Why is totalitarianism funny?
What Are You Watching? is a weekly space for The A.V Club’s staff and readers to share their thoughts, observations, and opinions on film and TV.
“Why is Stalin always pictured in boots, while Lenin wore shoes?”
“Because in Lenin’s time, we were only ankle-deep in shit.”
Jokes were the oral tradition of the Soviet Union, remaining in circulation for so long that even after the collapse of the USSR, one could still hear kids reciting punch lines about Joseph Stalin, purges, temporary shortages (“a permanent feature of the socialist economy”), and forced labor that dated to the 1940s or earlier. “Thank you Comrade Stalin for my happy childhood” remains one of the all-time-great Russian-language one-liners, as does the old Soviet credo that today, though worse than yesterday, is at least better than tomorrow. This stuff is its own subfield of academic study. Books and countless papers have been devoted to it. Though similar phenomena existed under other regimes (e.g. East German “whisper jokes,” or flüsterwitze), Stalinist underground humor was unique in its popularity, cultural currency, and insight. It gets meta, too—jokes about people telling political jokes and so on.
An old man has been waiting in line for three hours. Fed up, he mutters, “I fought for the Revolution, and this shit still hasn’t changed!”
A younger man turns to him. “Look there, old man,” he says. “A few years ago you could’ve been shot for saying something like that!”