ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the genuine, hilarious legacy of 'Wojciech Jaruzelski's war' in the 1980s through some artists' monstrous mockery of official historical narratives and their pompous victimisation and rejection of the alleged autonomy of modern abstract painting and conceptual art. As can be deduced from 'the theory of women's disappearance' coined by Ewa Toniak, one can therefore assume that men's laughter and good humour in the 1980s were brought about by a return to patriarchal values and by the second-rate position of women. In Poland, there was a prevailing need to say something new and different, and paradoxically, the only possible way to express it was through laughter—thus avoiding the risk of pathos. Laughter used by Poles, victimised in their history of martyrology, turned out to be the most convincing mode to describe their intransigent spirit. Lukasz Gorczyca and Kaczynski's war can be described in terms of Bourdieu's symbolic violence: it has finally succeeded in erasing old mechanisms.
