From January 2020 to September 2021, the author of the article, as a part of the research group Folklore Monitoring Research Team studied the features of the infodemic – a wave of rumors and urban legends related to the COVID-19 epidemic. In this article, I propose a kind of archeology of folklore texts (rumors, urban legends and anecdotes) that allowed users of the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet to survive the pandemic. I will focus on analyzing two genres of “coronavirus” folklore – jokes and urban legends. The purpose of the study is to describe the reasons for the appearance of legend-dependent anecdotes and the structural changes that are necessary for the text to transition to another genre. To achieve the goals of the study, a database of jokes about coronavirus was compiled (603 texts), which was collected by the author of this study. The database contains joke texts that were distributed on social networks from January 2020 to September 2021. Also I used a database of texts of rumors and urban legends from Russian social networks selected using the “Medialogy” service (167 stories), prepared by members of the Folklore Monitoring Research Team. Based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of infodemic texts, the author described how a legend-dependent joke is structured and what conditions are necessary for the text to transition to another genre.
Infodemic; coronavirus; COVID-19; urban legend; joke; digital anthropology.