Digenis.org

About two years ago I was scolded by one of my Russian readers for posting a simple Cheburashka joke here on my site. Apparently they’d come to expect something more hard-hitting and inquisitive from Digenis.org.

In the comments to that post I admitted that I like to read Russian jokes. With each anekdot I feel I take a baby-step down the long, winding road toward understanding the culture of this country and the enigmatic Russian Soul. I still have a long way to go, let there be no doubt about it… ???? ?????? ?? ??????.

I don’t think I’ve written anything on Russian humor since then, but I stumbled across a really interesting article today at Prospect Magazine and I can’t help but pass it on. The article is titled ‘Hammer and Tickle’ and in it Ben Lewis writes about the unique brand of humor that came out of communism.

Communism was a humour-producing machine. Its economic theories and system of repression created inherently funny situations. There were jokes under fascism and the Nazis too, but those systems did not create an absurd, laugh-a-minute reality like communism.

But, of course, don’t think that by ‘laugh-a-minute reality’ he means to paint Eastern Europe’s period of communism as a Robin Williams flick. Lewis also takes a few paragraphs to tell of a few stories of arrests for the crime of joke-telling:

Perhaps the most emblematic story of the joke-as-resistance is a report of the prosecution of a joke-teller in Czechoslovakia in 1967, which I found in the archives of Radio Free Europe, the anti-communist cold war broadcaster. An arriving refugee brought the news that a worker in a liquor factory had been arrested for telling the following joke: Why is the price of lard not going up in Hungary? So that the workers can have lard on bread for their Sunday lunch.
…
The joke wasn’t very funny—the implication is that since there is no meat in the shops, Sunday roasts have been replaced by lard sandwiches. But the real story produces its own punchline.

While joke-telling gave the people a way to ridicule the elite, make light of waiting forever in lines to get to empty shelves in shops, and commiserate with their tovarishi about the failings of communism, there was much more to it than just subversion and dissidence. Lewis often quotes Stanford anthropologist Seth Benedict Graham and his PhD dissertation, A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot.

In other words, jokes could aid the system as well as undermine it. This, it seems, is what Graham’s thesis on the meaning of the anekdot was grasping for when it described a “spectrum from resistance to complicity.” A joke could be told about Stalin, or by Stalin; it could mock both the makers of the system and its victims. A joke could be an act of rebellion or a safety valve, an expression of revulsion against the system or of familiarity, even warmth towards it.

Ah, Russian humor. More than meets the eye. Read the whole article if you have the time; there’s a lot to be learned there.

So my question to any Russians who may read this is:

How have Russian political jokes changed since the collapse of communism? Has political satire, just like so many other things, come to resemble it’s Western counterpart?