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Humour and Irony as research objects and as parts of everyday discourse in Russia
 
PIIS294939000028975-1-1
DOI10.18254/S294939000028975-1
Publication type Article
Status Published
Authors
Ksenia Shilikhina 
Affiliation: Voronezh State University
Address: Russian Federation, Voronezh
Journal nameLinguistica Fundamentalis
EditionIssue 2 (2)
Abstract

The paper addresses the issues of humour and irony research by Russian scholars and the functioning of humour and irony in everyday interaction. The aim of the paper is twofold: firstly, it presents an overview of humour and irony research in modern Russian linguistics, anthropology, ethics and literary studies. Secondly, it describes functioning of humour and irony in Russian everyday spoken, written and computer-mediated modes of discourse to demonstrate the variety of their forms and conveyed social implications.

There is no single perspective that underlies existing approaches to non-bona fide forms of communication. In the Soviet Union, the use of humour and irony was largely controlled by the state. Therefore, there was a strong ideological influence on the research of non-bona fide genres and the choice of empirical data: researchers focused only on the “good examples” of humour taken from classic literary works. Also there was a strong tradition to use the terms humour, the comic, laughter, irony and satire as near synonyms, so sometimes it is not easy to draw a borderline between humorous and ironic discourses.

In the past decades spontaneous non-bona fide forms of discourse have attracted researchers’ attention. Among a variety of genres canned jokes (or anecdotes) is the most popular humorous genre. Instances of humour and irony can be found not only in written texts, but also in spoken and computer-mediated modes of discourse, and in all modes humorous and ironic utterances are used to convey social implications or challenge existing social norms.

Keywordsnon-bona fide discourse, humour, irony, canned joke, criticism
Received08.12.2023
Publication date08.12.2023
Number of characters34715
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Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. Humour research in Russia
3. Research of irony in Russian linguistics and theory and history of literature
4. Irony in everyday discourse
Irony in spoken discourse
Irony in written discourse
Irony in computer-mediated discourse
1

1. Introduction
2 Humour and irony are indispensable elements of modern Russian culture: one can encounter instances of the non-bona fide discourse in everyday spoken and written communication as well as in computer-mediated interaction. It is no coincidence that the past decades have faced a growing number of publications by Russian scholars devoted to various non-bona fide forms of discourse.
3 Discussing the nature of humour, Henry Bergson states: “The greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this little problem, which has a knack of baffling every little effort, of slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation” [Bergson, 1911]. Despite having been written more than a century ago, these words still reflect the state of research in the field of humour studies, and Bergson’s statement can be successfully applied to humour research in Russia. Attempts to define humour and irony and describe their functions have been made by the researchers from various fields: philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, etc. However, the discussions are going on, and this is a sign that non-bona fide forms of discourse still merit scholarly attention and are important for the modern society.
4 In this paper, I will present an overview of research on humour and irony published by Russian scholars. I will also attempt at demonstrating how jokes and ironic utterances function in oral, written and computer-mediated modes of discourse and what social implications they convey.
5

2. Humour research in Russia
6 Research of humour and irony in Russia has a long-standing tradition which, on the one hand, is based on the ideas expressed by European scholars, and, on the other hand, offers its own theories and approaches to humour.
7 In the Soviet Union, humour was a rather serious matter: the communist state treated humour as a tool for ideological influence, and only what can be termed as “good examples of humour” were subject of scholarly analysis. In the 1st half of the 20th century humour research was restricted to its literary forms, and detailed, but ideologically laden definitions of the basic concepts, e.g., humour, satire or irony can be found in sources like Literary Encyclopaedia [Literaturnaya Entsikolpedia, 1929-1939]. Anatoly Lunacharsky’s article “What is Humour?” is a good example of purely ideological treatment of humour. Lunacharski, who, apart from being a writer, a translator and an art expert, was also a revolutionary and the first People’s Commissar of Education in the Soviet Government, began the text with the statement that the works of two Russian writers – Gogol and Chekhov – are good examples of humour. Lunacharsky likens humour to laughter and claims that laughter emerges when people find something that contradicts the norms. Following this line of reasoning, Lunacharsky gives examples of classical Russian literary works in which the writers criticized the injustice of pre-revolutionary “tsarist” social order [Lunacharsky, 1967].
8 The tradition to refer to various forms of humour, irony or satire in literary texts as “laughter” was taken up by many Soviet scholars. For instance, in their book Laughter in Ancient Rus’ Likhachev et al. focus on the comic genres that existed in the ancient Russian culture and describe laughter as a social phenomenon which breaks the rules of culture and creates a new environment of “anti-culture” [Likhachev, 1984].
9 Another well-known example of the study of comic forms in fiction is Yury Tynyanov’s analysis of literary parody [Tynyanov, 1977]. The writer and literary scholar, Tynyanov focuses on social functions of parody and gives a range of examples from the classic Russian literature of the 19th century.
10 One of the researchers who presented a systemic account of humour in literary texts was Vladimir Propp, whose posthumous book “On the Comic and Laughter” was first published in 1976 [Propp, 1976; Propp, 2009]. Propp focused specifically on the forms and functions of laughter and what he termed as “the comic” in literary texts. He created a theory which allowed for the analysis of empirical data, defined the concept of “the comic”, and classified types of laughter. Again, in Propp’s book laughter was used as an umbrella term for what is known as humour, irony and sarcasm. Propp’s classification of laughter was based on the concept of ridicule, which makes the classification more applicable to irony rather than humour. According to Propp’s taxonomy, laughter can be benign, bitter, cynical, joyful, ritual or carnival. Propp’s ideas were further expanded to the treatment of irony and comic discourse as phenomena existing in a particular cultural context.
11 A step towards the study of non-literary forms and genres of humour was made in the last decades of the 20th century. Recent years witnessed a range of publications devoted to the nature of humour and laughter [Shmeleva, 2002; Kozintsev, 2007; Logicheskij analiz jazyka, 2007], stylistic and cultural features of specific humorous genres [Shilikhina, 2017; Aleksandrova, 2018], etc. Canned jokes (or “anecdotes”) are, perhaps, the most popular humorous genre among scholars [Khimik, 2002; Shilikhina, 2017]. In their book “Russian canned jokes” E. Shmeleva and A. Shmelev describe a prototypical “anecdote” as a short coherent text recited with the primary intention to make the audience laugh. Prototypical canned jokes consist of a meta-textual introduction, words that belong to the narrator and utterances of the joke characters [Shmeleva, 2002].

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