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About the project

Even though the research on the socialist and postsocialist jokelore is considerable, it lacks coordination and cooperation. There is no integrative, extensive and international register (index) or database of contemporary punch-lined jokes that could be compared to the scope of the index of old joke tales in the many versions of Aarne, Thompson and Uther folk tale registers. We lack a substantial overview of their genesis, the patterns of distribution, loans, global and local elements in jokes, etc. In addition to this, there is no account about the trends of development in jokelore and other forms of folk humour in the post-socialist countries in Europe and elsewhere, caused by the multiple scenarios of political, economic and social transitions in the region during the last decades. We have no unified answer to the dilemma of aggression versus mirth – is humour an expression of ethnic hostility, xenophobia, racism, etc and should as such be rooted out from the field of international communication, or is it an ineluctable, inherent and basically mirthful aspect of each interethnic relationship that soud be accepted and even valued. Last but not least, the results of the research focusing either on text or on context (cognitive vs sociological approaches, among others) are not always compatible. The abovementioned issues form the grounds of this research project.

Aims

1. Crete a preliminary version of the international database of contemporary jokelore that would first cover the socialist and post-socialist ethnic and political jokes, more precisely the Russian – Polish - Hungarian - Romanian - Bulgarian - Estonian parallels in the existing sources. On Estonian side, the comparison will be based on the following material:

1) typological idex of Estonian Soviet jokes, with their Russian parallels in Russian internet; http://www.folklore.ee/~kriku/TRANSPORT/SovEstRus.doc

2) Continuously growing database of Estonian contemporary jokes, collected from the internet, covering the period from 1990s to 2007 and consisting of about 50 000 joke texts with and metatext (time, source, etc); http://www.folklore.ee/~liisi/o2/ This can be expanded on the material from the never-socialist Western European countries. In the same vein, other categories besides the initial ethnic and political jokes can be added to supplement the database. All in all, the database is designed as an international, interactive humour portal that would also allow simple statistics on the main trends in the data.