Liisi Laineste

Estonian Literary Museum · Department of Folkloristic

The article investigates the humorous reactions to two important controversies that received a great deal of attention in the Estonian public sphere during the summer of the year 2023. These are the Wagner group rebellion and the scandal involving Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas. Building on theories of the public sphere and observations on how...

Teesid: Uurimuses analüüsitakse ajaloomeeme Vene sõja kohta Ukrainas. Leidsime materjalis korduvad motiivid ning vaatlesime suhteid meemide ajalooalasete viidete ja hoiakute vahel. Selgus, et ajaloomeemid võivad olla vahendiks, kuidas õigustada tänapäeva sündmusi, tekitada vaenlaste suhtes üleolekut, anda hinnanguid sündmustele ning naeruvääristada...

Memes offer responsive acute commentary on controversial societal matters, providing non-violent and democratic spaces of discussion for conflicts. The paper studies memes on the war in Ukraine that spread in Eastern (Russia, Estonia, Belarus) and Western Europe (Spain). We analyze who are the main actors/characters that personify the war in the me...

Conflict divides society by bringing out opposing opinions and social, political and cultural difference. Humour becomes a way to disseminate and comment on opinions as well as to mark divisions in the public sphere. Even though humour is ambiguous in nature, its stance (Shifman 2014) is made evident through content and/or context. In cases where t...

Contemporary contacts and interactions with religion are often mediated by mass and social media. These sources vary in their reliability and some are known for their use of humor as a communicative strategy. In this article we analyze how humorous religion-related news triggers reactions to and discussions about the intertwined issues of humor, re...

In this chapter we give an overview of the usage and context of figurative elements in hate speech, addressing also the role of humour in such comments. In doing this, we focus on the religious domain, as this is a kind of discourse which engenders strong emotions. We hypothesise that metaphors and humour carry an important role in moderating the h...

We investigate the humour production, consumption and sharing of Russian-speakers in Estonia, based on the self-reflections and self-perceptions of their humour preferences and other humour-related behaviour. By studying the representation of the humour practices of this important minority community we can get a more complete picture of humour in E...

Wars and other acute social conflicts are a fruitful ground for the emergence of heroes and villains. This is true for the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine: both the news media and ordinary people have found targets for villainisation (Russian president Vladimir Putin) and heroisation (Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy) since the outbreak of...

This paper builds on a novel methodology of lexical semantics exemplified on lexical field theory by using several translations of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The present study, a large-scale collaboration, presents and compares the results for laugh, smile, grin, giggle, and other words for laughter behaviors across 14 languages a...

When serious official political statements are not enough to get people’s votes, politicians often turn to attention-grabbing and emotion-triggering self-presentation. They give the public access to their “normal, everyday” lives through personalisation and use other tools of “new” politics to create a favourable image of themselves. They can also...

Humour has been celebrated as a way to cope with trauma – through disaster jokes, wartime humour and death-related humour in general, the joke-tellers alleviate the painful experiences and memories of these. But there is another side to this coin. Humour may trivialise the negative experience, especially because black humour is not only the priorit...

Bringing into focus the ways of how to approach trauma instead of defining the object of research is becoming increasingly important. This also indicates that the range of approaches to trauma that informs cultural inquiry is widening, and is moving away from one singular paradigm posited as universal. Trauma scholars have demonstrated, on the one...

The editorial article for the special issue of EJHR “Laughter and Humour in Communication” provides an overview of all the presented articles and highlights the general idea of the issue.

Some topics, especially those concerning nationality, race, religion or gender, bring about heated discussions both offline or online. They evoke strong emotions, cultural narratives and folkloric motives that are shared within communities, while each side defends their opinions with all rhetorical means possible. It is in the crossroads of the voi...

Benevolent and corrective humor are two comic styles that have been related to virtue, morality, and character strengths. A previous study also supported the viability of measuring these two styles with the BenCor in 22 countries. The present study extends the previous one by including further countries (a total of 25 countries in 29 samples with N...

The Internet affects the adaption and translation of humour through faster dissemination, but also by influencing the content. This influence is especially palpable in languages that recycle – adapt and translate – texts from mostly English-language jokelore and meme pools. This article gives an overview of humorous memes created in response to tab...

The religious sphere has inspired much humour, but there are not many historically and culturally contextualized comparative studies of humorous tales and jokes about the clergy. This article aims to compare Estonian and Belarusian joke lore, outline the main topics of clergy jokes, and show their interconnectedness with and dependence upon their r...

The Publisher regrets that this article is an accidental duplication of an article that has already been published, https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.05.022. The duplicate article has therefore been withdrawn. The full Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal can be found at https://www.elsevier.com/about/our-business/policies/article-withdrawa...

The study¹ examines how metaphors are deliberately used in spoken interaction, taking into account their context and combining the analysis of conversational data with new developments in metaphor studies. In doing this, we present Estonian examples of extended metaphors co-constructed in the course of interaction. Steen's framework of deliberate m...

This paper takes a diachronic look at the culinary trends in the presentday Estonia. It sheds light on the process of nation-building enacted through recipes that refer to the social ideals, convictions, and stereotypes widely held at the time of the first Republic of Estonia (1919-1939). The idealised notions of the past create a distinct atmosphe...

