Folk Humor Research Articles

How It Was Sung in Odessa: At the Intersection of Russian and Yiddish Folk Culture

Odessa has played a significant role in Russian and Yiddish folklore and popular culture. Although the city has changed with the times, the Odessa variant of the Russian language and the Russian and Yiddish songs created in and about Odessa are the lasting product of a unique brand of multiculturalism. The Russian of Odessa shows die influence of Yiddish and Ukrainian in grammar, lexicon, and phraseology, and Odessa folk humor reflects Jewish sensibilities. Odessa Yiddish is permeated with Russianisms. The repertoire of Russian and Yiddish songs about Odessa reveals the mixed character of die respective languages. The songs portray a unique city: one tfiat is more impressive than Vienna or Paris; one that embodies progress and the carefree life but is also dangerous. These songs deal with various aspects of the Jewish experience but also with the life of the underworld, employing the stylistic conventions of the so-called blatnaia pesnia.

"The Culture of Folk Humor" in Petronius' Cena Trimalchionis

"The Culture of Folk Humor" in Petronius' Cena Trimalchionis

Southern Literature and Folk Humor

Southern Literature and Folk Humor

Folklore Motifs in Late Medieval Art III: Erotic Animal Imagery

IN two previous articles in Folklore (vol. 100, 1989; vol. 101, 1990) I explored some themes of folk humour and satire in the pictorial arts and verbal idioms of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. In the present paper I shall discuss the erotic symbolism associated with certain animals during these periods.

Book Reviews

R. J. Hoage. Perceptions of Animals in American CultureAda Morehead Holland. Brush Country WomanJudy Nolte Lensink. “A Secret to Be Buried”: The Diary and Life of Emily Hawley Gillespie, 1858–1888Paula Petrik. No Step Backward: Women and Family on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier, Helena, Montana, 1865–1900Jack Santino. Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman PortersRobert Dallek. The American Style of Foreign PolicyDonald Chu. The Character of American Higher Education Zntercollegiate SportJohn O West. Cowboy Folk Humor: Life and Laughter in the American WestSteven Starker. Oracle at the Supermarket: The American Preoccupation with Self‐Help BooksHillel Schwartz. Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and FatGeorge Lipsitz. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular CultureMichael Hough. Out of Place: Restoring Zdentity to the Regional Landscape

Carnival: Death and Renewal in the Poetry of Gloria Fuertes

The word as used by Mikhail Bakhtin, refers to the culture of the marketplace and the forms of folk humor which arose in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The manifestations of this popular culture included comic festivities and ritual activities, memorialized in the oral and written parodies from which an entire body of recreational literature was born. Among the most salient traits of carnivalesque compositions are licentiousness, irreverence, and an exaggerated fascination with the human body and with its appetites and instincts, both noble and base. The ambivalence inherent in the portrayal of bodily impulses is central to the grotesque realism that Bakhtin attributes to Rabelais in particular and to carnival expression in general. For Bakhtin, the grotesque character of popular parodical literature is perhaps carnival's greatest triumph, for the very ambivalence of praise and degradation echoes the eternally unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming (Bakhtin, 24). The grotesque, in short, signals the cosmic triumph of regeneration over death.' The world of carnival, according to Bakhtin, traditionally stands outside of an official culture marked by sobriety and asceticism, intolerance and repression.2 These elements conspire to produce

Chronotopes and Catastrophes: The Cultural History of Mikhail Bakhtin

The Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) is best known to historians as the author of a book on Rabelais which subverts the received notion of that author and inverts the commonplace idea of the Renaissance. Rabelais, Bakhtin maintains, is not a humanist-evangelist concealing Socratic seriousness in scatalogical tales; his roguish peasant-kings are authentic folk heroes and Rabelais is their literary voice and ideological advocate. And the Renaissance, for all its Michelangelos and Queen Elizabeths, is mainly distinguished by the manner in which its greatest figures -Shakespeare, Cervantes, Rabelais satirize official culture by drawing upon carnivalesque sources of folk humor.2 The essays translated and commented upon in the two books under review offer the English reader the theoretical bases for these unorthodox assertions. They reveal Bakhtin as someone other than an unorthodox student of literature who somehow survived under Stalin. Bakhtin is an historical thinker of scope and genius; these essays are of methodological importance not only to students of the Renaissance but to every historian of culture. The astonishing range of his interests and breadth of his hypotheses are outlined with care and perspicacity by Tzvetan Todorov in the essay which forms the first half of the French volume under review.3 As the titles of these books indicate, the generative center of Bakhtin's thought is dialogic. The neologism is related both to dialogue and to

The Emergence of the Mass Society: The Standardization of American Culture, 1830–1920

One of the great intellectual debates in the nineteenth century in the United States concerned the American preoccupation with European culture and, perhaps more important, the continued use of European critical standards to judge the quality of indigenous American culture. There is a great deal of truth in Walt Whitman's lament above, for a truly American high culture had yet to emerge, and American popular culture was still very much in its formative stages and under the influence of European trends (witness the enormous popularity of Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott). Only in the realm of folk culture had a rich, and by now Americanized, tradition emerged in the period before the Civil War. This is an interesting point, for after nearly two hundred years in the New World, American folk culture (especially folk humor) was now quite independent, whereas American high culture was still beholden to Europe for its inspiration and ideals. This clearly demonstrates that folk culture emerges from an affinity with everyday cultural expression and is closely identified with its creators, whereas high culture is based on a rigid set of (sometimes arbitrary) standards, which can be imposed from outside, with little regard for community cultural needs. Thus, the existing folklore was the result of the unique American experience, and while elements of the older European folk cultures were still visible, these had undergone the transformations caused by a new environment and were now fully integrated into the “frontier” culture of the new land.

