The study of the speech-genre and formal-semantic properties of Russian anecdotes on bribery is based the corpus of anecdotes, which also include jokes of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, differing from Russian ones only in the names of the “protagonists” appearing in them. It is established that the main means of creating a pun in a joke are the lexical and grammatical polysemy and homonymy, playing off the phonetic similarities and spontaneous humor.