Christie Davies, the renowned humour researcher and a passionate propagator of the comparative method in studying jokes, stressed the necessity of establishing a relationship between two sets of social facts: the jokes themselves on the one hand, and the social structure or cultural traditions wherein they disseminate on the other (Davies 2002: 6)....

The article analyses rumours about Putin’s disappearance from the public eye during the ten-day period in March 2015. Parallels with earlier rumours about Russian leaders before Putin are thus revealed and differences between English and Russian sources of information are pointed at. The data presented here comes from both traditional and social me...

Internet humour flourishes on social network sites, special humour-dedicated sites and on web pages focusing on edutainment or infotainment. Its increasing pervasiveness has to do with the positive functions that humour is nowadays believed to carry – its bonding, affiliative and generally beneficial qualities. Internet humour, like other forms of...

Humor is a trans-genre phenomenon that functions above the established genre rules, challenging them through parody and other subversive practices. At the same time, genre rules have an influence on humorous discourse, but this often works in the negative: the rules are distorted in the process. Humor can thus be seen as counter-discourse, continuo...

Old jokes (sometimes only reduced to the punch-line), also known as lame jokes, are true pieces of folklore that circulate among people and are shared by communities. These are short narratives ending in a predictable punch-line that does not provide any novelty to the listeners. They are often published in volumes of joke collections or in the Var...

The link between jokes and social reality is visible in the way that jokes adapt to different socio-political contexts by dealing with the most salient issues of such contexts. This article casts light on another facet of the relationship of jokes and their social context. Ideas about jokes are influenced by their social context, being continuously...

In January 2011, uprisings and demonstrations broke out in Egypt, and the reverberations of the revolution are felt up to this day. The events that lead President Hosni Mubarak to resign were violent, disturbing, and definitely serious, but at the same time they were fuelled by and caused a plethora of jokes and funny slogans which circulated among...

This article(1) is a study of the doping scandal that broke out in April 2011 and concerned the esteemed Estonian sportsman and Olympic gold medal winner, Andrus Veerpalu. The current analysis is based on the material collected from the Estonian online media throughout two years, from April 2011 to March 2013, during which Andrus Veerpalu's court c...

Jokes, ethnic slurs and parodies often occur in Internet comments, as the general feeling of anonymity allows for and even favours balancing on the verge of the acceptable and the unacceptable. Thus, a humorously intended comment can be perceived as aggressive by other Internet users. This possibility is further enhanced by the fact that the electr...

The focus of this paper is on the nature and role of online aggression in larger scale societal tensions and its interaction with the use of humor. The study analyses expressions of online aggression in different online environments. The study involves content analysis of online media from discussion forums and less regulated social media like blog...

The article aims to validate the main presuppositions of the theory of eth- nic humour (see first and foremost Davies 1990, but also Davies 1987, 1991, 1998, 1999, 2002) in contemporary Estonian joke material. The author will pose hypotheses which will contest Davies' conclusions on regularities in ethnic humour. Davies' conclusions are largely bui...

Humour is a cultural phenomenon situated at the juncture of societal changes, being most actively present at the spot where the sharpest transitions in value systems take place. Both universally and in the present context of the expanding European Union, it has functioned as an indicator of conflict, transformation and/or assimilation. Now is the p...

The article will describe the transformation of cultural heritage, focusing on ethnic jokes. Starting with the jokes from the 1890s, which were collected by Estonian folklorist Matthias Johann Eisen (1857–1934) during the country-wide folklore collection campaigns tied to the idea of national revival and ending with the most recent jokes shared on...

Ethnic, religious or other group-based dysphemisms are the most obvious manifestations of prejudice, ethnocentrism, sometimes even indicating actual feelings of xenophobia.But they also mirror the present and past on interethnic relationships, as slurs and dysphemisms are part of a nation’s or a group’s reactions to culture contacts, for example to...

The article aims to validate the main presuppositions of the theory of ethnic humour (see first and foremost Davies 1990, but also Davies 1987, 1991, 1998, 1999, 2002) in contemporary Estonian joke material. The author will pose hypotheses which will contest Davies’ conclusions on regularities in ethnic humour. Davies’ conclusions are largely built...

The study provides an overview of Estonian ethnic humour over the last century (1890-2004), focusing on three periods: the end of the 19th century, the Soviet period, and the years following Estonia’s regained independence. The changes in the choice of the targets of joke throughout the century are mapped and the cultural, social and political infl...

The study provides an overview of Estonian ethnic humour over the last century (1890-2004), focusing on three periods: the end of the 19th century, the Soviet period, and the years following Estonia's regained independence. The changes in the choice of the targets of joke throughout the century are mapped and the cultural, social and political infl...

Collecting jokes on the Internet is becoming more and more useful, and one might say even unavoidable. The renewed nature of jokes (short, electronically distributed in addition to oral circulation, some jokes created only for electronic media (see Ellis 2001) etc) requires renewed methods for collecting and processing the data. Further than that,...

Jokes are a vitally important part of everyday discourse. Joking occurs mostly in social situations, but there is an emergent source of jokes circulating on the Internet. The vast number and popularity of jokes proves that jokes possess roles other than those connected with immediate communicational gains. My interest is not to discuss the psycholo...

The dissertation consists of an introductory chapter and five articles (four published and one in press). It approaches Estonian contemporary jokelore from different perspectives, covering the area of topical, ethnic and political jokes, giving an overview of the material used in the research, and eventually aiming at cross-cultural comparisons wit...