Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Milli Folklor, cilt.17, sa.130, ss.70-83, 2021 (AHCI)
© 2021, Milli Folklor Dergisi. All rights reserved.It is possible to define “bride” as “a female individual that has joined the family through marriage”. Considering the Turkish family structure, the bride has an undeniable role in both the large family structure of the past and the nuclear family structure of today. This place and role, even in the case of families with very close cultural structures, may cause the family from which the "bride" comes from and the “bride” herself turn into a clash of culture and authority. These conflicts may arise due to various reasons such as the person joining the family having a different view of the world, differences in character and habits, a feeling of strangeness given to acquiring new relatives, intergenerational incompatibilities affecting the relationships, positions of the family members in relation to each other, the prioritization of their own thoughts and habits of both parties, and disfavor of the physical properties. In the traditional family type, the person whom the “bride” addresses most in the home environment is the "mother-in-law". The Mother-in-law may appear in such materials as the Turkish word “kaynana” instead of "mother" or "mother-in-law", which has a largely negative background. Therefore, the experiences between these two parties, and the evaluations that begin even before the "bride" arrives, have the potential to become a common material of humor. When the past is examined, the mother-in-law has an absolute authority over the bride or brides in the Turkish family structure at various times, even if not as much as it used to be in today's nuclear family conditions. Although the mother-in-law is the secondary type in "bride" anecdotes, the other members of the family can also be included in "bride" anecdotes to the extent that they fall within the scope of this relationship. This includes the person the bride has married. Such conflicts in genres of Turkish folk literature such as folk songs, poems, anecdotes, folk tales, and rhymes, can be expressed with different emotions such as complaint, weariness, humor, and reproach. However, in anecdotes the subject is expressed with a humorous dimension. There are not just “bride” anecdotes of Turks living in Turkey but also other Turkic people. When the "bride" anecdotes from the Turkic World are evaluated in terms of laughter theories, it seems that all the theories are valid for the anecdotes. The incompatibility between the basic family members and the "coming" member, the superiority the "newcomer" and those who have existed in that family express over each other, the relief achieved by the occasional sarcastic answers, and the emotional turmoil caused by problems encountered, cause laughter in these anecdotes. While the conflict between the bride and the members of the family she joined is processed with a laughing dimension, the problems underlying the humorous element also arise. With these problems, the anecdotal texts on the "Bride" are a subject of a size that the sociology of literature can deal with and there are similarities and differences in the anecdotes of the Turkic World about the “bride”. In this article, humor and problems based on the conflict between bride and mother-in-law, father-in-law and groom are tried to be presented with examples from Turkic World anecdotes.