The Author discusses the communist period of Polish history as it is pictured in selected products of contemporary popular culture. The present paper is based on textual analysis of comic books on the history of PRL (the first ones which appeared after 1989) and hip-hop songs.

The joke is a kind of text of unknown origin, oral, popular and brief, to which scholars have paid very little attention. In this work, we depart from the children´s jokes to draw some lines of analysis that would allow us to deal with the joke in the frame of a general theory of laughter. According to us, this cannot be understandable without referring to the interdiscourse, the set of mechanisms to which we do not have direct access but which determine what we do, think or say.

This article discusses Grzegorz Uzdański’s verse novel Wypiór (2021, the title is a pun on the word ‘upiór’, Pol. spectre) which is multifaceted commentary on the Romantic tradition and the ‘Romantic paradigm’, epitomized in the figure of Adam Mickiewicz transformed into a vampire. The pop-cultural frame invites the reader to pursue all kinds of links between Wypiór and the gallery of the living dead, ghosts and spectres in Mickiewicz’s stories (conceived both as characters from the past and a metaphoric projections of the Romantic poet). The article compares the references and allusions in Uzdański’s novel to Mickiewicz’s own text as well as the text of another contemporary comic horror novel, Ale razem z naszymi umarłymi ( But Not Without Our Dead) by Jacek Dehnel. The analyses, which rely on a methodological toolkit inspired by Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, offer a more accurate reading of Wypiór and highlight its place in the contemporary reception of Romanticism with its predilection for haunting, ghosts or persistent spectral presence.