“What Happened to Jokes?”

Abstract

Since 1989, commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have mourned the death of jokes in postsocialist societies. While in fact humor has not gone away, the everyday experience of sharing jokes as an intimate form of political criticism has indeed vanished. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival research on the history of Hungarian humor, this article contributes a new perspective to the recent wave of scholarship on Soviet laughter, by examining the “loss of the joke” as both a cultural phenomenon and a critical discourse in postsocialist Hungary. First, we argue that a series of important shifts in the way Hungarians work, socialize, communicate, and engage in politics has led them to be far more circumspect in sharing political humor. Second, we analyze the self-reflexive perception of loss as a form of cultural criticism that indexes broader anxieties about the challenges of interpreting the operations of power under postsocialism. With this shift in political sensibility, we argue, the lament that the joke is “lost” may now offer more effective political commentary than a joke itself.

Possibilities and limits of political humour in a hybrid regime

“…As a hybrid regime of electoral autocracy with a socialist past, it differs in many ways from Western liberal democracies. Hungary has a particular heritage of using humour as a form of resistance during the socialist times (Lampland & Nadkarni, 2016). This tradition, which has long been cherished in literature and cinema, still resonates among many Hungarians, who are yet again caught in a situation in which freedom of speech and the media are being limited by the country's rulers.…”

The affective labor of commoning: Street art in illiberal Hungary

“…They also stress that the creative and hands‐on character of street art makes the MKKP's projects more capacious to enfold individuals who participate in them. Scholars observe that the MKKP's street art projects are unique in that they engage with local politics and, therefore, are difficult to appreciate without familiarity of local political culture and urban life (Lampland & Nadkarni, 2016; Molnár, 2017; cf. Klumbytė, 2022).…”

Legal analysis of freedom of expression and online humour in Indonesia

“…Humour has been recognized as a tool for expressing and disseminating opinions, and it is intricately linked to other fields of knowledge (Alkiviadou 2019). Scholars have examined humour as a component of social, political, and cultural phenomena (Ridanpää 2014), as well as within the domains of psychology (Franzini 2001), psychotherapy (Dimmer et al 1990;Valentine & Gabbard 2014), neurology (Rodden 2018), and education (Banas et al 2011), etc. On the other hand, humour has been recognized as a means of resistance against oppression and slavery (Barber 2021), and as a tool to resist authoritarian rule (Lampland & Nadkarni 2015) in undemocratic states where power is distributed unequally (Bozzini 2013;Bruner 2005;Davies 2007;Dumitrica 2022;Salmi-Niklander 2007). Going back as far as the classical playwright Aristophanes, humour has been used to ridicule those in public office (Schutz 1977).…”