Jokes are Small genres of folklore

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Children's folklore is a separate system of oral folk art with its inherent genre components - cradles, teasers, jokes. Everyone knows about the existence of the latter, even people who are absolutely far from studying texts or raising children. Probably, many will immediately remember the sayings about the magpie-crow, the horned goat (although, apparently, they should be attributed to a different genre - nursery rhymes). Confusion has long existed in folkloristics as well. Anything was attributed to jokes, including tongue twisters, teasers, shifters. However, now literary scholars tend to avoid such mistakes, so the genre of jokes is quite defined. Its specifics will be discussed in the article.

Genre definition

Jokes are small stories of a humorous nature that amuse the baby with their content or rhythmic organization. They have a rather uncomplicated plot, can be performed both in prose and poetic form.

Place in children's folklore

Rhyme songs should be distinguished from pestles and nursery rhymes, whichaddressed to very young children and are accompanied by a simple physical exercise, massage. Miniature texts, consisting of one sentence, made it possible to establish contact between an adult and a child, to cheer up even the most capricious baby. Jokes are somewhat different. They are also aimed at achieving a similar result, however, they are intended for a more adult audience, when the child can not only recognize the appeal to himself, but also somehow respond to it. By the end of the "lullaby" period (age 2-5 years), the child has sufficient vocabulary in order to perceive the game with the word, puns at the semantic level.

Through sayings like this, the little man learns the world in which he will live. Necessary philosophical categories, social problems can fit in an unpretentious, sometimes primitive form. Even the most banal jokes (for example, "The goat went after the bast") give an idea of the way of family life, the division of labor between husband and wife. And then the child becomes aware that the forest is full of dangers, the wolf is waiting for the goat, but the beast itself is afraid of the archer - an ambivalence that is universal in nature!

Specific existence

Children's jokes are often improvised, so there are no special instructions on how they should be performed - in chorus or alone. Moreover, the age of the speakers does not matter. The children themselves can happily compose texts, and then voice them.

Origin

Russian folk jokes go back to"buffoon" songs, playful sentences performed in a dialogic form:

- Goat, goat, Where have you been?

- She guarded the horses…etc.

From buffoons, various jokes were inherited about insects that chopped wood, heated a bathhouse, about smart pigs and many others.

Relate this genre with children began only by the end of the XVIII century. For the first time, jokes were published in the “Notes of the Fatherland” by the folklorist Avdeeva. She did not separate them from lullabies, although she pointed out that such works were not always sung, but were often recited by nannies.

Contents

So, jokes are another mechanism for the development of a child's intellect, which manifests itself in the early stages of life in a rich imagination. That is why children's songs are richly saturated with a fantastic element. In jokes, a cat sews a fly, ducks play pipes, and a cockroach, despite its small size, is quite capable of lifting an ax and chopping wood. The most striking example of such strange content is the song “The fish danced with cancer”. In this joke, the general bacchanalia affects the inhabitants of the rivers (the fish and crayfish mentioned above), vegetables (onions, garlic, parsley) and even people. The only one left without a pair was a carrot that couldn't dance… The picture looks pretty surreal, doesn't it?

Jokes are characterized by repetition so that the child remembers the information better. So, the last line of the saying “Water does not pour fire” is repeated nine times, the one in front of it is eight, and so on in descending order. Welland, of course, jokes (this is the main condition for their content) should have an aesthetic impact, bring joy to the child. Such a goal is achieved by the artistic merits of the texts themselves - vivid metaphors, sound writing, richness of rhymes.

Features

The semantic content of jokes determined their artistic specificity. They have an extremely uncomplicated, even primitive plot, which is rapidly developing and covers a limited circle of actors. In addition, he tends to repeat himself in the jokes of various peoples. For example, the English song about the old woman who settled in a shoe is quite famous. Grandmother was strict: she had many children, whom she fed soup without bread, beat, and so that they would not be too indignant, she sent them to bed early. An almost similar joke was recorded from the lips of an illiterate peasant woman who lived in the Vologda province. True, in the Russian version, the old woman had already become kinder and more generous: she did not allow herself to be beaten, and porridge with butter was added to the first course (shchi).

For jokes, the use of constant verbal formulas with "once upon a time" and "in a certain kingdom" is typical. The language of these works is uncomplicated, the syntax is simple and clear. The features of joke songs also include the already mentioned repetitions, sound writing (alliteration), an adjacent rhyming system.

Classification

Russian jokes are very heterogeneous in nature. Among them there are humorous sayings,describing animals, insects that are engaged in human affairs. An example of this is the joke about a cat in a basket sewing shirts while the cat is “pushing crackers on the stove.”

It is necessary to distinguish from them songs that were performed by adults for children. They are also called cumulative, that is, built on the repetition of various motives, images. An example of such song sayings is “I lived with a pan”, “The widow had eight daughters” and many others.

The "ancestor" of jokes-dialogues is called game conspiracies, which began to be considered part of children's folklore only in the first half of the twentieth century. Their examples are songs-conversations about horses that went into the forest, bulls that drank water, etc. A separate group includes children's jokes, devoid of comic effect. The latter include appeals like “our daughter is at home, like pancakes in honey.”

Jokies and other minor genres

Rarely there are jokes-parables. Such a genre designation is generally debatable, and some researchers prefer to call them children's jokes. But this is not entirely correct. Unlike a joke, jokes-parables are a kind of lesson in morality, which is embodied in an entertaining form. A vivid example of this is the saying about Titus, who did not want to thresh, but could not refuse porridge and tried to find his big spoon. When the child tries to do something hastily, somehow, he is reminded: “He knocked down, knocked together - here is the wheel! I sat down and went … Well, what happens after such a trip is known to everyone - an accident and a breakdown of the transportfunds.

But the boast of the child should be answered with a witty dialogue with Vanya, who caught the bear, but cannot move away from him, as the nasty animal "does not let go." The anecdote has no such moralizing, instructive component. By its nature, it is a prosaic genre; the poetic organization of the text of jokes is alien to it. So the allocation of the last digit is quite legitimate.

Russian folk jokes can contaminate (combine) with other small genres. This is a very common occurrence in folklore. So, there are rhymes-jokes, preserved thanks to Dahl. They are well suited for active games, when the process of choosing who will drive can be a pleasure in itself. Riddles and jokes are also not uncommon, telling about the Vorotynsky pillar, which no one blows, including the king and queen. By the way, the answer to this puzzle is extremely simple - a tomb sign.

Jokes and lullabies

Children's sayings can also be correlated with lullabies, from which they borrowed a figurative system. That is why the main characters of jokes are often cats, chickens, lambs and other animals. Especially often there are children's songs in which two characters participate - a goat with bast eyes and a magpie. The latter is interested in where she was, and the answer is a phrase like “herded the foals that went into the forest / went downhill”, that is, they got lost.

Such jokes can be heard even today. And this is their special charm. After all, to thatwhat the people have been creating for centuries, the fate is destined to exist forever, not to lose relevance, some novelty for future generations.