Structure of a joke

Abstract

Milan Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, on April 1, 1929, he was a professor at the School of Cinematographic Studies in Prague, since he lost after the Russian invasion of 1968. His works were then withdrawn from the library of his country and his name disappeared from literary history manuals. Since 1975 he lives in Paris. Kundera's first novel, The Jocke, won the Czechoslovakian Writers Union Prize in 1968. The edition we are discussing is the second reprint of 2006, produced by Editorial SeixBarral.

The purpose of this essay is to present to the reader the structure of any joke. To do this, we have divided it into five parts. In the first, we describe the joke. In the second, we analyze the subject who suffers the joke. In the third, we present what we call the hermeneuts of the joke, thereby indicating that there are always, along with a joke, very intelligent individuals who interpret it. In the fourth, which is undoubtedly the central part of our essay, he describes the consequences of a joke, and here what we have to bear in mind is the ability of a joke to determine the totality of the joker's life. In the fifth, we describe what we call the joker's redemption.

By structuring our essay in this way, we seek to draw the reader's attention to our key to reading this novel: it is not intended to make a systematic reading of the novel. Strictly speaking, the novel has been a means of making the phenomenology of a joke, not only of the joke to which our novelist refers, but of any joke.