A joke to die for: Old communists telling Soviet jokes

Last updated on March 5, 2024

Every time you tell a joke, a dictator gets a little weaker. If you grew up in any household of former eastern European emigres, then you’re probably familiar with the very particular form of Soviet black humour. There is no North American equivalent to the anekdot. Aside from the jokes that periodically make the rounds in elementary schools (and, I suppose, knock-knock jokes), there isn’t the same kind of repository of jokes that everyone knows and draws from. The one-liners and zingers that we get on late-night TV tend to be very in-the-moment, and are quickly forgotten. But Soviet life couldn’t have functioned without humour to smooth over the pain and terror of reality — and Ben Lewis digs deep into that  culture of Soviet jokes in Hammer and Tickle.

“Hammer and Tickle: The Communist Joke Book” is a documentary, and book of the same name, by British documentary filmmaker and writer Ben Lewis. It’s a decade-by-decade overview of the jokes — or, anekdotiy — that were popular as the communist system grew, stagnated and then collapsed. In Lewis’ telling, the types of jokes and how the authorities responded, closely mirrored the politics of the day. Communism is the only political system to have produced its own brand of jokes. A lot of the jokes were the same across the east bloc, and other were particular to the regime.

Soviet jokes: Cheese shop and toilet paper

More Soviet jokes: Adam and Eve

And though I’m clearly not the target audience, I’d like to think that the simplistic, children’s version of the Bolshevik revolution is unnecessary — either explain the history or don’t, but please don’t talk to your audience like children hearing about the big bad wolf for the first time.

Final quibble — it’s sometimes hard to know when he’s using real historical footage and when it’s a simulation for the film. I’m the kind of person who likes to know those details, so I can relish the historical authenticity of every real moment.

And by the way, if you followed the news a few weeks ago of Harper’s plans to eavesdrop on public conversations at the Ottawa airport, you’ll find the scene of Hungarian secret police dropping mics into trees to eavesdrop on couples in the park particularly chilling.

And one of my favourites, though it doesn’t appear in the documentary:

Three Russians are in the gulag. The first one says, “What are you in for?”
The second one replies, “I called Zbarsky a revolutionary.”
“That’s funny,” the first one says. “I called Zbarsky a counter-revolutionary.”
“That’s funny,” the third one says. “I am Zbarsky.”

Boris Zbarsky, incidentally, was one of the two Jewish scientists ordered to find a way to successfully embalm Lenin after his death in 1924. (The other scientist was Vladimir Vorobiev.) Despite his phenomenal scientific achievements — because it is an achievement, whatever you might think of both Lenin and his living corpse — he ended up in a gulag.

Things I learned about Soviet jokes and repression from Hammer and Tickle

• Sometime after Stalin died, the Soviet government stopped sending people to the gulag for telling jokes. No one quite knows why, though there’s some speculation it was related to Kruschev’s 1956 secret speech denouncing Stalin, and the general thaw of that period.
• Under Kruschev, 250,000 people were freed from the gulags, who’d been imprisoned for the crime of telling jokes. That’s the same number of ppl who immigrated during the Soviet-Jewry movement.
• Between 1948 and 1953 was the most dangerous time to tell jokes in Hungary. And after Stalin’s death, 200 people were arrested, presumably reflecting the rise of “dead comrade Stalin” jokes. It strikes me as somewhat ironic that the jokes are now forever recorded in these files.
• After the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, the citizenry went to war through posters — every day, countless new posters appeared ridiculing the Soviets, which the soldiers then removed at nights. Example: “Soviet circus back in town. All new acts!”
• There are an awful lot of people studying jokes. There is Christie Davis, the Professor of Jokes at Reading University, and Gyorgy Dalos, a historian of Hungarian communist jokes, or Calin Bogdan Stefanescu, a statistician of Romanian communist jokes.
• Reagan had a particular interest in Soviet humour. The White house asked the State Department to collect Soviet jokes, and this became proof for him that the people themselves wanted a change. The jokes came up frequently in his speeches.
• By that time, Gorbachev was also telling anti-communist — and anti-Gorbachev — jokes, including a joke about the lengthy queue of people waiting to kill him on a BBC talk show.

As always, the jokes are funnier in Russian. Sorry.