Cultural wars in Polish political humor

This chapter focuses on the rich tradition of political humor in Poland. The aim of the chapter is to point out how Polish culture, in the broad sense of the term, is reflected in different genres of political humor. The discussion and examples will concern the sources of political humor, including religion, class system, literary tradition, art, film, and popular culture in general. A distinct source of humor is socio-political polarization that currently takes the shape of conservative and liberal sides of the political debate, but the opposing sides of the political scene used to vary over the course of history of Poland, with the main vectors remaining similar (e.g. traditional, patriarchal/progressive, Christian/atheist, patriotic-nationalist/cosmopolitan, Polish/Western, Polish/Russian-Soviet, communist/anti-communist, and generally high/low stature), and it is these that have inspired political humor. In recent decades new genres have appeared, forcing a change of style, although rhetorical techniques have remained largely the same-irony, parody, allusion, or intertextuality have prevailed. We will draw on the Discourse Humor Theory to analyze particular instances of humor in the public sphere.