Linguistic analysis of the Russian political anecdote during the 21st century: change of the genre?

An analysis was made of the personal and non-personal post-Soviet political anecdotes. It is argued that post-Soviet political anecdotes have been created during 2000–2019. The starting point is that the Russian word анекдот carries particular, cultural information and does not have a systematic equivalent in Swedish ot English, i.e. it can not be directly translated to English as anecdote or joke or to Swedish as anekdot, skämt, or vits. This was demonstrated in a brief comparison with Swedish jokes and anecdotes. Using three text corpora with a total of 3,170 political anecdotes, I examined: (a) how events and politicians are described and how this can be decoded (corpus 1 and 3); (b) what topics are most common (corpus 2 and 3). A more in-depth analysis of cultural references, pragmatics, semantics and deixis was made of 33 selected anecdotes, which were considered to be representative for the genre. The analysis showed that the thematics tend to be recurring, that few new anecdotes are added, old anecdotes are repeated and that the genre has undergone considerable changes during the past two decades. Such a change is the abscense of post-Soviet anecdotes with significant critique against politicians or sensitive political topics, as compared to earlier anecdotes, and a simplification of the genre. This development is a possible result of that anecdotes are no longer told as often as during previous decades, as well as the new Russian law § 282 implemented as of spring 2019, which affects the creation and distribution of anecdotes. By extrapolation, the observed changes could lead to parts of the most common anecdotes becoming tematic jokes in the future.