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Residents of Lemberg as Other
exploited" (Kuret 1954: 24). Lemberg was supposed to be no different. Townsmen
had spent the last 300 years earning high profits from town fairs, as neighboring
farmers were forbidden to either buy or sell anything outside the market town.
Despite the railway, which came to the area in 1904 and cut the town off from the
main arterial road, Lemberg remained financially independent until 1924, when
the town itself was able to cover all of its expenses. Niko Kuret and Pavel Strmsek
have identified another reason for the mocking of Lemberg. They reported that the
market town was so prosperous as to cause its inhabitants to become very conceited
and presumptuous. They were even said to intermarry, which supposedly led to the
fact that “every household had at least one idiot” (Kuret 1954: 24). Some researchers
thought that the narrow-minded view of Lemberg inhabitants, their comfortable
way of living, and their genetic diseases resulting from intermarriage could be the
reasons that the neighbors started to look on Lemberg as a town of fools (Kuret
1954; Strm$ek 1937).
Niko Kuret saw the reason for the rise of humorous stories in the envy and an¬
ger of a people who were submissive to Lemberg. He wrote, “It is no wonder that
the market town roused not only envy but also the righteous anger of neighboring
farmers. Satirical stories they made up or tailored to their account were therefore
not only a sign of our rural inhabitants’ witticism, but mainly a debilitated form of
revenge” (Kuret 1954: 24). Another author, whose primary concern was the history
of the town, was of the opinion that, “neighbors were unable to trick the Lembergs
[out] of either their rights or their income, so they had to content themselves with
mocking and insulting them” (StrmSek 1937: 21).
Joke researcher Davies has criticized the search for hidden motives and resent¬
ments that could have given rise to the jokes, in this case humorous tales, because
“everyone enjoys, and always has enjoyed, jokes at the expense of some other group’s
stupidity, regardless of whether they like, dislike or feel indifferent towards the butt
of the jokes” (Davies 1998: 24-25). In Davies’s opinion, the key factors that should
be researched are how joke tellers categorize the targets of the jokes (Davies 1998:
25). Based on the research of humorous stories and modern ethnic jokes, Davies
came to the conclusion that “the joke tellers associate the butts of jokes about stu¬
pidity with a relatively static, uncompetitive and un-innovative way of life in which
stability is more highly valued than individual success” (Davies 1998: 25). We could
say that this is also true in the case of Lemberg.
For jokes and humorous tales about stupidity, it is, in Davies’s opinion, essential
that the mocking group from the teller’s point of view arise from the periphery.
Center-periphery opposition results in laughing pairs—“townies laughing at rus¬
tic, skilled and white-collar workers laughing at the unskilled, and the established
laughing at the greenhorns” (Davies 1998: 25). But in the case of Lemberg and its
stories, it appears that the uneducated people from rural surroundings were the tell¬
ers of these stories and not vice versa. The first mentions of Lemberg in relation to
humorous stories suggest that this assumption is not true. Since publications were
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