Dumb Blondes and Democracy

Abstract

The jokes about dumb blondes, thinking only of sex, are very popular in the international joke repertoire. From the perspective of the ancient misogy- nous narrative tradition they are perhaps the most radical part. In Bulgarian everyday communication the jokes about dumb blondes began to be spread during the second half of the 1990s and are still popular today. In Western democratic societies the creation and spreading of jokes about dumb blondes is a logical consequence from advanced social and economic development which brings forth more and more women onto the public stage and the sphere of employment, and gives them the chance for individual accomplishment. The socio-cultural situation in Bulgaria, after the fall of the communist regime, in relation towards women is a bit different - characteristic for it is a discredited emancipation, obvious aggravating and extension of sexist discourses, male domination over public life and professional activities, feminization of poverty, a tendency to return to patriarchal values in private life. Despite the diverse contexts in both cases, jokes about dumb blondes represent an adequate strat- egy for the adaptation to the deep social change which challenges, in many ways, female and male identities. Since the beginning of the 1990s a new protagonist appeared in international jokelore and is still popular nowadays (Oring 2003: 59). What is more, it could be claimed that jokes about dumb blondes have established their stable place in most of the national joke repertoires - being an indispensable part of almost every printed or Internet collection of jokes. Dumb blonde jokes can also be found in the respective rubrics of the press. In Bulgaria these jokes began spreading as early as during the second half of the 1990s. In spite of the great popularity of the jokes about dumb blondes nowadays, such jokes were not registered during the 1997 year project in the Institute of Folklore, Contem- porary State of Bulgarian Joke Telling, the aim of which was to document jokes within the different contexts of their firsthand telling. Likewise, it is indicative that these popular joke figures were still absent from the popular thematic collections, issued by the Fliorir Publishing House during the years 1993-1998, categorized on the principle of the joke protagonists 1 .