LAUGHTER ALLOWANCE
http://prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/communist-jokes
https://aeon.co/jokes-always-saved-us-humour-in-the-time-of-stalin
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0037677900001455
Satire and Trauma in the Novels of Il’f and Petrov
by Maya Vinokour / 20 January 2017

“The Soviet 1920s and ’30s saw heated debate around the issue of laughter, with writers and political actors alike asking, should the Soviet person laugh at all, and if so, how? This article considers the birth of Soviet laughter as reflected in Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov‘s popular satirical novels, The Twelve Chairs (1928) and The Golden Calf (1931). I argue that Il’f and Petrov’s relatively consistent critical unassailability throughout the Soviet period rests on two techniques. First, they acknowledge trauma without dwelling on it—it is always already in the past, with dramatic focus placed instead on the socialist future. Second, they encourage collective, outward-oriented laughter, stimulating Soviet citizens to unite themselves against the possible enemies of socialism. Thus, despite its inclusion of some subversive elements (like the ideologically volatile trickster Ostap Bender), Il’f and Petrov’s satire was at the vanguard of what became official literary ideology.”

STATE SPONSORED COMEDY
https://archive.org/details/tinyrevolutions
https://scholar.princeton.edu/red-laughter-soviet-jesters
https://books.openedition.org/pupvd/3206/
Laughter in the Dark: Humour under Stalin
by Iain Lauchlan / 2010

“…With a chief like Stalin it is not surprising to find that state-sponsored Soviet comedy –tame, fawning, loyal as a lapdog– was never very funny. The comedy highlight for Russians in the 1930s was a visitor from abroad, Harpo, the silent Marx Brother, who came as a goodwill ambassador from the United States (and part-time spy for the FBI). Harpo’s wordless performances were a runaway success on the Moscow stage. Good comedy in the public sphere in the Stalin era was, quite literally, mute. Even Stalin admitted in a speech to the Soviet Writers’Congress in 1952 that his reign had produced no great humorists…”

DEPARTMENT of JOKES
https://wqxr.org/story/department-jokes
https://bbc.co.uk/jokes-that-make-russians-laugh
https://listverse.com/10-ways-soviet-union-controlled-its-people
Jokes Had To Be Approved By The Department Of Jokes

“For comedians in the Soviet Union, every attempt at humor had to be read from a government-approved list of comedic material. Each year, comedians were required to submit every joke they’d written to a section of The Ministry of Culture called The Department of Jokes, and they couldn’t crack a single one until it had been approved. Jokes against the state, of course, were forbidden, as was everything even remotely edgy. Even jokes against the United States had to be tame. When the list came back, comedians were usually left with just a handful of tame jokes about their mother-in-laws. For the next year, they could only tell jokes from their approved list. Improvisation was strictly forbidden. The only way a comedian could keep an act fresh was to steal gags from the competition. Plagiarism was fine, as long as the material you stole was approved.”

COLD WAR HUMOR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_political_jokes
https://rbth.com/soviet-counterculture-rebellious-youngsters
https://theguardian.com/cold-war-comedy-yakob-smirnoff
Yakov Smirnoff, king of cold war comedy, makes a comeback
by Avi Steinberg  /  22 Jan 2015

“…Most Americans who were culturally sentient in the Reagan years know the name Yakov Smirnoff. He was a standup comedian whose cold war-themed humour, which traded heavily on his personal misadventures as a recent Soviet émigré, made him a star. People born as late as, say, 1980 can muster up an impression of his heavily-accented punchlines and his braying donkey laugh. Those of us who remember Smirnoff from TV instantly detected his affinity with Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat” persona, who was a Smirnoff joke taken to its terrifying, logical extreme.

