Displays of “new” gender arrangements in Russian jokes

Jokes can reflect dominant and changing gender norms as well as arrangements active in a speech community. Analyses of Russian jokes from the Soviet era have so far revealed a male, and often also misogynist, perspective and a jocular perpetuation of gender norms and arrangements of rural Russia (cf. Draitser 1999). Up-to-date jokes posted on the Russian internet analysed in this paper testify to new tendencies in humorous doing gender, i.e. gender displays in humour, notably in jokes. The GTVH is applied in order to describe the innovative features of these new jokes and to compare them with the traditionally gendered ones. The analysis at the same time serves as a check of the GTVH, developed as a linguistic tool to capture joke (dis)similarity. It is thereby shown that not all differences in gender displays can be detected and described in terms of the GTVH.