The Joke

Throughout The Joke, the characters reference the folk traditions of Czechoslovakia, particularly folk music. Folk music symbolizes a desire to connect to the past, which is complicated by the forward-thinking nature of post-revolutionary society. The communist regime strives to create a more equal society in which traditional institutions and class structures are replaced with something more equitable and egalitarian. At the same time, however, the citizens feel a desire to connect to their pre-revolutionary past. The Party actively attempts to connect to this cultural past, funding people like Jaroslav to maintain and modernize folk traditions. This effort symbolizes a desire by the state to create a continuation of Czechoslovakian society. The new post-revolutionary world is not born in a vacuum. Deliberately, the state positions the new regime as a development and evolution of what came before. However, achieving that goal requires inventing an artificial past to support the Party’s historical narrative. The folk traditions of Czechoslovakia such as the Ride of the Kings and folk music are stripped of religious or capitalist ideas and reimagined for the new, post-revolutionary world. The Ride of the Kings, for example, introduces themes of class equality into a ceremony that originally centered around socially stratified feudal characters, an inherently absurd premise.