People under 35, however, are generally not familiar with him. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 made his act obsolete almost overnight. When his LA-based career came to a sudden end, Smirnoff found his way to Branson, where he slowly rebuilt his act. The vacationing conservatives who fill Branson’s theatres have become Smirnoff’s meal ticket. But as cold war talk has returned to the US, Smirnoff believes he may have another moment on the national stage. Or so he jokes. When speaking of his bid to land on Dancing with the Stars, Smirnoff told me, “I need Putin to invade one more country, even just a little one, and I’ll be on the show for sure.”

When I visited him in December, he was a week away from wrapping up another season of Dinner with Yakov, his one-man variety show. Reclining in his office as showtime neared, Smirnoff sent his assistant to retrieve his beverage of choice, a bottle of lukewarm water, a taste he acquired in Soviet days. “I’ll tell you little parable,” he said to me, at the exact moment his phone began to vibrate. He picked it up and fell into a distracted silence. From the way Smirnoff was smiling it seemed that the text he’d received was encouraging. It was from his TV producer friend. He furiously typed a reply with one hand while his other hand firmly grasped the top of his head, as though to secure it from floating away. “Actually,” he said, when he finally finished typing. “It’s a story about parable.”

Comedians in the Soviet Union were required to register their material annually with the Department of Humour, which was part of the Ministry of Culture. “They got the least funny man in all of Soviet Union and he would review your jokes,” Smirnoff told me, “to make sure that they weren’t too good.” Since sex, politics, and religion were off-limits, “the animal kingdom was really big”, Smirnoff said. But even this could get you in trouble. On one occasion, Smirnoff was summoned to the Department of Humour to explain why he should be allowed to do his ant joke, which tells the tale of an ant who falls in love and marries an elephant. They have an amazing honeymoon, a night of wild passion that is so passionate, in fact, that the elephant collapses and dies in the middle – the ant, however, is even less lucky. He is forced to spend the rest of his living days digging the elephant’s enormous grave. When the censor accused Smirnoff of masking an anti-communist message in the joke, he denied it. “I told him, ‘No, really, it’s just about this ant. He had a very difficult life!’”

At some point during the various interviews he’s given over the years, Smirnoff invariably interrupts himself to say, “I’m not kidding, this really happened.” He’s not speaking figuratively, for example, when he says that he went from painting murals of Stalin to writing jokes for Ronald Reagan – both were actual jobs that he has had. It’s also true that, as a child in Odessa, Ukraine, he’d never seen a balloon float. In a country where even food was scarce, getting hold of helium was virtually impossible. (“We didn’t have bread or milk,” he told me. “The one thing we had plenty of was metaphors.”) So his father, an engineer and amateur inventor, set up a lab to make hydrogen in the family’s living room – which, like the bathroom and kitchen, was shared by the nine families who lived in their communal apartment – and experimented with mixing battery acid and zinc in a bottle while young Yakov held a balloon over the mouth of it. The experiment exploded grandly in his hands, and it was only by sheer luck that neither he nor his father were seriously harmed. The balloon never got off the ground.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM2Mo6gjMjI&list=PLNq3y0OU1_Bb9BRmETQhUKL1aqCuUi3xJ

Smirnoff and his parents arrived in the US in December 1977, when he was 26 years old. They had managed to leave Ukraine thanks to the proceeds from one his father’s inventions, a gadget, about the size of a ruler, that measured the structural integrity of large blocks of concrete. Smirnoff used to sell the device on the road during his comedy tours, until the KGB ordered him to desist. On their first night at their new home on the Lower East Side of New York City, Smirnoff and his parents slept on the floor of an empty apartment. Since they didn’t have even the $240 for their first month’s rent, the building superintendent, a complete stranger, covered for them. After taking a mixology course of which he could barely understand a word, Smirnoff began to work as a bartender. (The idea to change his name from Pokhis to Smirnoff came to him when he encountered Smirnoff brand vodka while tending bar.)

