«Is a communist an optimist?» measuring "cheerful­ness" of the society (on the example of content- analysis of the Soviet Ukraine political humour)

The problem of the negativation of public discourse on the example of the Soviet political humour is considered in the essay. The solution of the problem allows to determine to what extent the image of reality in the public con­sciousness of the Soviet society was positive. An attempt to trace the transformation of that image during the Soviet period is undertaken and the representation of the crisis and its scale in the Soviet humour are analyzed. The problem of the differences between formal and informal public discourse is posed. The study of social consciousness is possi­ble due to the discourse-analysis of the texts circulating in the Soviet society. The author analyzes the humorous texts of the journal «Peretz» («Pepper») and the Soviet political anecdotes. The analysis was done by the method of con­tent-analysis using DBMS MS Access. Two databases (DB) called «The Soviet political anecdotes» and «The texts of the journal "Peretz"» were created. The Soviet political anecdotes and the «Peretz» texts were formalized on simi­lar criteria; therefore the database models were built on the same principles. The databases include tables, devoted to the humorous texts, their characters and problematics. The author concludes that the official humorous discourse was more pessimistic whereas the informal discourse became more comical. In general, the most optimistic reality was presented in the texts of the 1970s, and the number of negative characters and problematics with negative valence increased after the 1970s both in official and unofficial humour. Moreover, the official media sent the signals about system crisis to the public expanding the scale of the described problems. That trend was caused by the influence of an informal humorous discourse.