The purpose of this study is to identify and compare the structural-semantic and cultural features of anecdotes to reveal its similarities and differences in the english, french and russian languages. Based on the analysis of a small corpus of anecdotes, the present exploratory study intends to identify types of lexical relations such as homonymy, polysemy, and paronymy and their linguistic features. The findings show that a common feature of russian, english, and french national humour can be considered as criticism.