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The paper addresses a well-documented genre of Russian canned jokes from a sociopragmatic perspective. The goal of the paper is twofold: firstly, it aims at examining a relatively new phenomenon of telling jokes in public political discourse. Secondly, it argues that jokesa typical example of a non-bona fide genrecan nevertheless be used to convey bona fide messages. As a specific sphere of communication public political discourse incorporates official interaction of professional politicians as well as publicly expressed attitudes of ordinary people. Because jokes capture our experience and reflect ongoing social processes, modern Russian political discourse in many of its forms eagerly employs the genre. But, whenever a joke is used in the official political communication, we face the discrepancy between the premise of the bona fide mode of political discourse and non-seriousness of jokes. On the surface telling jokes in political discourse might seem to be a temporal switch from the bona fide to the non-bona fide mode of communication. However, the content of canned jokes told by politicians reveals deep social implications: for instance, Vladimir Putin's frequent references to Soviet realia are signs of superiority and control over the situation. Jokes told by Putin's opponents, on the one hand, reveal disappointment; on the other, they are part of the struggle for power. Telling jokes in public political discourse shows that the borderline between two modes of communicationbona fide and non-bona fideis fuzzy since jokes transmit serious messages for the participants of political communication.Keywords: canned jokes, public discourse, political discourse, bona fide mode of communication, non-bona fide mode of communication. Canned jokes as a genre of non-bona fide communicationThe urge to tell jokes seems to be deeply implanted in humans. To most people jokes are funny stories told with the purpose of entertainment; to humour researchers they are tokens of the genre that captures basic stereotypes of our social behavior: important social practices and relations regularly become the targets of jokes. According to Ritchie (2012: 34), jokes have

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Editorial: Humour in Eastern European countries

Abstract The paper discusses metapragmatic assessment of verbal irony by speakers of Russian and American English. The research combines ideas from metapragmatics, folk linguistics and corpus linguistics. Empirical data are drawn from the Russian National Corpus (RNC), the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Spontaneous evaluation of linguistic behavior is an important function of both explicit and implicit metapragmatic uses of language. Distributional adjectival patterns of the Russian word ирония and English irony are treated as implicit indicators of folk metapragmatic awareness. Connotations of the adjectives reflect our everyday linguistic practices and contribute to the vagueness of the notion and the definition of irony in scholarly theorizing.