In the winter of 1978 Smirnoff got a job as a “bar boy” at Grossinger’s, a “Borscht Belt” hotel in the Catskill mountains, three hours drive north of New York. At Grossinger’s he watched and studied visiting comedians, paying special attention to the comic cadences of American English. When a Grossinger’s connection helped him land a gig as assistant cruise director on a Royal Caribbean ship docked in Miami, Smirnoff got his first opportunity to perform in the US. Even though he could barely speak the language, and his act consisted of little more than mimed punchlines and a Russian folk dance, he was allowed a few minutes on stage. Royal Caribbean did not re-hire him – but he’d proven to himself that he could perform for American audiences.

Smirnoff soon moved to Los Angeles, where he supported himself by working as a carpenter during the day. His English steadily improved and more gigs opened up. After showcasing at Mitzi Shore’s famous Hollywood venue, the Comedy Store, in 1978, he was invited to become a regular. In the early 1980s he began touring around the country and by 1985, Smirnoff had made a big enough name for himself that Miller Lite hired him to do a TV advertisement. The punchline: “In America, there is plenty of light beer and you can always find a party – in Russia, Party always finds you.” The ad was a huge hit, and began to open doors for him. It also created a comedic sub-genre known as the “Russian reversal” that lives on today as an online meme.

In November 1985, Johnny Carson booked Smirnoff on the Tonight Show. If Carson liked a comedian’s set, he’d call him over to his desk for a chat – a wave of the genie-wand that instantly transformed a comic into a star. After receiving this honour in his first appearance on the show, Smirnoff went on to become a Tonight Show regular. In 1986, a sitcom called What A Country was developed for him and ran for a season; the same year, Smirnoff appeared in the film Heartburn, which starred Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. At the height of his fame, he was making $100,000 a week as a Las Vegas headliner. In those years, Jerry Seinfeld was opening for him. Smirnoff performed at the 1988 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, a gig given to the major comedian of the moment.

It is not a coincidence that Smirnoff’s rise occurred during Reagan’s tenure. In contrast to his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, Reagan not only grasped the political power of humour, he was himself a professionally trained comedian (the 1951 movie Bedtime for Bonzo, was one of Reagan’s many comedic roles). Reagan’s appeal was also, in part, his ability to create an American narrative that was a comedy, a genre defined by its happy ending. Americans exhausted with Vietnam, Watergate, and energy shortages wanted a return to the upbeat script in which they were the world’s uniquely confident nation. Reagan was a fan of Smirnoff and invited him to perform at various occasions.

https://youtu.be/-wPKt5W8I5Y

In Smirnoff, Reagan saw a comedian who could help him punch up his cold war script. From McCarthy to Nixon, anti-Soviet rhetoric relied upon fear-mongering. But Smirnoff’s anti-communism was humane, optimistic and unifying. It spoke not to the menace but to the day-to-day absurdity of Sovietism. In a culture in which most Americans encountered Russians as sneering Hollywood villains with nefarious-looking crewcuts, Smirnoff presented an image of the eastern European everyman who shared the values of regular Americans. He was the greenhorn next door, the kind of guy you continue to cheer for even after he strikes it rich and buys himself a Rolls-Royce – as Smirnoff in fact did.

From the mid-80s onwards, White House speechwriters began to tap Smirnoff for jokes that the president could insert into Soviet-related speeches, often cleverly introduced as “stories that the Russian people are telling amongst themselves”. When Reagan gave a major address at the Moscow Summit in 1988 he stood under a bust of Lenin and opened with a Smirnoff joke that strongly implied that heaven itself had endowed communist politicians with lazy asses. Smirnoff says that his role in Reagan politics was something that he didn’t entirely grasp at the time. “As a young comic, I never saw myself as having something big to say about the cold war,” he said. “I just told the jokes that worked. What I wanted, mostly, was to be able to get a nice car.” In 1980s America, of course, a Soviet émigré buying a nice car was itself a major cold war statement…”

https://youtu.be/Fk3nqKoGVWw

SHARING JOKES
https://rbth.com/history/330551-stalin-jokes-ussr
https://openculture.com/soviet-department-of-jokes
https://chicagotribune.com/ct-xpm-1985-01-11-8501020948-story
by Tom Popson  /  January 11 1985

