New book charts the comedy of Communism
Published 02 June, 2008, 16:03
The Soviet engineer that announced triumphantly: “I’ve designed the biggest microchip in the world!” was playing a part in the comedy of errors that brought the Soviet Union to its collapse. That’s according to Ben Lewis, an award-winning director who’s written a history of communist humour, ‘Hammer and Tickle: A History Of Communism Told Through Communist Jokes’.
Political jokes (or as Russians call them, ‘anekdoty’) about the communist regime began to spread straight after the 1917 revolution. “An old peasant woman is visiting Moscow zoo, when she sets eyes on a camel for the first time. ‘Oh my God,' she says, ‘look what the Bolsheviks have done to that horse!'”
As the bureaucracy grew, the comics made hay. “Why, despite all the shortages, was the toilet paper in East Germany always double-ply? Because they had to send a copy of everything they did to Moscow.”
Lewis became fascinated with jokes like this while working on a documentary on Ceausescu’s communist dictatorship in Romania.
His obsession took him across Eastern Europe and Russia, where he interviewed dissident politicians like Poland’s Lech Walesa and Boris Efimov, a Moscow cartoonist now aged 107 who Stalin hired to make jokes about Trotsky.
It was the shortages and empty shelves during communism that provoked the most gags. “Why isn’t there any flour for sale? Because they’ve started adding it to the bread!”
Even the Chernobyl nuclear disaster was fair game for Russian jokers. “How many Russians does it take to change a lightbulb? None. They all glow anyway!”
At the height of the Stalinist repressions, cracking a joke like the following could land you in a Gulag – a Soviet-era prison camp. “A teacher asks his class, ‘Who is your mother and who is your father?' A pupil replies, ‘My mother is Russia and my father is Stalin.' ‘Very good,' says the teacher. ‘And what would you like to be when you grow up?' ‘An orphan.’”
Ben Lewis suggests in his book that as well as being their way of dealing with the hardships of life, jokes revealed the lunacy of Soviet bureaucracy and ultimately convinced people that communism was an unworkable system.
The Cold War leaders realised the immense power of the joke as part of their arsenal. Ronald Reagan asked his ambassadors in communist countries to collect all the jokes they heard and send them to him in a weekly memo. When Gorbachev came to Washington, Reagan delivered one of his favourites, and later boasted that the Soviet leader had laughed.
So, what ticked Gorby’s funny bone? “Two men are walking down a street in Moscow. One asks the other, ‘Is this full communism? Have we really passed through socialism and reached full communism?’ The other answers: ‘Hell, no. It's gonna get a lot worse first’.”
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