Jokes and Mass Media. The first Polish Series of Sick Disaster Jokes

The paper deals with the occurrence of sick disaster jokes in the Polish culture. It presents a characteristics of the Polish jokes about the crash of the air-plane with the Polish President and the First Lady on board as well as numcrous VIPs of the Polish establishment flying in to attend the commemoration event marking the 70th anniyersary of the Katyń massacre of thousands of Poles by Soviet forces during WWI1. The piane crashed near the Smoleńsk military airport on 10 April 2010. Three groups of te\ts about the Kaczyński brothers, their sources and socio-cultural conte\ts are analysed. The jokes cover the period before the disaster, describe its course and are also related to the 2010 presidential elections. The author compares the character of the Scripts appearing in the specified groups of jokes, and pays special attention to a unique in Polish culture character of the jokes related to mass media, their connections with traditions and w ith the systems of values and beliefs. Such jokes undergo a unification under the influence of the globalisation changing Poles’ preferences conceming the ways of talking about disaster victims