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Romanian humour, like many other Romanian cultural aspects, has many affinities with four other groups: the Latins (namely the French and Italians), the Balkan people (Greeks, the Slavs, and Turks), the Germans and the Hungarians.
The earliest Romanian character found in anecdotes is Păcală.[ citation needed ] His name is derived from a (se) păcăli ('to fool oneself/somebody') and, since this word cannot be found in any other related language, we can safely assume that his name is part of the pure Romanian humour.
The Ottoman influence brought the Balkan spirit and with it, other characters and situations. Anton Pann's character, Nastratin Hogea, is a classic example of an urban tradesman. As Jewish people settled in many Romanian regions, two other characters joined Romanian humour: Iţic and Ştrul, a pair of cunning Jews, mainly seen as ingenious, but avaricious shopkeepers.
With modernization and urbanization, especially during the Communist regime, Romanians needed a new character, different from the traditional Păcală, and he was found in Bulă, the tragicomic absolute idiot. In 2006 Bulă was voted the 59th greatest Romanian.
With the fall of communism and facing capitalism, a new kind of joke became popular: that of Alinuţa, a sadistic and stupid 10-year-old girl. Example: Alinuţa: "Mum, I don't like grandma." Mum: "Shut up, we eat what we have!"
Other popular characters are Ion and Maria, a pair of young married or engaged innocent peasants, sometimes depicted as gypsies. Almost all jokes including them are sexually oriented. Another well-known character is Badea Gheorghe, mainly depicted as an old shepherd with a very simplistic view of life, death and material possessions. The newest character is Dorel, the archetype of a careless construction worker, engineer or electrician. Originally the name of a clumsy and ill-experienced worker from a series of TV adverts, Dorel is often depicted as the sole author of weird construction works as door-less balconies or even stairs leading to nowhere or as the cause of blunders leading to comic incidents.
Especially during the communist regime, political jokes were very popular, although they were illegal and dangerous to tell. [1] In the democratic Romania, these jokes are still popular, although the themes changed: now the politicians are seen either, as hopelessly corrupt, greedy, or as nationalist madmen.
As Ben Lewis put it in his essay, [2] "Communism was a humor-producing machine. Its economic theories and system of repression created inherently funny situations. There were jokes under fascism and Nazism too, but those systems did not create an absurd, laugh-a-minute reality like communism."
Radio Yerevan : just like in the most countries of the former Eastern bloc, Radio Yerevan jokes were popular during the communist times.
Ion Iliescu is a Romanian politician and engineer who served as President of Romania from 1989 until 1996 and from 2000 until 2004. Between 1996 and 2000 and also from 2004 to 2008, the year in which he retired, Iliescu was a senator for the Social Democratic Party (PSD), of which he is the founder and honorary president to this day.
After the Communist rulership ended and the former Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was executed in the midst of the bloody Romanian Revolution of December 1989, the National Salvation Front (FSN) seized power, led by Ion Iliescu. The FSN transformed itself into a massive political party in short time and overwhelmingly won the general election of May 1990, with Iliescu as president. These first months of 1990 were marked by violent protests and counter-protests, involving most notably the tremendously violent and brutal coal miners of the Jiu Valley which were called by Iliescu himself and the FSN to crush peaceful protesters in the University Square in Bucharest.
Făt-Frumos is a knight hero in Romanian folklore, usually present in fairy tales.
Presidential elections were held in Russia on 16 June 1996, with a second round being held on 3 July. It resulted in a victory for the incumbent President of Russia Boris Yeltsin, who ran as an independent politician. Yeltsin defeated Communist challenger Gennady Zyuganov in the run-off, receiving 54.4% of the vote. Yeltsin's second inauguration ceremony took place on 9 August.
Eugen Barbu was a Romanian modern novelist, short story writer, journalist, and correspondent member of the Romanian Academy. The latter position was vehemently criticized by those who contended that he plagiarized in his novel Incognito and for the anti-Semitic campaigns he initiated in the newspapers Săptămâna and România Mare which he founded and led. He also founded, alongside his disciple Corneliu Vadim Tudor, the nationalist Greater Romania Party (PRM).
The Romanian revolution, also known as the Christmas Revolution, was a period of violent civil unrest in Romania during December 1989 as a part of the revolutions of 1989 that occurred in several countries around the world, including the countries in Eastern Europe, before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Romanian revolution started in the city of Timișoara and soon spread throughout the country, ultimately culminating in the drumhead trial and execution of longtime Romanian Communist Party (PCR) General Secretary Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena, and the end of 42 years of Communist rule in Romania. It was also the last removal of a Marxist–Leninist government in a Warsaw Pact country during the events of 1989, and the only one that violently overthrew a country's leadership and executed its leader; according to estimates, over one thousand people died and thousands more were injured.
Russian jokes are short fictional stories or dialogs with a punch line, which commonly appear in Russian humor. Russian joke culture includes a series of categories with fixed settings and characters. Russian jokes treat topics found everywhere in the world, including sex, politics, spousal relations, or mothers-in-law. This article discusses Russian joke subjects that are particular to Russian or Soviet culture.
The mineriads were a series of protests and often violent altercations by Jiu Valley miners in Bucharest during the 1990s, particularly 1990–91. The term "mineriad" is also used to refer to the most significant and violent of these encounters, which occurred June 13–15, 1990. During the 1990s, the Jiu Valley miners played a visible role in Romanian politics, and their protests reflected inter-political and societal struggles after the Romanian Revolution.
