This article examines the interplay between humour, science and pandemics in culture. Asking what comic scenarios of infectious diseases look like in different media, the article focuses on comic zombiism in film, clown viruses in comics and COVID-19 jokes on the internet. What can we learn from comic zombies and the Joker – the clown prince of crime in the DC Universe – about infectious diseases? What do viral jokes about pandemics in popular communication (COVID-19 memes in particular) that explicitly refer to these pop cultural phenomena teach us about our understanding of the spread of diseases? And in what way is the spread of humour comparable to the spread of viruses? Exploring these questions, this article investigates the ways humorous interpretations of infectious diseases shape, cultivate and reinforce cultural meanings of diseases and science.

The paper discusses Belarusian couples’ reflections on the role of humorous folklore in their daily family interactions. The interviewees generally regarded being humorous as a positive feature and identified (explicitly or implicitly) several functions of humor, such as framing group boundaries, offering criticism, and sharing ideas that would otherwise be difficult to communicate. A recurring distinction evoked by respondents was between “good” (benevolent) and “bad” (offensive) humor. However, interviews also revealed that the actual perception of humor, especially in the form of mocking and teasing, can be very context-specific, and the boundary between aggression and playfulness is not always clear-cut. The paper explores this ambiguity by examining self-reported instances of mocking and teasing, whereupon the producer and the recipient of humor need to resolve the tension between “having a good sense of humor” and using humor in an offensive or aggressive way. The couples’ attitudes towards family humor are discussed within the broader context of the value of humor in modern society. The paper also reflects on the limitations of using the interview as a data collection method for studying family humor.

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 This study returns to earlier findings of Estonian (Laineste 2005(Laineste , 2009 and Belarusian (Astapova 2015;Zhvaleuskaya 2013Zhvaleuskaya , 2015 ethnic jokes and takes a look at new trends in fresh data. Starting with the jokes from the end of the 19th century and ending with the most recent jokes, memes and other humorous items shared over the Internet, the paper will give an overview of how social reality interacts with the rules of target choice, above all describing the effect of globalisation on jokelore.

This paper offers a folkloristic perspective on the features and dynamics of sharing humorous content digitally within a family in the context of daily communication. The data, collected from 60 Belarusian families via oral interviews and an online survey (175 respondents), were subjected to quantitative and qualitative content and context analysis. The results suggest that sharing humour digitally within a family can take various forms, some of which parallel oral face-to-face interactions, while others complement them. The most preferable ways of sharing are those that ensure the privacy of conversation, thus providing family members with an opportunity to follow the customary patterns of communication while adapting them to the new spatiotemporal circumstances. Even though the process of selecting humorous content to share with one’s family does not necessarily involve conscious reflection on the sharer’s part, some tendencies clearly transpire from the data. For example, visual and generic forms of humour are more popular than textual and personal ones. Sharing such humour presupposes certain considerations about its recipients, thus making the fact that one’s audience is their family an important consideration in the practice of digital sharing.

This paper is a study of Belarusian humorous folklore revolving around cooking. It examines two different types of folklore text: jokes collected on the internet, and humorous anecdotes in family lore about cooking, the latter collected through fieldwork. By comparing the two kinds of humour, the paper investigates to what extent the values and attitudes manifest in my interviews mirror those found in internet jokes. The research shows that while there can be some parallels between the two types of humour, their forms, topics, and functions differ greatly and reflect separate aspects of Belarusian foodlore.