Laughter Through Tears

“No punch line? Must be a Russian joke.”

This caustic headline appeared recently over a Western newspaper’s article about Russian humor. While it certainly grabs your attention, the implication, that Russians have no sense of humor (or a sense of humor that cannot be understood by the outsider), is wrong. After all, if this gift of nature were absent from Russian culture, how could our country have survived intact through four revolutions, two world wars and numerous coups?

Clearly Russians do have a sense of humor and their jokes do have a punch line. And there are natural differences based on the uniqueness of Russian culture and society.

“Humor does have a nationality,” said Russian comedian and actor Yefim Shifrin, who traveled three times to the USA and even performed on Broadway. “I tried to get my stories translated into English but then gave up the idea. There are too many idiomatic situations a non-native wouldn’t understand. My audiences in America were emigres from the former Soviet Union, who mostly spoke Russian with a slight Jewish accent. Our comedians who go there are scared to admit this fact because it’s so prestigious to say, ‘I have performed in America.’ My tour in the USA was a success because there were enough Russian emigres to fill the hall.”

Unlike Shifrin, writer Arkady Arkanov, who also performed in America, believes that Russian humor will get more international with time.

“A joke about a waiter spitting in your soup doesn’t make Americans laugh,” he explained. “They just get annoyed or at best ask you what the waiter’s motivation is. Soviet and post-Soviet humor is socially acute. If and when our living standards become as high as those of Americans, we’ll stop laughing at things which make them [Americans] cry. In this respect, Karl Marx was absolutely right when he said that ‘being defines the mind.’

“However, scroundrels, idiots and womanizers are an internationally accepted category of people. We laugh at Mark Twain or o henry, so why can’t Americans laugh at our jokes?”

In the bad old days the nyet mest sign (meaning ‘no rooms available’) was often seen hanging in Moscow’s hotels. One day, a peasant from the provinces is trudging around Moscow looking for somewhere to stay. Everywhere he goes, he sees the ‘nyet mest’ sign. He drops into the Intourist hotel and unexpectedly finds a helpful receptionist at the front desk (no, that’s not the joke...)

“You can spend the night in a single room,” she says, “but you’ll have to share a double bed with a Frenchwoman. But don’t worry, you’ll be able to sleep under different covers.”

The man is so tired that he accepts the offer immediately. In the middle of the night his French bedfellow says: “It’s winter in Moscow and I’m cold.”

The peasant gets the floor lady to give the Frenchwoman an extra cover. But half an hour later she complains of being cold again. The man controls his temper and gives her his own blankets.

“That’s bound to keep you warm through the night,” he says.

“Back  home in Paris,” the Frenchwoman replies, “my mom used to warm me up with her body...”

“Now look here,” the peasant snaps back, “I ain’t gonna go looking for your mother now, in the middle of the night in Moscow, miles away from Paris!”

When Arkady Arkanov was in America, his humor was very well received – not just by Russian emigres but by natives as well. Who Booked a Taxi?, the play he wrote in 1993 at the request of Vermont’s Middlebury College, was performed by Russian language students with great success.

It tells the story of a taxi driver who calls at an apartment in Moscow and asks who ordered a taxi to Khabarovsk (a city in the Russian Far East). When nobody in the family can remember who rang for the taxi, the driver explains to them that there is now a new system whereby he has to wait until his customer is identified. By the end, the comedy borders on tragedy, as the mother of the family accuses the men of being wimps and volunteers to go to Khabarovsk herself. After she has gone, the grandfather wakes up and admits he ordered a taxi to Khabarovsk back in 1937 to escape Stalin’s persecutions. Finally, another man calls at the apartment and asks the family who ordered a coffin, causing similar embarrassment.

This type of ‘laughter through tears’ (smyekh skvoz slyozy ) is a very Russian kind of humor which will outlive any political regime.    

From an interview with a Russian plumber:

“Has inflation affected your income?”

“No, before the transition to the market economy I was charging a bottle of vodka for my services, and that’s the same price I’m charging now.”

