The Joke Is on You: Humor, Resistance through Culture, and Paradoxical Forms of Dissent in Communist Romania

Abstrakt

The author of the article focuses on showing that resistance through culture is part of a social and political dynamic that is complicated and paradoxical. He claims that a discursive analysis of power relationships and of the rapport between the private and official idioms in the political context of communist totalitarian societies can evince the daunting complexity of some forms of resistance-through-culture discourse. The author argues that with the appropriate critical instruments, cultural discourse analysis can broach the intricacies and paradoxes of power relationships in oppressive environments and can ground a more accurate and unprejudiced moral evaluation of resistance through culture as a phenomenon typical of totalitarian cultural politics.