«Children’s» Jokes as a Means and a Way to Maintain the Collective Identity of NativeLanguage Speakers within a Culture

Abstract

The article is devoted to the description of the functional potential of one of the ways of socialization of native language speakers within a culture, namely «children’s» jokes in the German culture. These types of text are characterized by obvious cultural specifics, objectified not so much through the environment of functioning and the implementation of the corresponding functions by various means and methods, but through their main characters. The focus of the analysis is on Fritzchen, who, due to his obvious cultural specificity, is interpreted as a cultural hero (in Geert Hofstede’s terms). Therefore, the situations in which Fritzchen’s actions are narrated in official and unofficial communication and his reactions to the environment and his actions are analyzed as a way of communicating social norms to a collective subject, as a way of reproducing social standards in a culture which functions «on the contrary», as a means of maintaining cultural continuity and cultural identity in synchrony and diachrony. For this reason, the character qualities attributed to Fritzchen in the “children’s” jokes are interpreted as components of the collective identity of a collective subject, relating to the nuclear part of the collective identity of both individual and collective subjects who speak the German language and exist within the German culture.