doi:10.7592/FEJF2013.53.astapova http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol53/astapova.pdf TO WHAT EXTENT ARE JOKES REACTIONAL? (BASED ON A JOKE CYCLE ABOUT YURY LUZHKOV’S DISMISSAL) Anastasiya Astapova Abstract: The article concentrates on jokes that appeared immediately after the dismissal of Yury Luzhkov, Mayor of Moscow, in 2010. As soon as he was ired after eighteen years in the same position of mayor, the Internet was looded with jokes about his dismissal as well as numerous discussions on internet forums and blogs. I collected the jokes as well as opinions from the discussions, categorised them by their themes, and tried to understand how these two phenomena (jokes and discussions on the Internet) correlate with each other, in order to understand whether the axiom that folklore is a mirror of society is true. Keywords: Yury Luzhkov, (internet) humour, topical jokes, political jokes, re- lection of social life in folklore It seems to be true that whenever something important happens in the world around us, it is immediately manifested in folklore. One of the most ’respon- sive’ genres of folklore is obviously jokes. No wonder that in the 1980s several folklorists turned to the study of such relections in jokes. For example, some articles concentrated on the jokes that appeared immediately after the disaster of the space shuttle Challenger (Simons 1986; Smyth 1986; Oring 1987). Contemporary scholarship acknowledges such ’reactional’ jokes; for instance, Liisi Laineste focuses on what she calls topical jokes from the point of view of their cognitive function. She takes into consideration mainly the jokes about the terrorist attack in the USA in September 2001, and mass alcohol poisoning in Estonia (Laineste 2008). Similar topics are discussed by Alexandra Arkh- ipova in her articles dedicated to the jokes about Vladimir Putin, including those which appeared as a reaction to the so-called ’Snow Revolution’ in winter 2011–2012 (Arkhipova 2009, 2012). Unlike the aforesaid authors, she uses statistical methods for the analysis of the topical jokes and makes a conclusion about the popularity of the new form of the joke that parodies speech genres. Nevertheless, many topical joke cycles have been neglected by scholars and forgotten by joke tellers. It would thus be of great interest to learn about how