“A lot of comics tell jokes about their old neighborhood. Yakov Smirnoff, a 33-year-old stand-up comic, is no different. His old neighborhood was Russia. Born and raised in Odessa in the Soviet Union, Smirnoff emigrated to America seven years ago. He knew little English but was certain he wanted to continue the career as a comedian he had begun in Russia. Today he is working comedy clubs across the United States–including Zanies in Chicago, where he is appearing through Sunday–telling jokes about life in the USSR and making observations about America with a kind of surface naivete that belies his perceptiveness and shrewdness. Before he emigrated, Smirnoff worked craft-union shows and cruise ships on the Black Sea, among other places. On the cruise ships he encountered passengers from capitalist countries and got his first close-up glimpse of another way of life. Eventually, he and his parents applied for an exit visa from Russia, and after a two-year wait they found themselves in the United States.

You began doing comedy at the age of 15 in Odessa. Where does one start doing comedy in Russia? In clubs?
“In jail. I`m kidding. Clubs, yes. There are a variety of clubs that are sponsored by different unions. Steelworkers, let`s say, have their club. My father was a building construction engineer, so he belonged to a building club. They would encourage their children to go and show their talents, so I went to one of those clubs. I sang, and I got a lot of laughs. So I figured I`d switch to comedy.”

What kind of jokes would you do in Russia?
“It was old jokes, more vaudeville type of humor. More like English-style comedy. Or like Henny Youngman. One-liners or stories that have been told over and over again but they`re still funny. No improvisation comedy. You don`t improvise. You don`t tell stories about yourself the way American comics do. I would do some original material, but that would be unusual. Also, it was OK for comedians to borrow–if one of the big comedians went on television and did a monolog, next day 10 or 20 other comedians would do the same thing in clubs. That wasn`t considered stealing.”

Can you give an example of the kind of joke you were telling?
“Sure. Jokes about mothers-in-law would be popular. A funeral procession is going by, and they`re walking a goat behind the coffin. A guy comes over and says, `Why are you walking a goat behind the coffin?` The other guy says, `This goat killed my mother-in-law.` The first guy says, `Can I borrow this goat for a week?` The second guy says, `You see all these people in the procession? They`re all waiting. Get in line.`”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7I08nEDj8A

Did you have to submit your material to a censor?
“Yep. There`s a Department of Jokes. Actually, the Ministry of Culture has a very big department of humor. I`m serious now. Once a year they censor your material, and then you have to stay with what they have approved. You can`t improvise or do anything like that. You write out your material and mail it to them, and they send it back to you with corrections. After that, you stay with it for a year.”

Do they permit jokes that poke fun at America?
“Mild jokes. They don`t want a controversial subject. They`d rather stay with something that is safe, that has been heard many times, but is still making people laugh.”

Is there a difference between Russian and American senses of humor? Do we laugh at different things?
“No. I think a sense of humor is probably the most international language there is. It`s just that subjects you`d laugh about are different. Otherwise, it`s the same. Timing is the same. If I start making jokes about a shortage of toilet paper in America, it won`t make any sense because you walk into a store and see 15 brand names of toilet paper. One you squeeze. One matches your curtains. In Russia, they explain very simply the shortage of toilet paper. They say, `You don`t have food; you don`t need toilet paper.` ” You entertained the troops while you were in the Soviet army, didn`t you? ”Right. After the army course for beginners, when you learn how to shoot and crawl, comedy became some source of me not being in that front line. Which was a wonderful feeling because I could still make people laugh and I could travel around the country. Yeah, it worked real nice for me.”

After the army, you worked on cruise ships in the Black Sea and personally encountered capitalism for the first time?
“Right. Which was what made me realize how much I was missing. In the Soviet Union everybody supposedly gets the same thing, no matter how talented you are. What I found out on the cruise ships was that here, if you`re better, you get more. If you`re not better, you`re not gonna get more. And I liked that because I am a hard-working person. I work for what I get.”

