The Disappearance of Political Jokes in Post-Socialist Slovenia

Abstract

In the decades since the fall of socialism, political jokes seemed to have lost their significance in Slovenia. In order to confirm and understand this change, we collected a sample of 200 jokes from five of the most popular Slovenian Facebook groups and analyzed the jokes and their targets. The results show that political jokes have indeed largely disappeared from the Slovenian public sphere: only three of the jokes in the sample target politicians. In this article, we argue that this development indicates a different response to the social pressures of the market economy. Whereas during socialism the source of anxiety was more or less apparent (the communist elite) and consequently easier to ridicule, in post-socialist societies, sources of anxiety are more diverse and impersonal, making them more difficult to target in jokes.