Depiction of Ethnic Targets and Scripts in Jokes from Uladzimir Sysou’s Archive

Abstract

The article uses Uladzimir Sysou’s archival collection of jokes to study the corpus of Belarusian ethnic humour and delineate its main features. The analysis reveals the most popular targets among the ethnic jokes in Sysou’s collection which are Auciukoucy (the inhabitants of Malyja Auciuki and Vialikiya Auciuki villages in southern Belarus), Jews and Armenians, as well as most popular ethnic scripts of these jokes which are stupidity, canniness, self-deprecation and physical or sexual violence. The popularity and novelty of Auciukoucy as an ethnic humour target is explained within the context of the spatial and temporal circumstances of Sysou’s fieldwork. The jokes are interpreted within Christie Davies’s theory of ethnic humour, and the phenomenon of application of both stupidity and canniness scripts to a single ethnic target is discussed.