“‘Our Schmuck’: Russian Folklore about American Elections”, 2020-10-01 ():
Throughout the course of the 2016 US presidential election, hundreds of jokes dealing with the topic appeared on the English-speaking internet.
While Russian folklore could have simply exploited translations of existing American texts, representing Trump as incompetent, a statistical and semantic analysis of the corpus of jokes that appeared on Russian social media during the 2 weeks following the election shows that a different type of joke, one juxtaposing the election systems in the United States and Russia, was much more popular.
Yet 70% of the reposts of the jokes suggested an unrelated base meaning—the idea that Russia and the United States exist in a state of constant competition, trying to influence each other’s internal and international policies.
For the audience that opposes the Russian president and the loyalist mass media, “Trumplore” becomes a way to laugh not at the American president-elect, but at Russia’s own administration.