Humour, Hoaxes and National Narrative: Czech National Identity in Postcolonial and Postsocialist Context

This dissertation focuses on three Czech cultural phenomena that combine hoax and humour, Jára Cimrman, Octobriana, and Entropa, as key examples of how humour functions as a form of cultural resistance and rebellion but when integrated into national identity it becomes a uniting and stabilising force in both socialist and postsocialist eras. It also introduces the term humorous hoax to capture these phenomena’s humorous and participatory nature, while positioning them within Cultural Studies. These works have rarely been addressed in Anglophone scholarship and remain marginal even in Czech academic discourse, where such phenomena are often dismissed as insufficiently serious subjects. Yet, approached through postcolonial and decolonial frameworks, they reveal how Czech culture negotiates power, identity, and belonging internally and on the international stage.

This thesis examines how monuments, histories, nostalgia, humour, and hoaxes shape national identity. It highlights themes of absence and rebellion as core to the national imagination. Methodologically, the study combines Cultural Studies, Comedy Studies, postcolonial theory, postsocialist theory and decolonial framework. It introduces a new concept, fantasy nostalgia, to describe how the West reinterprets Eastern European culture for its own purposes.

The research argues that Czech culture remains underrepresented and often misunderstood in the British art and cultural curriculum, partially due to nostalgia that reduces and simplifies the Eastern Bloc to stories of oppression and delayed modernity. By examining humour and hoax, the thesis shows how these simplified narratives can be challenged. By examining humour and hoax, the thesis shows how these implifies narratives can be challenged. By questioning traditional boundaries and introducing new approaches, this thesis aims to tell a story that allows us to see postsocialist phenomena in a new light and to contribute to a better understanding of power dynamics in our global cultures.