Everybody is a Fool: Rural Life, Social Order and Carnivalesque Marginalisation in a Hungarian Television Series
Balazs Varga
DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-73543-2_12
in: Reifová, Irena, and Martin Hájek, eds. Mediated shame of class and poverty across
Europe. Springer International Publishing, 2021.
The chapter provides a case study on A mi kis falunk (Our Little Village), a popular
Hungarian comedy series from the 2010s. The analysis highlights the interplay between
emphatic and disciplinary humour, ridicule, satire and moral assessment. It claims that in
Eastern Europe, due to the weakness of the middle class and the legacy of socialism, village
communities and rural life are targets of internal othering. The ambivalent portrayal of the
village articulates the feeling of anomie. This is specific to the region in that, due to the post-
socialist condition, nostalgia for community is fused with the ambivalent acceptance of
neoliberal values.