In Soviet Russia, Punchline Laughs At You

The dead do not laugh.  Everyone else does.  Earlier this year, we talked about the legendary humor of the Spartans and the world's oldest jokes.  Today we'll be talking about jokes so funny they could get you sent to the Gulag.  We're going to delve into the humour of Stalinist Russia.

Many of the jokes had to do with the Stakhanovites--workers who achieved supernaturally high production levels, becoming a legion of pseudo-celebrities.  Often Stakhanovites would get special privileges and gifts.

Four Stakhanovite milkmaids were getting prizes at a public ceremony.  The first got a radio receiver.  The second got a gramophone.  The third got a bicycle.  Finally the fourth came onstage, the leading pig-tender of the whole kolkhoz.  The audience held its breath.  Wiping tears from his eyes, the kolkhoz director shook her hand with great pride.  "I present to you the collected works of our beloved comrade Stalin!"  Silence.  A voice peeped up from the back of the hall.  "Just what the bitch deserves."

Others had to do with the tension that came from the suddenness of soviet-style repression.

"Did you hear that Petrov's been shot?"
"Nonsense!  That's Petrov himself walking on the other side of the street!"
"Yes, he hasn't heard yet."

Fear might make us try to stifle our laughter, but a few snickers always get out.  Here's another.

1937.  Night.  A ring at the door.  The husband answers it nervously.  He returns to his wife, glowing with relief.  "Don't worry, darling.  It is only bandits who have come to rob us."

Finally, jokes can offer us a way to imagine hope in a hopeless situation.

A riddle:  Stalin, the entire Politburo, and their whole entourage are on a steamer going down the Volga.  If the steamer were to sink, who would be saved?
Answer:  The peoples of the USSR.

My sources today were Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism and Political Humour Under Stalin, edited by Michael Brandenburger.

Spartan Jokes

The past is a broken, forgotten thing. We have only small pieces of it, which, with some effort, we might stick together roughly. Then we might find the shape of the past--but not its color, or heft.

Just think of this:  We have lost nine-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine jokes out of every ten-thousand that have ever been told.  That means someone sometime has told the funniest joke in history.  And we can't laugh at it anymore.

But even if all the jokes of antiquity were preserved, we might not be able to understand them.  What will make one person laugh until they cry will make another merely scratch their head.  So much more with the wit of the ancients.

Take the Spartans, please!

Plutarch admires the Spartans for their dry, restrained wit.  Though the jokes he records do not exactly leave you rolling on the floor, laughing.

Here's one (slightly edited):

One day a Spartan was invited to hear a man imitate the nightingale.  He said: "I won't waste my time.  I have heard the bird with my own ears."

Here's a second:

Another Spartan, seeing men seated on stools in a privy, said: "May I never sit where I cannot give place to an elder."

Could you stand a third?

A youth, when someone promised to give him game-cocks that would die fighting, said, "Don't do that, but give me some of the kind that kill fighting."

Banter!

If you want some more very old jokes (including some that are actually funny), check out this post about the world's oldest jokes.

Learning Today: The World's Oldest Jokes

A stale joke is about as appetizing as a dead metaphor.  But for generations some jokes, no matter their groan-worthiness, have been passed from victim to victim like a kind of meme-based viral infection.  Take my wife--please.  A horse walks into a bar.  Why the long face?  The ten-inch pianist.  Sometimes I expect that the shame might get so bad that humanity just jumps off a bridge.

Would you believe that this has been going on for over three-thousand five hundred years?

That's when the oldest recorded gag joke was put down on a clay tablet in Mesopotamia.  Here's one of three ancient old knee-slappers orientalists have pulled from the sands of Iraq:

In(?) your mouth and your teeth (or: your urine)
constantly stared at you
the measuring vessel of your lord. (— What is it?)
(Answer:) Beer(!?).

The same tablet contains what is most likely the earliest Yo Mama joke, though only the middle of the joke remains, so it's of minor interest.

The collection of translations in the journal Iraq from which these jokes are taken also presents a dialogue between two friends (too fragmentary to be interesting to the non-expert) and a very promising set-up where a barber of evil, a harlot of evil, a scribe of evil and one unidentified professional woman (of evil?) argue with their clients.  I smell an Adult Swim series.

If you want antiquity to give you jokes that make sense, you have to jump forward about a millennium and a half to Rome.  The historian Mary Beard found an old Roman joke book that contains jokes that are actually amusing.  Two favorites jump out at me.

A barber, a bald man, and a bumbling man are taking a trip.  One night they have to sleep outside and they take turns looking after the luggage.  The barber gets bored during his watch so he shaves the bumbling man's head.  When the bumbling man is roused for his watch, he feels his head and thinks.  'Stupid barber.  He's woken the bald man instead of me.'

Here's another.

An absent-minded professor is asked to bring his friend two fifteen year old slaves.  He says, sure.  But if I can't find two fifteen year olds, will one thirty year old do?

Now that is comedy.  People have been laughing at absent-minded professors since Caesar.