The Death of Jokes? The Shifting Landscape of Humor in Postsocialist Hungary, public lecture by Martha Lampland, University of California

Since 1989, commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have mourned the death of jokes in  postsocialist societies.  The lament is spurious.  Jokes have not gone away, but the everyday experience of sharing jokes as a public form of political criticism has indeed fallen by the by in Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe and Russia.  Since jokes had been at the heart of political criticism in everyday life, it wasn’t obvious why they would have vanished merely with the demise of the Communist party/state.  After all, new governments had the potential to be as incompetent and power-hungry as the Communists before them, and in the decades since have proceeded to live up to these expectations.  We argue that a series of important shifts in the way Hungarians work, socialize, communicate, and engage in politics has lead them to be far more circumspect in sharing political humor publicly than in the past.  

Martha Lampland is Associate Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego.  Her specialties include political economy, science studies, feminist theory, and cultural history (Hungary, Central Europe, 19th-20th c).  Her research focuses on the social sciences as science, specifically in relation to economics, commodification and state formation in both capitalist and socialist societies.  Professor Lampland has published and co-edited several books: The Object of Labor. Commodification in Socialist Hungary (University of Chicago Press, 1995); Altering States.  Ethnographies of the Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, co-edited with Daphne Berdahl and Matti Bunzl (University of Michigan Press, 2000); and Standards and their Stories. How Quantifying, Classifying and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life, co-edited with Susan Leigh Star (Cornell University Press, 2009).   She has published articles on the role of numbers in formalizing practices; theories of instinct and class formation in the 1930s and 1950s in Hungary; state planning and the transition to socialism in the 1940s; women’s labor in socialism; the role of agrarian elites in Hungary’s decollectivization; gender and the nation in 19th c. Hungary; and historical consciousness, revolution, and poetry (1848-1956).  She has just finished a book on agrarian work science and the development of socialist wages during the transition to Stalinism (1920-1956), entitled The Value of Labor. The Science of Commodification.  Professor Lampland is a past editor of the Journal of Historical Sociology, and has served on the Academic Advisory Council for the Eastern European Studies Program at the Wilson Center.  She is currently a board member of the National Council on Eurasian and East European Research.