To what Extent are Jokes Reactional? (Based on a Joke Cycle about Yury Luzhkov’s Dismissal)

The article concentrates on jokes that appeared immediately after the dismissal of Yury Luzhkov, Mayor of Moscow, in 2010. As soon as he was fired after eighteen years in the same position of mayor, the Internet was flooded with jokes about his dismissal as well as numerous discussions on internet forums and blogs. I collected the jokes as well as opinions from the discussions, categorised them by their themes, and tried to understand how these two phenomena (jokes and discussions on the Internet) correlate with each other, in order to understand whether the axiom that folklore is a mirror of society is true.