RUSSIAN WITTICISMS AND JOKES AS A MEANS OF CONVEING ANTI-WAR RHETORIC

Abstract

This chapter examines a witticism, that is, a short oral story about a fictional event concerning the current everyday issue or socio-political topic, with a humorous or satirical coloring and an unexpected witty ending. The anecdote spread widely as a speech genre of the Russian language in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The aim of this study is to consider the relationship between witticisms and the socio-political situation of the Russian "special operation" in Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022. Witticism, as a speech genre of modern Russian language, instantly reflected all sorts of aspects related to the events taking place, namely anti-war rhetoric. The chapter examines how an impressive amount of Russian national folklore texts can be observed during a difficult and tragic time for many people. In the article I give definitions of an anecdote, joke, humor. I analyze the matherial from The Dictionary of the Russian Language Ozhegov S. edited by Shvedova N., Great Russian Encyclopedia, etc. I present certain philosophical concepts of humor by such famous thinkers as Jean Paul (Richter), A. Schopenhauer, S. Kierkegaard and scientific conception of E. Shmeleva and A.Shmelev. Humor shows the contrast between an infinite idea and a limited world of phenomena, humor expresses itself through a smile, not laughter, and often manifests itself as a smile through tears. A witticism, usually has a monologue or dialogue structure and always consists of two parts: the plot, i.e. the story of the event, the dialogues of the characters, and then an unforeseen twist that adds salt to the joke, its point. The comic effect is achieved by means of two main types of jokes: reference jokes (there are more such examples in the article) and jokes that play on a specific linguistic phenomenon - polysemy, homonymy, stylistic diversity of vocabulary, etc. (so-called linguistic jokes, I also give such examples). In addition, I give examples and analyze anecdotes and jokes related to anti-war rhetoric. I illustrate the linguistic features of the anecdote, show the connection between socio-political events in Russia and elements of folklore that were a reaction to these events. In the article I present my own translation of the collected material from Russian into Polish. This topic is very current and interesting, it shows language changes and reactions of a certain group of Russian society in a relatively short period of time.