In Soviet Russia, Line Punches You!
I hosted a Russian exchange student who really liked joking about that stuff. He went as the ghost of communism for Halloween
Nah, he found a smooth reflective mask and a huge red robe, then we took a toy sickle and rubber mallet and spray painted them with gold paint.
Not great, not terrible.
In Soviet Russia, punchline tell on you!
it looks like yakov Smirnoff, who came up with the joke, was very young when he left Russia, so he didn’t have a huge following or public opinion before he immigrated to the United States in '77.
he became popular in the US.
and then the internet wasn’t really around until the only salient remains of his cultural legacy are the Russian reversal joke, so I doubt many Russians are familiar with him or the joke now either.
I still wonder what the roots of his joke are in terms of the actual philosophy/psychology of it. Like, is it supposed to articulate backwardness or the lack of agency enforced by a totalitarian/authoritarian central government?
It’s a joke with the Soviet propaganda, I don’t remember the specifics but I remember there being a few that had sayings like “In Capitalism the ones with wealth own everyone, In Communism everyone owns the wealth”, the closest I could find now is
Where it reads “In Capitalism… In Socialism!”
I doubt he was trying to make make a political statement, I think it was more a savvy joke to make at a time when Russia was such a scary figure in American lives and by painting the USSR as “backward” Americans would laugh in relief, which they did.
another component was that they didn’t foster animosity so much as a disarmament of animosity, they weren’t jokes about how Russians were stupid but many of the jokes were about how a totalitarian government was not something he wanted and didn’t appreciate, " I saw an advertisement with a guarantee for an American furniture company that said ’ behind it our furniture for 6 months’ and I said that’s why I left Russia, I didn’t want that".
so I think it’s just mostly playing with USSR, identifying with American values and allaying American fear over the USSR.
he has a good delivery.
You think Politburo folks actually privately enjoyed Soviet/Communist humor?
