“The street sweeper had his chip and vaccine”: children’s macabre rhymes of the coronavirus era

The article is devoted to children’s macabre rhymes (sadistic rhymes) published on social media from October to December 2020. The author raises the following questions: why did a genre whose active oral tradition belongs to the past (the 1970–2000s) become reactualized during the pandemic? Who composed and disseminated these coronavirus rhymes, what ideas did they convey, and what function did these texts serve? How did the new sociocultural context and the new information environment influence the characteristics of the sadistic rhyme genre? The author examines the black humor of sadistic rhymes in light of the concepts of A. Dundes, B. Ellis, and E. Oring. Classic sadistic rhymes and coronavirus rhymes are analyzed in the context of thematically and functionally similar black jokes in Anglo-American folklore. The literature on dark humor describes several of its varieties: sick jokes, gallows humor, and disaster jokes – these may appear in texts in varying proportions, shaping the distinctive humor of particular folklore genres. An analysis of the material shows that, despite superficial similarities and the borrowing of formulas from classic sadistic rhymes, the coronavirus texts have lost key genre markers and transformed into jokes of a different type – with a different subject, target of ridicule, and function.

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