Book recommendation: It's Only A Joke, Comrade!

Compiled by: Mustard Seed

It’s easy to forget that “funny” and “serious” are not opposites; serious things can be funny, and funny things can be serious. Jokes are the stories we tell ourselves about our experience of the world. They can capture, challenge, reimagine, and defuse that experience, keeping tensions and emotions in a tentative, playful state. As philosophers and folklorists have said, if myths are the images we use to explain the world to ourselves, then jokes are their funnier siblings—challenging rather than prescriptive; asking questions rather than answering them; probing rather than hiding behind received wisdom. —Jonathan Waterlow

This issue recommends a new book by Jonathan Waterlow, It's Only A Joke, Comrade!: Humour, Trust and Everyday Life under Stalin (1928-1941), published in 2018. The book is dedicated to exploring the hidden world of folk jokes in the Stalin era and how humor helps us understand life. Jonathan Waterlow is a scholar at the University of Oxford in the UK, as well as a writer, podcast host, historian and professional editor. He runs a podcast called Voices in the Dark.

Jokes, Everyday Life, and Crosshatching

This book is about how and why ordinary Soviet people used their experiences to laugh and joke during the most dramatic, unstable, unpredictable, and painful decades in modern history. The book is not only about the jokes they told (and there were many), but also about what those jokes can tell us about their outlook, their sense of self, their place in history, and their social world. Humor helped them cope with and stave off despair—at least temporarily—and sharing it with others brought them closer together to help stave off the chill of harsh reality. Studying their jokes brings their experiences to life and contradicts many long-held views of the period as one marked by terrible atomization and blind obedience to Stalin.

Historians have long been more interested in grand political events than in the daily lives of citizens. Even when the history of everyday life does emerge, despite its richness, popular opinion is often treated in black and white terms. In short, popular opinion is often interpreted as "a binary toggle switch, either in the "anti-Soviet" or "pro-Soviet" position, but somewhere in between." Jokes, when they appear, are instinctively lumped into the "anti-Soviet" category.

The meaning of any joke depends more on context than on its content. Similar or even identical jokes can mean drastically different things to different people at different times and in different places. They can also mean different things to the same person at different times or in different places, and so on. Depending on the context, a given joke can have diametrically opposed results: told to a bureaucrat, it may function as a direct attack; but when told among ordinary people, politically powerless, it often diffuses anger and tension first, then diffuses those effects between the listener and the joke teller. Much like public opinion more generally, we need more nuance than a binary switch between affirmation and rejection can provide. The author notes that many historians now talk about “grey areas” rather than binary oppositions, but while “grey areas” are an improvement on black-and-white generalizations, they are still a cop-out.

"Gray area" is a euphemism for "very complicated", but it is not enough to stop there. The more important question is how the boundaries of affirmation and opposition are blurred together, and how contemporaries understand this mixture. It is not a featureless gray fog that makes people lost, but a complex interweaving of official and unofficial. It is not an undifferentiated sludge, but a complex and vibrant living culture. By definition, the author believes that there are no simple or conclusive answers here, but more can still be done than just saying it is gray.

The author further interprets the concept of crosshatching, which he introduced. Crosshatching means two sets of parallel lines crossing each other. By changing the density and angle of these lines, they work together to create nuanced and even stunningly detailed images; seemingly simple elements combine, and in their fusion, form meaningful and powerful images. The author uses the concept of "crosshatching" throughout the book to describe the repeated but often unconscious mixing of official and unofficial discourses, values, and assumptions, the intersections between which constantly produce new understandings of life and how to live in the 1930s. This metaphor is particularly useful because it helps to steer people away from head-on collisions and conflicts between official and unofficial, between national ideology and the realities of ordinary people's lives. Instead, it allows people to appreciate the ways in which these elements actively engage with each other, rather than assuming that they always bypass or cancel each other out.

The meaning of humor

Cicero, one of the most famous orators in history and himself a “notorious joker”, poses some questions about laughter in his treatise on speech written in the mid-50s BC. “What is it?” he puzzles, “What causes it?” Yet, despite being, of all people, highly sensitive to the art and power of humor, he is quick to admit his own ignorance: “There is no shame in being ignorant of something that even the self-proclaimed experts do not really understand”. Despite thousands of years of interest in and acceptance of the importance of humor to our experience of the world and our place in it, Cicero’s words still apply.

Humor can contain and control the tensions and contradictions around them, forming an effective placebo to relieve feelings of powerlessness and soften terrible and frustrating realities, even if only for a moment. But it is more than just a painkiller. It defuses tension and fear, but in the process it enables people to get on with their lives, rather than falling into despair or being forced to take up arms against the system. It creates and maintains bonds of trust between people; sometimes it reaffirms a sense of personal sovereignty; and in other cases it provides important advice on how to get through difficult situations in the best possible way.

In this book, I define humor as broadly as possible, including not only anecdotes but also humorous songs and poems, satire, ridicule, jokes, black humor, hierarchical inversions, exaggerated statements, unbridled absurdity, breaking taboos, and behaviors, rituals, and symbols that generally undermine official expectations. The boundaries between all these labels are fluid, and when categories are created they are quickly broken down, so they are never more than a rough shorthand. The only necessary headings are defined by the contemporary context: Is it spoken or performed in a humorous manner? Is it meant to be funny? Does anyone think it is funny? Does it tell us something about how contemporary people understand Stalinist socialism and their place in it?

