When the Moral Mentors Lapse: A Comparative Study of Estonian and Belarusian Clergy Jokes

Abstract

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 respective political, cultural, and ideological mainstreams. We claim that the jokes highlight the incongruity between the normative and the real world order. We position our interdisciplinary study within Christie Davies’s models of joke target choice. Davies’s aim was to produce a theory that could be applied to different corpora of jokes throughout times and cultures. Testing the theory against our data shows that it has wider implications and a high potential for analysing various forms and targets of humorous folklore from a comparative and historical perspective.