Publications

Publication details [#63860]

Fiadotava, Anastasiya. 2018. “Who sharpens the knives in my house?” Belarusian jokes about adultery at the turn of the 21st century. The European Journal of Humour Research 6 (2) : 23–39.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
The European Journal of Humour Research

Annotation

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 Due to his untimely death, these jokes and other folklore items remain unpublished and have, to my knowledge, not been noticed by folklorists.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 debates why adultery jokes (AJs) in the compilation of Belarusian folklorist and ethnographer Uladzimir Sysou diverged quantitatively and qualitatively from AJs found in Soviet compilations. It displays that the high AJs vantage in Sysou’s collection and the liberal stance against adultery shown in them mostly derive from the drop in self- and state censure in early 1990s Belarus, pit against a value pluralisation setting driven by the USSR crash.