internet humor about stalin netinalju stalinist - Eesti Rahvaluule

Arvo Krikmann
tual sites. e first sub-type includes “joke departments”, “joke books”, etc.
at all manner of portals, digital newspapers and magazines, that encourage
users to add their jokes to their collection, permit one to read and request
that one rate the latest jokes that have been submitted. Such sites also often
create and manage their own joke archives, the chronology of which occasionally
spans several years. Expansion of these sites depends on texts
copied from elsewhere and on those reproduced from memory. e other,
contextual sub-type of dynamic joke sources consists mainly of various chat
rooms and mailing lists where live communication takes place, during which
jokes are also told, and witticisms are recounted or referred to. In contextual
e-humour sources, jokes copied from elsewhere are ruled out, logically, and
are also actually very rare.
is categorisation also broadly reflects the folkloric value of Internet
jokes as texts and types. Copies are certainly of lower value than the texts
reproduced from memory, although on the whole and in a statistical sense,
the intensity of the copying of texts (frequency, number of copies that have
been made) is certainly one parameter of the value attached to a joke, and
should not be ignored. If someone has copied a text onto their personal humour
site, that is indirect recognition of that text and that type of joke in
general. e third, context-related form of presentation is of greatest interest
to the humour researcher, since it reflects the practical needs (psychological,
social, political, etc.) for the retelling of or referring to jokes, and is most
reminiscent (especially in chat rooms and lists) the ordinary, natural oral
form in which jokes are spread.
Correspondingly, the compendium of jokes about Stalin, as an excerpt
from the general body of Internet jokes, is divided into three categories based
on the degree of folkloricism:
1) mechanical copies of earlier Internet texts, in which the context is
lacking;
2) independent retrievals of texts also lacking context;
3) spontaneous recounting and quotation of jokes in various contexts
(such as the above-mentioned chat rooms and mail lists, articles in e-journals
and e-newspapers, e-versions of books, etc.).
In light of this gradation, the jokes represented by a larger number of
Internet texts differ quite extensively: some appear to reproduce mainly
through mechanical copying, while others multiply by being retold over
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