Culture in the Ironic Interpretation of Modern Urban Folklore

The article describes peculiarities of culture as a complex multidimensional phenomenon in the everyday consciousness, as well as the reflection of the concept of culture in anecdotes and parody aphorisms, the comic genres of modern urban folklore. The experimental material comprised anecdotes and parodic aphorisms, including the word culture and / or its derivatives; and the analytical approach employed combined content-analysis, contextual-semantic, stylistic, comparative, and interpretive analyses. As a result, it has been shown that at the level of vocabulary, the analyzed texts reflect the structure of culture as a material, social, spiritual, and psychological phenomenon, most of all, such components as cultural subjects and psychological mechanisms of the implementation of cultural activity. At the same time, the texts reproduce all the basic meanings of the word culture, but to the greatest extent they demonstrate a definite state of social, economic, mental life in some era, among some people, class, culture along with human achievements in taming nature, in technology, education, social order. At the same time, the mixing of styles, characteristic of comic folklore, at this level makes it possible to emphasize the essential features of culture: value, normativity, subjectivity, variability. The analysis of the distribution of the themes for anecdotes and parody aphorisms, and later the analysis of the texts content within each of the selected theme groups made it possible to identify the most significant contradictions in terms of ironic everyday consciousness associated with certain aspects of culture.