To understand the punch lines, you need to be immersed in Russian culture long enough to grasp the stereotypes and understand the way of life. Elizabeth Roberts, a British journalist, is a great admirer of Russian ‘laughter through tears.’ She admits to having “caught Russia as a kind of disease at the age of 14,” and ever since has traveled there three times a year. She writes in her humorous book, The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Russians, that Russians “have a great sense of humor” and “particularly relish the funny way in which life in reality differs from life in theory.”

This discrepancy between life and theory was especially obvious under socialism, when the theory in question was Marxism-Leninism and life resembled a science fiction detective story based on the daily battle for scarce food products and a painful compromise between required ideological purity and normal human feelings.

The theory told people to idolize its political and military heroes, but life made Russians sick and tired of this idolatry. So they started telling irreverent jokes about those heroes. The more obtrusive the leader’s propaganda, the more acrimonious the joke. General Secretaries, ministers, Civil War heroes – no one was spared. The best political jokes were reserved for less-than-beloved leaders, with Stalin, Lenin and Brezhnev being the easiest targets.

Lenin asks the head of the Cheka secret police Felix Dzerzhinsky: “Felix Edmundovich, do your read Pravda ?”

“No, I don’t, Vladimir Ilyich,” he replies.

“That’s a shame, Felix Edmundovich, it’s very soft paper.”

(For those who missed last December’s Practical Traveler, the implication is that newspapers have bathroom as well as breakfast table uses.)

Equally common and popular are jokes about Vasily Ivanovich Chapayev and his aide-de-camp Pyetka, heroes of the Civil War and protagonists of the famous movie Chapayev, for whom no unwashed state or humiliating occupation is too unpleasant.

In the public baths, Pyetka is scrubbing Chapayev’s back with a brush and soap. After half an hour’s hard work, Pyetka is still sweating. Then he gasps in surprise: “Look, Vasily Ivanovich, here’s the T-shirt you said you lost last year.”

“What are you chewing, Chapayev? Chewing-gum?” asks Pyetka enviously.

“No, Pyetka, I’m just washing my socks.”

(This joke dates back to the times when chewing-gum was an expensive luxury, smuggled into the country by profiteers.)

Anecdotes, especially political jokes, were once quite a risky business. Today Yuri Nikulin, Russia’s most famous clown and director of the Old Moscow Circus on Tsvetnoy Boulevard, can openly admit that he is ‘collecting jokes’ (a Japanese company even recently offered him a computer to store them in). But in the 1930-50s (Stalin’s reign of terror) he would not have been able to tell jokes in his now famous and very personal style on national TV. He would tell them in kitchens, and still risk a ten-year prison term: as Russians say about political jokes – he who laughs without consequences laughs loudest (khorosho smyeyotsya tot kto smyeyotsya bez posledstviy).

A man walks up to a Russian policeman.

“Like to hear a political joke ?” he asks.

“You must be out of your mind. I’m a policeman, don’t you realize?”

“I know. So I’ll tell you the joke twice... and very slowly.”

During the so-called ‘stagnation period’ in the 1970s, the only type of satire allowed by the official authorities was stand-up comedy on stage. In those times, humor was directly controlled by the ideological department of the Communist Party.

On the one hand, ideological gurus saw to it that any hints about imperfections in the political system were deleted by censors. On the other, they demanded that comedians told jokes at the expense of the capitalist system (although poking fun at minor shortcomings at home, for instance in the service sector, was tolerated).

Anti-capitalist jokes brought comedians laurels, hence the popular genre of political chastushki (popular rhymes) in the 1950s and 1960s, usually about things like “the Pentagon flexing its military muscles.”

“Our satire had to dig up innocuous domestic issues,” recalls Arkanov. “Mostly alcoholics, bureaucrats and layabouts were the only targets of our comedians. If somebody at the Central Committee read something sharper, they would summon you and tell you to stop mudslinging.”

