Political Factors of Transition from Ridiculous to Insulting in Mass Media

The current research is dedicated to the idea of investigation of the political factors of transition from ridiculous to insulting in mass media. The main hypothesizes of this work are – first, the concepts of funny and offensive varied and dependent on the type of political state’s political regime; second, in democracies, the permissible boundaries of the ridiculous are established by civil society, and autocracies - by the government. As empirical data, we used materials from the media that describe cases when the funny stuff was turned out into insulting, and all the cases took please in such states as the United States of America, the Russian Federation, Hungary, the Republic of India and the Soviet Union. In the theoretical part, two major topics are considered - humor as an instrument of symbolic politics in different political regimes and humor and offence in the media. Next, we go directly to the search for the transition factors from funny to offensive. Coming to the conclusion, we can say that all the hypotheses are confirmed.