This paper offers a folkloristic perspective on the features and dynamics of sharing humorous content digitally within a family in the context of daily communication. The data, collected from 60 Belarusian families via oral interviews and an online survey (175 respondents), were subjected to quantitative and qualitative content and context analysis. The results suggest that sharing humour digitally within a family can take various forms, some of which parallel oral face-to-face interactions, while others complement them. The most preferable ways of sharing are those that ensure the privacy of conversation, thus providing family members with an opportunity to follow the customary patterns of communication while adapting them to the new spatiotemporal circumstances. Even though the process of selecting humorous content to share with one’s family does not necessarily involve conscious reflection on the sharer’s part, some tendencies clearly transpire from the data. For example, visual and generic forms of humour are more popular than textual and personal ones. Sharing such humour presupposes certain considerations about its recipients, thus making the fact that one’s audience is their family an important consideration in the practice of digital sharing.
Over the past century Belarus has experienced a dramatic increase in educational level. Obtaining secondary education is now considered normal, getting a university degree is prestigious. However, such an attitude is relatively new to Belarusian society. Joke texts that date back to the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century indicate that formal education was widely considered useless, as it did not equip children with skills they needed in real life. Formal education was often contrasted with learning necessary skills at home, invariably in favour of the latter. In the Soviet era, formal education was made compulsory and suddenly became an integral part of people’s lives, but it still lacked a link with children’s future careers. Parents could not always appreciate the benefits of education, but had to send their children to school anyway. The clash between the “old” attitude and the “new” reality produced jokes. Jokes that have emerged in the post-Soviet era reflect the omnipresence of education in contemporary Belarusian society. Some school jokes point to a greater understanding of the value of knowledge in modern children―yet it is often not the formal knowledge they are expected to get in school. Overall, school in jokes has become a setting where issues prominent in society at large come to the fore, even if this goes against the will of the educators.
This paper is a tribute to Belarusian folklorist and ethnographer Uladzimir Sysou (1951-1997) whose extensive legacy includes collecting 139 jokes during his field research in southern Belarus in 1995. Due to his untimely death, these jokes and other folklore items remain unpublished and have, to my knowledge, not been noticed by folklorists. Half of the collected jokes focus on family relations, mostly the relationship between husband and wife. One of the most popular topics of these jokes is adultery. The joke texts show an ambiguous attitude of people towards it. While committing adultery is considered improper, not a lot of effort is made to conceal it. If (or rather, when) a case of adultery comes to light, it does not lead to any serious problems for either spouse in jokes. When studying these jokes, it is curious to place them in historical context and compare them to earlier, Soviet-era jokes about adultery. This study discusses why jokes about adultery in Sysou’s collection differed both quantitatively and qualitatively from adultery jokes found in Soviet collections. The study shows that the high prevalence of jokes on the subject in Sysou’s collection and the liberal attitude towards adultery manifested in them result largely from the decrease in self- and state censorship in Belarus in the early 1990s, set against a backdrop of value pluralisation triggered by the collapse of the USSR.
Christie Davies, the renowned humour researcher and a passionate propagator of the comparative method in studying jokes, stressed the necessity of establishing a relationship between two sets of social facts: the jokes themselves on the one hand, and the social structure or cultural traditions wherein they disseminate on the other (Davies 2002: 6). He also inspired others to examine the differences and similarities in the patterns of jokes between different nations, social circumstances and eras. By doing this and building falsifiable models and generalisations of joking relationships, he changed the way we look at and analyse ethnic jokes.This study returns to earlier findings of Estonian (Laineste 2005, 2009) and Belarusian (Astapova 2015, Zhvaleuskaya 2013, 2015) ethnic jokes and takes a look at new trends in fresh data. Starting with the jokes from the end of the 19th century and ending with the most recent jokes, memes and other humorous items shared over the Internet, the paper will give an overview of how social reality interacts with the rules of target choice, above all describing the effect of globalisation on jokelore.
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