In the 1970s, Arkanov wrote a short novel featuring a dictator who rules a remote island in the ocean. Like most dictators, deep down he was a liberal and wrote revolutionary verses under a nom de plume to satisfy his ego. Finally, the people of the island, inspired by the dictator’s own revolutionary verses, overthrew him in the name of his nom de plume. In the epilogue the island’s volcanoes symbolically erupt.

“Our ideological censors never understood the real satire – instead their accusation was: ‘So, the revolutionary movement brings nothing but destruction, is that what you’re saying?’” recalls Arkanov.

But there was no satire in the philosophical or literary sense. What they called satire was in fact the stigmatizing of the shortcomings already exposed in the General Secretary’s report to the latest Communist Party Congress. The smartest comedians studied the report, pencil in hand, to pick up topics approved by the authorities.

In the late 1970s, comedians slowly started giving up their ideology and letting off steam. As shortages plagued the population, comedians were allowed to hint at shop assistants selling sausages under the counter. Long lines and shortages were the most popular topics.

... A customer enters a grocery store on Gorky Street, Moscow’s central thoroughfare, and asks the store assistant: “Can I have 200 grams of salmon, please?”

“What salmon are you talking about, we haven’t had any on the shelves for ages?!”, answers the angry shop assistant.

“Okay, 200 grams of sturgeon then.”

“What ?!” raves the store assistant.”

“Fine, if you don't have sturgeon, give me 300 grams of smoked eel.”

“This guy must be crazy,” says the irritated store assistant to her colleague, now deliberately ignoring the customer.

“He sure is,” says the colleague, “but what a memory ...”.

The master of socio-economic stand-up comedy was Odessa funnyman Mikhail Zhvanetsky. Banned from the mass media, his jokes were spread around on home-taped cassettes.

Soon, another innocuous genre, the poetic parody, appeared. It became quite popular in Soviet times. The Communist Party had no problem with it as it was a mere distraction – laughing at stupid verses turned inside out by the ‘poet’ took people’s minds off the ongoing economic crisis.

These experts in parody, in their turn, managed to slip in criticisms about the current political situation – and this art of writing between the lines gave them double satisfaction. The most popular parodist, Alexander Ivanov, was even allowed to anchor a TV show called An Evening of Humor. One by one, Zhvanetsky, Arkanov and others were invited on the show.

Meanwhile, Party favorites like Gennady Khazanov were invited to closed nomenklatura [party elite] evenings, but even there they didn’t dare to criticize anything that Pravda editorials didn’t criticize first.

In the early 1980s, subtle hints about minor shortcomings were no longer sufficient to control the popular mood. First on tape, then on TV, comedians began targeting the Communist gerontocracy directly. Khazanov began telling jokes about Brezhnev, imitating his rambling voice during his lifetime, though this never got on the air.

“Who, the hell, was that?” mumbles Brezhnev as he waves goodbye to a visitor whose plane has just taken off.

An aide replies: “Comrade Brezhnev, that was the President of one of our fiercest political rivals, a NATO member country, who has just turned down all our peaceful proposals.”

“NATO member or not, he was a great kisser.”

Time passed and the authorities needed to throw new bones to the hungry population. This was how Khazanov came up with his now famous ‘striptease’ story, about a group of Soviet tourists abroad who were allowed for the first time in Soviet history to visit a striptease bar. In those days, each tourist group was headed by a starshy (a KGB officer or agent) who would stamp out any ideological deviation within the group. Here is an extract from Khazonov’s story:

“What would you do if you saw a naked woman in the window?” asks the starshy as he prepares the tourists for the striptease.

“I would feel confidence in tomorrow,” replies one of the tourists.

(This expression is a propaganda cliche: Communists said that socialism, unlike capitalism, gives people ‘confidence in tomorrow’ – i.e. guarantees against unemployment, no inflation etc.)

Brezhnev’s death in 1982 dealt a heavy blow to Russian comedians. It can be tough when such a perfect butt of jokes exits from the scene.

But just three short years later another suitable hero came on the horizon. In March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev showed the world his European-style wife, unveiled his policy of glasnost and introduced his ill-famed anti-alcohol campaign.