Of course, the author points out that not every anecdote or sarcastic remark contained a deeper meaning that we can now try to unpack, nor was all humor political during this decade (although the regime viewed nearly every aspect of life as political, so the boundaries of this definition are blurred ).

“Political and social context shapes jokes more than traditional history, which is why I, a foreigner with limited knowledge of Russian folklore and born very late, can sit and giggle at an archive of anecdotes from the 1930s: Familiarity with the context is key .”

Book Introduction

The book "It's Just a Joke" is roughly divided into three parts. In the author's own words, the content " ranges from focusing on the content and characteristics of the joke itself, to the response to telling jokes, to the psychological and social motivations and impacts of sharing jokes ."

Chapter 1 examines the various ways Soviets mocked bureaucrats and revealed their secret powers. These acts of humor included hidden graffiti, creative misspellings, moving portraits, and banners that delivered satirical messages. These relatively minor subversions provided an opportunity to put the Unshakable in ridiculous situations, to poke fun at, and to pick on propaganda rhetoric. Far from being protected by his widely disseminated praise, St. Petersburg was often harshly mocked.

Chapter 2 examines critical responses to key Stalinist policies, including the state loan subscription campaign, the Five Year Plans, collectivization, the Great Terror, the 1940 Labor Code, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact. It lucidly explores the content of popular humor and the range of creative responses to widespread hardship and trauma. Far from being paralyzed by fear, jokers used gallows humor to undercut propaganda.

“At first glance, humor might seem anathema in such dark days, but as Chapter Two shows, this is, in fact, exactly when it is most needed. From the Five Year Plans to the bloody collectivization drive, the endless compulsory state loans, and the growing suspicion that their blood, sweat, and tears might have been in vain (a suspicion exacerbated by the truce with Nazi Germany), people’s daily realities clashed painfully with the regime’s promises. Just as their contemporaries used anecdotes to interpret the regime’s often bloody policies through incongruous daily experiences, they coped with the fear of condemnation and the terrifying sound of the NKVD knocking on their apartment doors at 3 a.m. with the blackest humor. People were not cowed into silence by terror during these years. If humor could not save them from the secret police, it always saved them from despair.”

In Chapter 3, the author focuses on his concept of Crosshatching. For ordinary people, this is not a zero-sum game where one value must win over another. Instead, they come to interweave their pre-existing values. At the core of this mixture is a strong desire that rhetoric should reflect reality . They " decode " the language of the regime, decode the Bolshevik language, so that it can describe the reality experienced by ordinary people.

Chapter 4 describes how the Bolsheviks struggled to control and curb all unofficial humor, revealing a shift in their view of humor from a blunt instrument (the Bolsheviks were not without a sense of humor and at one point used laughter as a didactic weapon to discredit their enemies) to an ideological virus that could infect all but the most ardent theorists.

The authors further examine how the authorities viewed joke-telling groups and its attempts to curb informal humor. In the 1930s, the state’s attitude toward humor hardened. By 1935, jokes were seen as a risk factor for viral infection. The changing attitudes of the authorities, coupled with the unpredictability of retroactive prosecutions, made it difficult for individuals to assess the risks they took when telling jokes.

Regardless of the joke teller’s intentions, many paid a terrible price. A joke could result in a gulag, a conviction for “anti-Soviet incitement,” and separation from family for 10 years or more. Yet the authorities’ attitude toward humor was more complicated than it seemed. The Bolsheviks had used satire as a weapon in their revolutionary struggle against Tsarism. Ever since, they have remained convinced that humor is a horror to any regime in the wrong hands. They have tried to confine humor to the pages of official satirical magazines or other carefully controlled media that use humor only to convey their line.

The final two chapters explore how joke telling operates as a coping mechanism. Far from representing an act of opposition, as controlling regimes fear, joke telling can be understood as an exercise in adapting to and regulating extreme situations. Even mildly deviant humor offers opportunities to demonstrate personal agency and empowerment.

In Chapter 6, the author introduces the concept of “trust groups” as a way of understanding Soviet socializing in the 1930s. Joke telling is a risky endeavor, but it is also fundamentally a social act. Sharing a crucial joke, therefore, requires a great deal of trust. Chapter 6 also discusses the issue of “condemners,” exploring issues of mistrust and condemnation, where it becomes clear that the concept of “condemners” is often more important in shaping people’s perceptions than any concrete knowledge of who these people actually are.

Conclusion

Soviet citizens, like all of us, struggled to find some harmony between the tune they were supposed to sing and the experiences, hopes, and fears they had and shared with their loved ones. Over time, people can adapt to almost anything, and in the process of adapting, they normalize things that initially seemed extraordinary. Humor helps them do this, but their humor also puts us in their shoes, and once there, we begin to realize how familiar their reactions, coping mechanisms, frustrations, social and psychological needs, and the ways they go about solving these problems are to us, a basic, universal human story.

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