FROM DOCTOR TO MADMAN: THEMATIC JOKES IN THECONTEXT OF URBAN FOLKLORE

Abstract

This article examines doctor and madman jokes as distinct and multilayered for-mations within urban folklore, situating them within contemporary folkloristics and cul-tural theory. The study draws on major theories of humor – Henri Bergson’s notion of the mechanical encrusted upon the living, Thomas Hobbes’s superiority theory, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, and John Morreall’s account of cognitive incon-gruity—together with Erving Goffman’s frame analysis. Through this combined theoreti-cal lens, the article explores how jokes disrupt established semantic frames, reorganize interpretive structures, and generate alternative regimes of meaning.
The primary aim is to clarify the functional role of the doctor and madman fig-ures in folkloric discourse and to analyze the internal logic through which these jokes en-gage social norms and institutional
authority. Doctor jokes frequently stage encounters between professional exper-tise and lay experience, symbolically negotiating hierarchical relations. By humanizing medical authority and momentarily suspending institutional distance, such narratives pro-duce comic effects that recalibrate social balance and mitigate symbolic asymmetries.
Madman jokes, by contrast, foreground the instability of the categories of “nor-mal” and “abnormal.” Through absurdity and unexpected reasoning, they interrogate the limits of rationality and expose the contingency of socially sanctioned logic. The mad-man’s seemingly irrational yet occasionally incisive responses complicate Hobbesian su-periority by unsettling the audience’s assumed vantage point. Read through the lens of cognitive incongruity, the humor emerges from the tension between anticipated and actu-al outcomes, while the carnivalesque dynamic enables a temporary inversion of social roles and epistemic authority.
Taken together, doctor and madman jokes function not merely as vehicles of en-tertainment but as expressive forms through which collective consciousness articulates critique. They operate as subtle instruments of social commentary, destabilizing norma-tive thought patterns and safeguarding symbolic spaces of individual autonomy. In this sense, thematic jokes may be understood as a mode of collective therapy, modeling at the level of cultural narrative the enduring dialectic between rationality and the absurd.