Did you suffer any reprisals as a result of applying for an exit visa?
“Oh, sure. They fire you from work. They investigate you. They turn people against you. It`s almost as bad as being on `60 Minutes.` Well, not that bad.”

Have you found any differences between Russian and American women?
“Oh, definitely. American women are so much sexier. Sexually they do things that Russian women wouldn`t think of doing, like showering. Otherwise, they`re just freer. The relationships here are so much different. In Russia, they do the same things, but they hide it. It`s a very suppressed community. There is no such word as boyfriend or girlfriend. You don`t live with each other until you`re married. You can have sex, but nobody should know about it. ”You can go out to movies or dancing and stuff. But you will not have a place to move in together. In Russia, there`s such a shortage of places. To go to a friend`s apartment to make love to a girlfriend is a normal thing. If somebody has an apartment, he is the most popular guy around. He could give you a key, and that would be a big thing because there`s no place to go. When you`d get married, you`d normally move in with your in-laws or your parents and wait until your grandmother dies to get her bed.”

What part of Los Angeles are you living in now?
“The Hollywood Hills. I live in a house that is about 20 times bigger than the place I lived in in Russia. We had a communal apartment there, and every family had one room. Me and my parents lived in one room, another family in another room. Fourteen people all together. One kitchen. No shower. One bathroom. Now I walk around, and I have four bathrooms. I don`t know where to go. It`s a problem. By the time I make up my mind, sometimes it`s too late. It`s difficult, the problem of choice.”

Does life occasionally seem excessive over here, that people have it just a little too good?
“I don`t know. You never have too much money, too much happiness, too much health. It`s a matter of appreciating it. There`s so much here, people don`t appreciate it. But I don`t believe there is ever too much if you appreciate it.”

How did American TV programs strike you once you developed a facility with the language?
“Well, the biggest shock was commercials. We didn`t have commercials in the Soviet Union. There`s nothing to advertise. To me, I was enjoying it. Sometimes it was hard to get interrupted in the middle of some heavy scene where somebody`s being killed and switch to a commercial saying, `I love New York.’ But later on I started enjoying them. I like those dancing cats. And those singing raisins. And the little guy in the boat in the toilet. And then they tell you, `Don`t use drugs.`”

What about the TV programs themselves? Were there any you liked right away?
“Yeah, I liked `Happy Days.` I like `Love Boat.` In Russia, it was `Love Barge.` I like clever comedy. Like `People`s Court.` In Russia, we have two channels on TV. Channel One is propaganda. Channel Two is a KGB officer who tells you to turn back to Channel One. We have MTV–Military Television. There`s no cable TV. We just have the cable, but it`s not connected. It`s just lying on the floor, and people come over and say, `What have you got?` And you say, `I got cable.` That`s impressive.”

Do you listen to American pop music? It was available on the black market in Russia, wasn`t it?
“Oh, yeah, we used to have a lot of that. Popular songs were, like,`Staying Alive.` Or `Please Release Me, Let Me Go.` The Police are popular there. Yeah, `I`ll be watching you.` We had the Rolling Tanks rock band. It`s a heavy metal sound. They toured all over the world and came back from Afghanistan singing `You Can`t Always Get What You Want.`”

Is there anything about American life that still amazes or puzzles you?
“Yes. Warning shots. Those are great. In Russia, they don`t shoot up in the air. They shoot toward you, and that`s a warning for the next guy.”

PREVIOUSLY

COMMIE HUMOR FUNNIER THAN EXPECTED
https://spectrevision.net/2006/07/14/commie-humor-funnier-than-expected/
STALIN ANIMATION STUDIO
https://spectrevision.net/2007/02/25/stalins-animation-studio/
BAD MOVES in CENTRAL PLANNING
https://spectrevision.net/2007/11/08/bad-moves-in-central-planning/