The article examines „Georgian“ jokes as a speech genre in which the linguistic norm is violated through connotative reduplication and other forms of language play. Based on Bakhtin’s theory of speech genres and the study of humor, an anecdote is interpreted as a metalanguage practice reflecting social attitudes towards normality, deviation, and linguistic authority. The analysis is carried out in the context of the linguistically polyphonic urban space of Old Tiflis, where Russian historically served as the language of the empire, comparable to the role of French in Southeastern Europe. This sociolinguistic situation contributed to active language contact and the formation of hybrid speech forms, which later became a source of anecdotal texts. Special attention is paid to reduplication as a key mechanism for creating a comic effect in „Georgian“ jokes. Echo constructions such as shashlik-mashlyk, salad-malat, culture-multur do not have an independent denotation. However, they perform pragmatic and semiotic functions: they enhance the expressiveness of the utterance, mark irony, and refer to a conscious deviation from the norm. An analysis of Soviet and post-Soviet anecdotal empirical material, including the „Georgian“ typical characters Gogi and Givi, shows that reduplication serves to carnivalize the norm and symbolically explore the center-periphery relationship. At the end of the article, the author concludes that reduplication in „Georgian“ jokes is a key mechanism of the comic effect. The „echoes“ of main parts of words, such as multur, malat, and mashlik, lack independent denotation and serve to carnivalize linguistic norms and increase the expressiveness of speech. They assume knowledge of the normative code and turn deviation from the norm into a conscious language game and a form of collective language memory.