Taking Penguins to the Movies: Ethnic Humor in Russia (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Taking Penguins to the Movies: Ethnic Humor in Russia Bert Beynen Taking Penguins to the Movies: Ethnic Humor in Russia. By Emil A. Draitser (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. Pp. 199, preface, notes, bibliography, indexes.) In this book, Draitser provides a lot of good jokes and in the process raises fascinating questions. Many Russian jokes, he reminds us, are products of the best part of Russian society-its intelligentsia (p. 12). Therefore, jokes are an important part of Russia's cultural history. Ethnic jokes are especially interesting because of their uniformity, and in spite of their specificity. That is, the jokes ascribe specific characteristics to various ethnic groups, but these characteristics are interchangeable and are, sooner or later, ascribed to most groups, and what is more, most groups ascribe them to themselves. Russians, for example, describe Jews (p. 182) and Georgians (pp. 49-50) as sexually overactive, which is very surprising because they make similar jokes about themselves (pp. 21 ff., 183), although they resent it when outsiders make the same assumptions (p. 25). To complicate matters, opposite characteristics are not infrequently ascribed to different ethnic groups (p. 33). The universality of the specifics in "jokelore," as Draitser calls his subject matter, are jokes about stingy people: They are told about the Scots, as well as by Belgians about the Dutch, by Russians about the Ukrainians (p. 73), and by Bulgarians about the inhabitants of the village, Gabrovo. Therefore, ethnic jokes seem difficult to explain: They ascribe the same and opposite characteristics to several ethnic groups. They do not refer to any objectively existing and verifiable ethnic characteristics, as Draitser repeatedly points out (p. 20, quoting Wilson, who quotes Barron and Legman). How can this be explained? According to Draitser, who attempts to explain these characteristics of jokes, groups take a close look at neighboring groups and make fun of their characteristics, but these groups say that, in the final analysis, all humanity is both the same and unique: Each group is stupid or clever, sexually active or inactive, depending on which individuals are chosen as representatives (pp. 20, 23). Linguists will notice here a similarity with phonemes or, more appropriately, distinctive features. Distinctive features and phonemes, unlike morphemes and words but like ethnic characteristics, do not refer to reality but "denote mere otherness," in Roman Jakobson's words ("Phonology and Phonemics," Selected Writings, vol. I [Mouton,1962, p. 470]). Similarly, these ethnic characteristics do not describe ethnic groups but only "denote their otherness," that is, state that they are different. Just as Jakobson described a phoneme as a bundle of distinctive features, we can describe an ethnic joke as a bundle of ethnic characteristics with this difference: that the bundle is defined for each individual joke, while phonemes are permanently defined as a certain bundle of features. This conception of ethnic jokes as a means to identify one's own group by contrasting it with others seems implicit in Draitser's analysis, even if he does not say so directly (pp. 17, 20). De Saussure was right: The sign is arbitrary and one can show one's "awareness of its existence" (p. 17) by attributing any characteristic to any group. Draitser's book deals with very fundamental questions. What makes a state? What makes a nationality? How are our neighboring countries different from us? Are they? He shows us that people have pretty much the same vices and weaknesses all over the world-well, all over Eastern Europe-and he gives us lots of good anecdotes. Bert Beynen Des Moines Area Community College Copyright © 2002 American Folklore Society