Did communism die of laughter?
Published 10 June, 2008, 05:20
George Orwell once said that “every joke is a tiny revolution”. English writer and film director Ben Lewis takes the idea a step further, suggesting that the love of political jokes among Soviet citizens contributed to the fall of the USSR.
In his book ‘Hammer and Tickle’ (and a film of the same name), Lewis says it was jokes that contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union and communist regimes across Eastern Europe. He looks at how ordinary citizens invented those jokes, how the state tried to prevent them from telling them, and how people were arrested for them.
Thus, a joke from the 1930s about three guys discussing how they got to the Gulag tells you everything about Stalinism. “One says: I’m here because I was five minutes late for work every day and they charged me with sabotage. The second says: that’s funny because I was five minutes early every day and they charged me with espionage. The third one says: I’m here because I got to work on time every single day month after month – and then they charged me with owning a western watch”.
Jokes gradually shook the foundations of communism and finally they spread up the hierarchy until Mikhail Gorbachev himself was telling these jokes to conservative leaders in an attempt to explain that this had to change.
Once he attended a TV show where he told the following joke: “People are waiting in a queue and are blaming Gorbachev. One of them says I’ll go and kill him. And off he went. But then he comes back. The line has moved on but it's still long. So the people ask him – did you kill Gorbachev? No, he answers, the line there is even longer”.
At the same time the then president of the U.S., Ronald Reagan, was also telling jokes about the Soviet state to show his attitude to the changes taking place in the USSR: “Two guys are discussing democracy in their countries. And the American says, I can come to the White House, slam my fist on the table and say ”Mr Reagan, I don’t like the way you run this country“. The Russian says, I can do exactly the same – I can come to the Kremlin, slam my fist on the table of the Secretary General and say: ”Mr Gorbachev, I don’t like the way Mr Reagan runs his country."
Nowadays jokes are no longer banned – and politicians are more than capable of poking fun at themselves. In fact, a sense of humour now seems to be a must for political success.
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