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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 anger 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 resentments 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 stupidity 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 rustic, 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 tellers 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 521
