1) to analyse the position of the nationalities mentioned in the tripartite textual structure of the joke and their function within the text of the joke and to study structural variations through time; 2) to determine the ethnic scripts that are frequently ascribed to these targets and their changes from Soviet to present times; 3) to identify the nationalities that appear in multi-ethnic jokes in Russian and to detect changes in this cast of characters, if any, through the three chronological periods previously stated. The analysis of a corpus of 359 multi-ethnic jokes in the Russian language reveals that multi-ethnic jokes in Russian undergo few changes through times. Although they feature different nationalities in one text, multi-ethnic jokes in the Russian language are an example of reflexive ethnic humour, since they target Russians themselves.Keywords: ethnic humour, multi-ethnic jokes, Russia