Japanese Folk Humor

Japanese Folk Humor

Once Upon a Shtetl: Schlimazels, Schlemiels, Schnorrers, Shadchens and Sages—Yiddish Humor in Children's Books

Once Upon a Shtetl:Schlimazels, Schlemiels, Schnorrers, Shadchens and Sages—Yiddish Humor in Children's Books Marilyn Jurich (bio) What can be better than for a child to discover another culture through its folk humor? Accurately and artistically, the sense and soul of a people is made explicit through those stories it traditionally finds funny. While some ethnic humor may be limited in appeal, the rhetoric exclusive and the experiences restricted, the most characteristic folk humor, paradoxically enough, is universal in appeal. For any humor to be appreciated, the story that frames it must be good and spicy, soaked in a rich background and seasoned with fragrant words and flavorful characters. Often, folk humor is more distinctly appealing not only for providing novelty through the ethnic qualities it contains, but for impressing us and children with what is earthy, deep, part of some vital community of spirit since lost—the reality of human absurdity with the implicit tragedy that begins and ends our laughter. Yiddish tales begin and never end. Yiddish humor is terribly repetitive; in fact, it can be terrible in its repetitiveness. One author even suggests that "Cain slew Abel because he kept pestering him with long-winded Jewish jokes."1 A people confined to a ghetto, prohibited from actively entering into life, achieves its sense of life and assures its own identity through critical examination, speculation, talk, and more talk, especially humorous talk; tries the adversity of "the system" and taunts the absurdity of that self who would remain whole within that system. Yiddish folk humor, for all its irony, is not cruel. (The world is cruel enough, and cruelty is not the means to enlightenment.) While the Talmudic influence gives the humor an intellectual quality, it also gives [End Page 9] it an ethical basis; laughing with an individual rather than at him, will gently persuade him to improve. In Yiddish humor, Rabbis are those sages who suggest to others their own silliness; in their wisdom, Rabbis can also play jokes. In Could Anything Be Worse? by Marilyn Hirsch, for one man, nothing seems as if it could be worse, until a Rabbi realizes matters differently. The story combines many qualities of Jewish humor—it is repetitive in structure, an "accumulative tale"; it is gently prodding through picture and print; and the laughter has a moral basis. As the story opens, a splendid two-fold picture demonstrates a stage set for comedy, the interior apparent under a roof which is lifted above it. Upstage right is the frustrated father, helplessly clutching a yowling infant who reaches towards the mother, ineffectually trying to calm him. On the left, a self-absorbed older sister detaches herself from the whole confused scene, concerned only with tying her hair ribbon. The upper foreground is the predominant center of comic motion; it is the loft under the roof. Up the ladder to the loft, a dog pursues a cat; on a pole to this same loft, the little brother climbs towards the top only to be pushed down with a pillow by a larger, surly-faced sister. In the room below, the cluster of furniture, some framed ancestors blankly looking out of circular frames from the wall, a pot abjectly kindling behind the father's rocking chair, all testify that "nothing could be worse." Hirsch has a marvelous sense for designing confusion in simple, unconfused forms—all coming together in a welter. The first stage set is used as the standard against which "worse" will be judged. The Rabbi's suggestions serve to increase the confusion, the first set reappearing five times, each time "worse" than the last. The accumulative disasters are, thus, visually demonstrated. The moral that derives—Be Grateful for What You Have, for There is A "Worse" in the World You Cannot Know—is resounding in the climactic scene. [End Page 10] After the man, at the start, complains to the Rabbi about his troublesome family, the Rabbi advises the man to bring into his house his chickens, and on further complaints, his cow, then his poor relatives. Then each removal of what has been an added calamity, now removed in reverse order—relatives, then cows, finally chicks...

Echoes of More in American Folk Humor

Echoes of More in American Folk Humor

Gogol' and The Correlation of "The Culture of Humor" with The Comic and Serious in The Russian National Tradition

M. M. Bakhtin's exceptionally profound work "The Art of the Word and the Culture of Folk Humor (Rabelais and Gogol')" (1) reveals previously uninvestigated aspects of the comic element in Gogol', placing the writer's creation in the context of folkfestival, humorous, and carnival culture. In revealing the link with this popular and democratic tradition, Bakhtin justifiably protests against one-sided reduction of Gogol's laughter to satire. Developing Bakhtin's thoughts, one might point to yet another tradition, besides folk-humor and accusatory-satirical traditions, that supplements the complex of Gogol's attitude toward laughter.

The Art of The Word and The Culture of Folk Humor (Rabelais and Gogol')

In our book on Rabelais (1) we sought to demonstrate that the basic principles of that great artist's creation were defined by the culture of folk humor [narodnaia smekhovaia kul'tura] of the past. One of the most significant shortcomings of contemporary literary scholarship lies in the fact that it attempts to confine all literature — including, particularly, that of the Renaissance — within the framework of official culture. However, the creation of that same Rabelais can actually be understood only within the flow of folk culture, which always, at all stages of its development, has resisted official culture and developed its distinctive point of view of the world and distinctive image forms in which this view is mirrored.