Are the jokes over?

Who and what can we laugh at? Is it still possible to draw a thick line through satire? How long do memes live?

Olga Drenda brings a sense of humour to her anthropological workshop. In this brilliant essay, she examines the various facets and contexts of humour, irony, abstraction and nonsense - from the Aesopian language of the communist era to the works of the cabaret scene, the language of advertising at the beginning of the Polsih transformation of the 1990s, stand-up, the memosphere and censorship.

Drenda reflects on the relationship between humour and politics, because when things are cheerful all around, it is easy to turn a blind eye to the fact that a joke about an extremist has suddenly become an extremist's joke. She also shows that laughter can build a sense of solidarity and that a lame joke can sometimes be reassuring.