Ideology and the death of satire

The Soviet Union had its own version of 'clapter'

Revolutions go through stages, becoming more violent and extreme, but also less anarchic and more authoritarian. Eventually the revolutionaries mellow, and grow dull. Once in power they become more conservative, almost by definition, and more wedded to a set of sacred beliefs, with the jails soon filling up with people daring to question them.

The Soviet system was based on the idea that humans could be perfected, and because of this they even rejected Mendelian genetics and promoted the scientific fraud Trofim Lysenko; he had hundreds of scientists sent to the Gulag for refusing to conform to scientific orthodoxy. Lysensko once wrote that: ‘In order to obtain a certain result, you must want to obtain precisely that result; if you want to obtain a certain result, you will obtain it … I need only such people as will obtain the results I need.’

Thanks in part to this scientific socialism, harvests repeatedly failed or disappointed, and in the 1950s they were still smaller than before the war, with livestock counts lower than in 1926.

‘What will the harvest of 1964 be like?’ the joke went: ‘Average – worse than 1963 but better than 1965’.

The Russians responded to their brutal and absurd system with a flourishing culture of humour, as Ben Lewis wrote in Hammer and Tickle, but after the death of Stalin the regime grew less oppressive. From 1961, the KGB were instructed not to arrest people for anti-communist activity but instead to have ‘conversations’ with them, so their ‘wrong evaluations of Soviet society’ could be corrected.

Instead, the communists encouraged ‘positive satire’ – jokes that celebrated the Revolution, or that made fun of rustic stupidity. ‘An old peasant woman is visiting Moscow Zoo, when she sets eyes on a camel for the first time. “Oh my God,” she says, “look what the Bolsheviks have done to that horse”.’ The approved jokes blamed bad manufacturing on lazy workers, while the underground and popular ones blamed the economic system itself. This official satire was of course nothing of the sort, making fun of the old order and the foolish hicks who still didn’t embrace the Revolution and the future.

Communists likewise set up anti-western ‘satirical’ magazines in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where the same form of pseudo-satire could mock the once powerful and say nothing about those now in control.

Indeed in 1956, the East German Central Committee declared that the construction of socialism could ‘never be a subject for comedy or ridicule’ but ‘the most urgent task of satire in our time is to give Capitalism a defeat without precedent’. That meant exposing ‘backward thinking … holding on to old ideologies’.

Because so many westerners asked why communist satire outlets did not make fun of East German leader Walter Ulbricht as they did of the Federal Republic’s Konrad Adenauer, the ‘satirical’ magazine Eulenspiegel produced an essay, called ‘How We Write about Walter Ulbricht’. In it, they argued: ‘We are proud of the fact that Socialist satirists don’t feel compelled to lash out in every direction in order to make profits for Capitalism … The transparency of our state makes it not only difficult, but simply impossible to write satire about its representatives. Where there is nothing to uncover and expose, the satirist has nothing to look for. Where no masks are worn, there can be no demasking. So, how do we write about Walter Ulbricht? We satirists are obliged to analyse the world in order to improve it.’

Yet there was not much improvement; there couldn’t be without honest criticism, and the whole Eastern bloc stagnated. By the 1980s, the USSR was a crumbling gerontocracy in which huge numbers were dying prematurely from substance abuse, and the joke went:

‘What is the stage that comes between Socialism and the arrival of full Communism?’

‘Alcoholism’.

Leonid Brezhnev had a stroke in 1974 and another in 1976, becoming an empty shell and inspiring the gag: ‘The government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has announced with great regret that, following a long illness and without regaining consciousness, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the President of the highest Soviet, Comrade Leonid Brezhnev, has resumed his government duties.’

Brezhnev was an absurd figure, presiding over a system few still believed in. His jacket was filled with medals – he had 260 awards by the time of his death - and when told that people were joking he was having chest expansion surgery to make room for all the medals he’d awarded himself, he apparently replied: ‘If they are telling jokes about me, it means they love me.’

Jewish jokes of this period, meanwhile, tended to focus on emigration:

Zimpsonovich goes to apply for a visa to emigrate and is asked why.

‘Well I have two reasons’, says Zimpsonovich. ‘The first is that if the Soviet government collapses, everyone’s going to blame the Jews.’

‘That won’t be a problem,’ says the official. ‘I can guarantee to you that the Soviet government won’t collapse anytime soon.’

‘And that’s the second reason’, says Zimpsonovich.

Across the Eastern bloc humour focused on the economic failings of the system, in particular the long waits. There was a joke about a Russian arranging for his car to be delivered and given a time and date 10 years away.

‘Morning or afternoon?’

‘What difference does it make?’

‘Well, the plumber is coming in the morning.’

This sounds absurd, but the wait for a car in East Germany was indeed about 10 years, and could be as long as 17.

Similarly, there was a Polish joke about overmanning, where someone finds two people pushing the same wheelbarrow and asks:

‘Why are there two of you doing that?’

‘Because the third one is on sick leave.’

In 1987, Ronald Reagan even told a joke among dissidents from the Soviet Union. 

‘What is a Soviet historian?’ 

‘Someone who can accurately predict the past.’

Communism in Europe came crashing down in 1989–91, and there was humour even in collapse. ‘The East German secret police had tried to mince all their files as the Wall fell,’ Lewis wrote: ‘They hadn’t had enough document shredders and they sent agents to West Germany to buy up every machine they could find. That was the last shortage in East Germany.’

As the 2017 hit The Death of Stalin illustrated, communism is an inherently funny system because it is both built on wild optimism, and because the terror and malice is often so random and nonsensical. The Nazis coldly and precisely murdered their enemies but otherwise left obedient citizens alone; communism consumed its most sycophantic supporters in an absurd manner. Nazism was inherently evil in its intentions, while communism created evil out of human naivety; that made it both less morally repugnant, but also funnier.

‘Unlike other commonly acknowledged ideologies, such as imperialism, Capitalism, fascism and fundamentalism, Communism was inherently “funny” because of a unique combination of factors’, Lewis wrote: ‘The ineffectiveness of its theories, the mendacity of its propaganda and the ubiquity of censorship were all important. The cruelty of its methods interacted with the sense of humour of the people on whom it was imposed. The concentration of all political and economic power in the hands of the state, and the state’s attempt to direct artistic activities – that meant that any joke critical of life in a Communist society was de facto about Communism. All these things created the innate and inalienable humour of Communism, its greatest cultural achievement.’

As Freud wrote in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, jokes unmask hidden truths, and in politics ‘tendentious jokes are especially favoured against persons in exalted positions who claim to exercise authority, a liberation from its pressure’. Revolutionary regimes are contradictory in their relationship with authority, arising out of subversion and attracting natural rebels and bohemians; therefore as they become the establishment, they find it hard to accept that they are now the natural subject of satire.

There are obvious parallels with today’s ‘clapter’, and the new type of comedy that aims to mock only the rural, old and reactionary. This kind of anti-comedy makes no real attempt to poke fun at the genuinely powerful, the people who could lose you your job or your friends, nor to take aim at the absurdities of the new regime or break its taboos. It is really just the same party-approved humour, aimed at laughing at those left behind by the Revolution.