A bodyguard tips off Gorby about the fact that Raisa is spending her free time with some anonymous man in her husband’s absence .

“Well as long as they don't drink vodka I don’t care,” is the new General Secretary’s reaction.

In the era of perestroika, the ideological censors gave up almost all their ground. Gorbachev’s evasive speaking style was parodied on TV. At the end of perestroika, even party apparatchiks became the target of comedians. Anything was tolerated as long as nobody called for the overthrow of the political system itself.

At the dawn of perestroika, when Gorbachev was just encountering the first covert resistance to his reforms from the old Party apparatchiks, Gorbachev turned his eyes to heaven (or rather hell) to ask Stalin for advice: “Comrade Stalin, what should I do to make my reforms work?”

“You should do two things,” Stalin replies. “First, you should shoot all the Politburo members. Second, paint all Moscow’s train stations green.”

“But why should I paint the train stations ? And why green?”

“What I like about your reaction, comrade Gorbachev, is that you did not question my first point.”

“It was much easier to make the audience laugh in the ‘good old Soviet days,’ when a comic just had to hint slightly at some flaw,” said Yefim Shifrin.

“All those comedians who made their career by hinting at shortages and criticizing apparatchiks went down the drain,” said Arkanov. “When Yeltsin removed the last barriers of censorship, our comedians felt like divers with the bends.

“Now it’s pointless to emulate the mass-media – what’s the point of telling your audience that the government takes bribes if it’s been published in today’s newspaper?”

As a result, comedians are now indulging in cheap take-offs of TV commercials. The less tasteful and discreet comedians get by telling openly dirty jokes. For a while, some spent their time making fun of the new democrats, who were proving to be just as venal as the old communists, but that theme was soon exhausted.

“Even the genre of the political anecdote is moribund,” says Lev Geo, organizer of the Desyatochka (little ten) joke contest of anecdotes. “There are no political stereotypes left. Gorbachev was a windbag henpecked by Raisa, but Yeltsin is hard to define – he has too many faces. The same goes for the new political system.”

One kind of humor is flourishing, though. The kind of satire practiced by the television show Kukly (“Dolls” – see Russian Life, September 1995) has targeted Yeltsin and other leaders with astounding success. So much so that the former acting Prosecutor opened an investigation into Kukly on the grounds of alleged financial violations and insults aimed at Yeltsin and Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, raising the specter of censorship once again. Only very recently were proceedings finally dropped.

Outside the political sphere, the “New Russians,” or Russian nouveau riche have become one of the most frequent objects of contemporary humor. Their customs and lifestyle have become a stereotype – they are commonly painted as narrow-minded, virtually illiterate, indiscreet, arrogant and unbelievably rich.

Two Russian businessmen meet in Paris on the Champs Elysees and proudly show off their newly bought clothes.

“Look at my new tie!” says one. “I bought it at Pierre Cardin for $500.”

“Big deal, I bought one just like that for $1,500 just around the corner.”

A Russian nouveau riche runs into an old school friend whom he hasn’t seen for ages (one who is not so well off).

“So, how are things?” the nouveau riche asks , noticing that his friend seems to be in really bad shape.

“Well, you know, between you and me, I haven’t eaten for two weeks.”

“Oh, come on, you gotta force yourself.”

It’s 6 pm, and two hired killers are waiting for their victim at the entrance to a luxurious apartment building. Ten minutes pass, and the two are still waiting. One looks at his watch anxiously and says:

“Something terrible must have happened, I’m really worried about him.”

It is probably a good sign that people in Russia have fewer things to laugh about. But it is even better that laughter is permitted and tolerated, and that there are no longer limits on whom jokes and satire can be directed at. And it is a positive sign of the times that Russia is joking about prosperity and democrats, instead of shortages and tyrants. We can only hope that our comedians are as successful in helping us deal with success and prosperity (so as retain the ability to laugh at ourselves), as they were in helping us weather the decades of privation and terror.