ABSTRACT
Humorous reaction to a news event demonstrates a new type of template thinking of the audience – repeated ridiculing of the same aspects of the event. This feature manifests itself in formulaic comments and is categorised by speakers of Russian as ‘poshlost” (similar concepts in English are ‘banality’, ‘platitude’, ‘kitsch’ and ‘vulgarity’; due to the lack of an exact lexical equivalent in English, it is customary to use the transliteration: ‘poshlost’). The humorous demonstration of detachment from a tragic event is considered a manifestation of cynicism. The audience is sensitive to the quality of style and cynical tone in ‘poshlyj’ statements, criticises them, and ridicules their humour (by using humour against humour). ‘Poshlost’ and cynicism qualify as destructive speech actions because the semantic shift that leads to humour emasculates the tragic tone of the utterance. At the same time, both poshlost’ and cynicism have a great humorous power and an evaluative potential in modern Russian speech culture, which is shown in the analysis of two cases.
