Political joke as an alternative literary form to official literature in the Moldavian SSR

Abstract

The article analyzes the relationship between the political joke as an alternative literary form to official literature in the Moldavian SSR and the socio-political context. In the first part of the article are defined the terms joke and political joke, and further aspects of the socio-political context of MSSR are pursued, which are starting points in the analysis of the political joke in Soviet Bessarabia. Some themes of political jokes in Bessarabia of the 1940s and 1990s are highlighted, with some examples of jokes “from the people”, collected during field discussions with some citizens of the Republic of Moldova, from the online environment and from a literary periodical magazine from 1988. The article demonstrates the words and expressions of daily life of Bessarabians, who made their way into the political jokes of the Moldavian SSR. The jokes that were presented in the article, as examples of political jokes in the Moldavian SSR, reflect the social and political realities of that time period. In these jokes are told stories that cheer and amuse us through irony, sarcasms, suggestions, especially for the bizarre language that the characters used. The political joke is regarded as a form of satire or humor, being framed in a literary species, namely the species of comic folk prose. This literary form, such as the political joke, was an alternative to the official literature of the MSSR. In this article we analyze two themes on which the satire of political jokes in MSSR focused: the distortion of the Romanian language and the effects of propaganda.

Keywords

• political joke
• moldovan ssr
• literary form
• socio-political context