Children's folklore is a separate system of oral folk art with its genre components inherent only in it - cradles, teasers, jokes. Everyone knows about the existence of the latter, even people who are absolutely far from studying texts or raising children. Most likely, many will immediately recall the tales of the magpie-raven, the horned goat (although just these, apparently, should be attributed to a different genre - nurseries). Confusion has long existed in folklore. Anything was included in the jokes, including tongue twisters, teasers, shifters. However, literary scholars are now trying to avoid such mistakes, so the genre of jokes is well defined. Its specifics will be discussed in the article.
Genre Definition
Jokes are small stories of a humorous nature that amuse the baby with its content or rhythmic organization. They have a fairly straightforward plot, can be performed in both prosaic and poetic form.
A place in children's folklore
Songs of jokes should be distinguished from petals and nursery rhymes, which are addressed to very young children and are accompanied by simple physical exercise, massage. Miniature texts, consisting of one sentence, made it possible to establish contact between an adult and a child, to cheer up even the most capricious baby. Jokes - it's a little different. They are also aimed at achieving a similar result, but are intended for a more adult audience, when the child can not only recognize the appeal to himself, but also somehow respond to it. By the end of the “lullaby” period (age 2–5 years), the child has a sufficient vocabulary in order to perceive the word game, puns on the semantic level.
Through such sayings, a little man learns the world in which he has to live. The necessary philosophical categories, social problems can fit in a simple, sometimes primitive form. Even the most banal jokes (for example, “Goat for bastards”) give an idea of the lifestyle of the family life, the division of labor between husband and wife. And then the child becomes aware that the forest is full of dangers, the wolf lies in wait for the goat, but the beast himself is afraid of the archer - ambivalence that is universal!
The specifics of life
Children's jokes are often improvised, so there are no special instructions on how to perform them - in chorus or alone. Moreover, the age of the speakers does not matter. Children themselves can write texts with pleasure, and then voice them.
Origin
Russian folk jokes go back to “modest” songs, game sentences, performed in a dialogical form:
- goat, goat,
Where was
“The guards of the horses ... etc.
Various buffets about insects that chopped wood, drowned a bath, about smart pigs and many others were inherited from buffoons.
Relate this genre to children only began at the end of the 18th century. The first jokes were published in the "Domestic Notes" by the folklorist Avdeeva. She did not separate them from lullabies, although she indicated that such works were not always sung, but were often told by nannies.
Content
So, jokes - this is another mechanism for the development of the intellect of a child, which manifests itself in the early stages of life in a rich imagination. That is why children's songs are richly saturated with a fantastic element. In jokes, a cat sews a fly, ducks play pipes, and a cockroach, despite its small size, is quite capable of raising an ax and chopping wood. The most striking example of such a strange content - the song "Danced fish with cancer." In this joke, universal bacchanalia affects the inhabitants of the rivers (the fish and cancer mentioned above), vegetables (onions, garlic, parsley) and even people. The only carrot left without a couple who could not dance ... The picture is quite surreal, isn't it?
For jokes, repetition is characteristic, so that the child better remembers the information. So, the last line of the saying “Water will not go pour fire” is repeated nine times, the one in front of it is eight, and so on in descending order. Well, of course, jokes (this is the main condition for their maintenance) should have an aesthetic effect, bring joy to the child. Such a goal is achieved by the artistic merits of the texts themselves - vivid metaphors, sound recordings, and rich rhymes.
Features
The semantic content of the jokes determined their artistic specificity. They have an extremely straightforward, even primitive plot, which is rapidly developing and covering a limited circle of actors. Moreover, he is inclined to repeat himself in jokes of various nations. For example, the English song about an old woman who settled in a shoe is quite famous. The grandmother was strict: she had many children whom she fed with soup without bread, beat, and so that they would not be too indignant, she sent them to bed early. Almost a similar joke was recorded from the lips of an illiterate peasant woman who lived in the Vologda province. True, in the Russian version the old woman had already grown up and was generous: she didn’t allow herself to be assaulted, and porridge with butter was added to the first dish (s).
For jokes, the use of constant verbal formulas with “lived-were” and “in a certain kingdom” is characteristic. The language of these works is straightforward, the syntax is simple and clear. The features of jokes also include the already mentioned repetitions, sound recording (alliteration), and the adjacent rhyming system.
Classification
Russian jokes are very heterogeneous in nature. Among them there are humorous sayings describing animals, insects, which are engaged in human affairs. An example of this is a joke about a cat in a basket, which sews shirts, while the cat "rumbles about on the stove."
From them it is necessary to distinguish songs that were performed by adults for children. They are also called cumulative, that is, built on the repetition of various motifs, images. An example of such song sayings is “I lived at the pan”, “The widow had eight daughters” and many others.
The “ancestor” of jokes-dialogs is called game conspiracies, which began to be considered part of children's folklore only in the first half of the twentieth century. Their examples are songs-conversations about horses that went to the forest, bulls who drank water, etc. A separate group includes children's jokes that are devoid of a comic effect. The latter include treatment like "our daughter in the house, that pancakes in honey."
Jokes and other minor genres
Less common parables. Such a genre designation is generally controversial, and some researchers prefer to call them children's jokes. But this is not entirely correct. Unlike the joke, parables are a lesson in morality, which is embodied in an entertaining way. A clear example is the saying about Titus, who did not want to thresh, but could not refuse porridge and tried to find his big spoon. When a child tries to do something in a hurry, somehow, they remind him: “I knocked it down, put it together - this is the wheel! He sat down and went ... "Well, what happens after such a trip is known to everyone - an accident and a vehicle breakdown.
But the child’s boasting should be answered with a witty dialogue with Vanya, who caught the bear, but he can’t move away from him, as the ugly animal “doesn’t let go”. The joke is deprived of such a moralizing, instructive component. By its nature, it is a prosaic genre; the poetic organization of the text of jokes is alien to it. So the allocation of the last discharge is quite legitimate.
Russian folk jokes can contaminate (connect) with other small genres. This is a very common phenomenon for folklore. So, there are counters-jokes preserved thanks to Dahl. They are well suited for active games, when in itself the process of choosing who will drive is able to give pleasure. Jigsaw puzzles telling about the Vorotinsky pillar, which nobody blows, including the tsar and the tsarina, are also frequent. By the way, the solution to this puzzle is extremely simple - a gravestone.
Jokes and lullabies
Children's sayings can also be correlated with lullabies, from which they borrowed a figurative system. That's why the main characters of the jokes are often cats, chickens, lamb and other animals. Especially often there are children's songs in which two actors participate - a goat with bast eyes and a magpie. The latter is interested in where she was, and the answer is a phrase like “grazing foals that went into the forest / went downhill”, that is, they were lost.
Such jokes can be heard even today. And this is their special charm. After all, what the people created over the centuries, destined to exist forever, not to lose relevance, some kind of novelty for future generations.