CAN HUMOUR BRING DOWN REGIMES?
The history of subversive joke telling in the Soviet Union has lessons for straight-faced Christians. 
   

Can humour bring down regimes?

This is the question which many scholars have tried to answer when looking at the history of Soviet communism, whose imperial ambitions folded summarily twenty years ago this year (see, for instance: Hammer and Tickle by Ben Lewis, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008).

Russian people have a rich tradition of jokes (anecdoty) and they were used to good effect for the seven decades and more in opposition to communist rule that, at least for some inspired hope at first, instilled fear under Stalin, sank into apathy under Brezhnev and collapsed into an unseemly free for all under Gorbachev and his post-communist successor, Yeltsin.

There is a tendency for people to fall into two camps: maximalists who think that humour was largely responsible for communism’s decline, and minimalists who think it had no bearing at all on its fate.  The truth probably lies somewhere between.  By the time of Gorbachev, even the Soviet elite were telling jokes against the system, evidence of its unsustainability.
CAN HUMOUR BRING DOWN REGIMES?
Q: What do you call a Soviet Symphony Orchestra returning from a tour of the United States?
A: A string quartet
 


Here are two dark jokes from Stalin’s era of repression:

A flock of sheep are stopped by frontier guards at the Russo-Finnish border. ‘Why do you wish to leave Russia?’ the guards ask them.
‘It’s the NKVD’ (the feared secret police), reply the terrified sheep. ‘Beria’s ordered them to arrest all elephants.’
‘But you aren’t elephants!’ the guards point out.
‘Try telling that to the NKVD!’

At a concentration camp in Siberia, several inmates are talking with each other about why they are in the camp.  One says, ‘I am here for saying that Karl Radek was a counter-revolutionary’.
The second says, ‘Isn’t that interesting?  I am here for saying that he was not a counter-revolutionary.’  They turned to the third man and asked, ‘What are you here for?’
He answered: ‘I am Karl Radek.’
   
It would be comforting to think that such jokes initially sustained people in the Great Terror of Stalin and nurtured an irrepressible dissidence.  The reality was more complex.  True communist believers also told jokes to highlight their frustration with the slow economic development.

What is the stage that comes between socialism and the arrival of full communism?
Alcoholism.

A man is hopping round Red Square wearing only one shoe.
He is approached by another man: ‘Comrade, have you lost a shoe?’
‘No’, he replies, ‘I’ve just found one.’

Both these jokes could, and probably were, cautiously told by communists and non-communists alike, while Stalin himself was chillingly adept at twisting jokes he came across to frighten opponents instead.

George Orwell said: ‘ever joke is a tiny revolution’.  For him:
‘A thing is funny when – in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening – it upsets the established order…If you had to define humour in a single phrase, you might define it as dignity sitting on a tintack.  Whatever destroys dignity and brings down the mighty from their seats, preferably with a bump, is funny.  It would be better to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.’

There is a remarkable echo of Mary’s song of praise in Luke 1 in Orwell’s discourse.  The unintended inference is that in bringing down the mighty from their seats and exalting the humble poor, God is playing the most decisive joke on the pretentious love of status that divides all societies.

Jokes fulfil the vital purpose of poking inventively around in the unseemly space between what is and what should be in life.  Twentieth century Russians understood that.  As Christians engage with their own unseemly space – the distinction between the ‘now and the not yet’, between the world as it is and coming kingdom of God as it shall be – there should be much more humour than currently on offer.  Where is the Christian tradition of subversive joke telling?  In its own way, it has a great contribution to make to the greatest revolution of all: the one God has yet to bring about.

   
 
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