Little Johnny jokes are about a small boy who naively poses questions and makes statements that are very embarrassing to his "grownup" listeners, and has a very straightforward way of thinking. At times he is well educated in the terminology of sex, while at others he is all too innocent. The jokes may also include a female counterpart, typically named Susie.
The Radio Yerevan jokes, also known as the Armenian Radio jokes, have been popular in the Soviet Union and other countries of the former Communist Eastern bloc since the second half of the 20th century. These jokes of the Q&A type pretended to come from the Question & Answer series of the Armenian Radio. A typical format of a joke was: "Radio Yerevan was asked," and "Radio Yerevan answered."
The National Salvation Front was the most important political organization formed during the Romanian Revolution in December 1989, which became the governing body of Romania in the first weeks after the collapse of the totalitarian communist regime. It subsequently became a political party, the largest post-communist party, and won the 1990 election with 66% of the national vote, under the leadership of then-President Ion Iliescu, who was elected with 85% of the vote.
Vladimir Tismăneanu is a Romanian American political scientist, political analyst, sociologist, and professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. A specialist in political systems and comparative politics, he is director of the University of Maryland's Center for the Study of Post-Communist Societies, having served as chairman of the editorial committee (2004–2008) and editor (1998–2004) of the East European Politics and Societies academic review. Over the years, Tismăneanu has been a contributor to several periodicals, including Studia Politica, Journal of Democracy, Sfera Politicii, Revista 22, Evenimentul Zilei, Idei în Dialog and Cotidianul. He has also worked with the international radio stations Radio Free Europe and Deutsche Welle, and authored programs for the Romanian Television Company. As of 2009, he is Academic Council Chairman of the Institute for People's Studies, a think tank of the Romanian Democratic Liberal Party. Between February 2010 and May 2012, he was also President of the Scientific Council of the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania.
In 2006, Romanian Television conducted a vote to determine whom the general public considered the 100 Greatest Romanians of all time, in a version of the British TV show 100 Greatest Britons. The resulting series, Great Romanians, included individual programmes on the top ten, with viewers having further opportunities to vote after each programme. It concluded with a debate. On 21 October, TVR announced that the "greatest Romanian of all time" according to the voting was Stephen the Great.
Russian political jokes are a part of Russian humour and can be grouped into the major time periods: Imperial Russia, Soviet Union and finally post-Soviet Russia. In the Soviet period political jokes were a form of social protest, mocking and criticising leaders, the system and its ideology, myths and rites. Quite a few political themes can be found among other standard categories of Russian joke, most notably Rabinovich jokes and Radio Yerevan.
Grigore Preoteasa was a Romanian communist activist, journalist and politician, who served as Communist Romania's Minister of Foreign Affairs between October 4, 1955, and the time of his death.
The events in Poland which led to the elimination of that country's Stalinist leadership and the rise to power of Władysław Gomułka on 19 October 1956 provoked unrest among university students in Eastern bloc countries. The state of unrest in Communist Poland began to spread into Hungary. As early as 16 October 1956, students from Szeged left the Communist-created students' union (DISZ), re-establishing the MEFESZ, a democratic organisation that the regime of Mátyás Rákosi had suppressed. Within a few days, students from Pécs, Miskolc, and Sopron had done likewise. On 22 October 1956, students from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics compiled a list of sixteen points containing key national policy demands. When they found out about the intention of the Hungarian Writers' Union to express its solidarity with Poland by placing a crown near the statue of Polish general Józef Bem, a hero of the Hungarian revolution of 1848–49, the students decided to organise a parallel demonstration in support of the Poles. At the protest on the afternoon of 23 October 1956, the students read their proclamation, an act that marked the beginning of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
The Union of Communist Youth was the Romanian Communist Party's youth organisation. Like many Young Communist organisations, it was modelled after the Soviet Komsomol. It aimed to cultivate young cadres into the party, as well as to help create the "new man" envisioned by communist ideologues.
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was a Soviet and Russian politician who served as the first president of Russia from 1991 to 1999. He was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1961 to 1990. He later stood as a political independent, during which time he was viewed as being ideologically aligned with liberalism and Russian nationalism.
Păcală is a fictional character in Romanian folklore, literature and humor. Primarily associated with Transylvania and Oltenia, he is depicted as a native of Vaideeni, located in an area of contact between those two regions. An irreverent young man, seemingly a peasant, he reserves contempt and irony for the village authorities, but often plays the fool, or displays an erratic and criminal behavior that scholars attribute to the eclecticism of sources weaved into the narrative. Păcală seems to be at least partly modeled on other characters in European folklore, in particular Giufà and Till Eulenspiegel. He may therefore be borrowed from Western chapbooks, with scholar Traian Bratu hypothesizing that Romanians were introduced to the Eulenspiegel anecdotes by their prolonged contact with the Transylvanian Saxons. The stories were then adapted and, in at least some cases, substantially modified, for instance by the addition of a native mythological layer, and by the appearance of a sidekick, the more slow-witted Tândală.
September 1991 Mineriad was a political action and physical confrontation between the miners of the Jiu Valley and the Romanian authorities, that led to the resignation of Prime Minister Petre Roman's government. Led by Miron Cozma, president of the Jiu Valley Coal Miners Union, the miners engaged in a series of actions beginning in the 1990s referred to as "mineriads" whereby large numbers of miners traveled to the Romanian capital of Bucharest and engaged in demonstrations and sometimes violent confrontations against counter-demonstrators and government authorities.
