Christie Davies, the famous humour researcher and a vehement spreader of the comparative method in scrutinizing jokes, accentuated the need of determining a connection between two sets of social facts: the jokes themselves and the social structure or cultural traditions wherein they disperse (Davies 2002: 6). He also stimulated others to explore the discrepancies and resemblances in the joke patterns between diverse nations, social circumstances and eras. By doing so and constructing falsifiable models and generalisations of joking connections, he altered the way people regard and assay 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.