Jokes under Socialism: first prize five years in Siberia.

Yet it was the broadcasters and the media elite generally who provided the ideal social circumstances for the proliferation of the jokes. Perhaps the point is best illustrated by reference to the political jokes that flourished so strongly in Eastern Europe under socialism or indeed before that in National Socialist Germany:

Stalin, Khruschev and Brezhnev were travelling on a train that had stopped.
"I will see to it!" said Stalin leaving the compartment.
On his return, he declared, "we are ready to go, I have had the engine-driver shot".
Nothing happened. Khruschev got up and went to the front of the train.
When he came back he smiled and said, "We will be leaving soon. I have had the engine-driver rehabilitated".
Still the train didn't move. Suddenly Brezhnev stood up and pulled down the blinds plunging the compartment into total darkness. "There", he said, "now the train is moving".

 

Soviet census taker: Where were you born?
Soviet citizen: St. Petersburg.
Census taker: Where did you go to school?
Citizen:  Petrograd.
Census taker: Where do you live now?
Citizen:  Leningrad.
Census taker: Where would you like to live?
Citizen: St. Petersburg.

There is a new navigation treaty between the Soviet Union and Hungary. The Soviets have the rights over the Danube lengthways and the Hungarians breadthways.

Party boss from the capital: How is the potato crop this year?
Peasant: There are so many potatoes that if we piled them all up they would form a pyramid stretching up to meet the feet of God.
Party boss: But there is no God.
Peasant: There aren't any potatoes either.

Under capitalism man exploits man. Under socialism it is exactly the other way round. 

What is an Aryan?
The arse-end of a proletarian.

A National Socialist school-teacher was berating a Jewish pupil who had come top of the class.
"Jew", she shouted, "you are greedy like all the rest of your people. Your parents pay the same fees as everyone else but you learn twice as much."

A visitor to Odessa discovered that all the phone books were missing. He enquired at the Communist Party headquarters as to where they had gone.
The Party secretary told him "We discovered that they contained a list of all the Zionist spies in Odessa. Then, to disguise the fact, the Zionists had added the names of all the other people in Odessa."

After his death an old priest arrived at the gates of heaven. St. Peter asked him if he had one last wish before he entered heaven.
"Yes", he replied, "I would like to go on a guided tour of hell".
When they got to the deepest circle reserved for the most evil people of all time there was Stalin standing in a cauldron of boiling shit up to his waist. Next to him stood Hitler with the shit up to his nose. "This isn't right", said the priest, "I suffered under both of them. Stalin was just as evil as Hitler".
"You don't understand", replied the guide, "Stalin is standing on Lenin's shoulders".

Lenin's widow, Krupskaya was telling a class of Soviet schoolchildren what a kind man Lenin had been. 
"One day ", she said, "he was standing outside his dacha shaving himself with a bowl of water and an open razor. A little boy came to watch him and asked him what he was doing. "I'm, shaving little boy", Lenin said.
"Why did that make Lenin a kind man?" asked one of the class.
"Don't you see", said Krupskaya, "he could have cut the little boy's throat but he didn't".

 

None of these jokes could be told in public, let alone published or broadcast under socialism. They were the jokes of the people and not the People's Jokes. They were ubiquitous. Everybody told them despite the risk of reprisals. A Bulgarian colleague used to tell them to me openly in English at lunchtime in Gabrovo in Bulgaria in the 1980s but always referred to Brezhnev as "Mr. B" in case an informer at the next table might work out what we were laughing at. Yet they were not in any real sense acts of political resistance from an often crushed and fatalistic population. Also even the members of the elite who enjoyed enormous privileges under socialism knew and laughed at the jokes. An Armenian who introduced himself at a meeting of media bosses as the Director of Radio Armenia was greeted with prolonged laughter. All the caviar guzzling commissar cats present knew the popular joke convention that Radio Armenia (also known as Radio Erivan) was a source of question and answer jokes about the stupidity of the party regime. 

Question: Could socialism be established in the Netherlands?
Radio Erivan: In principle yes, but what have the Dutch ever done to you?

Likewise the jokes had no effect. If after the fall of communism one were to ask a panel of experts or people in general to list the ten main reasons why the system collapsed, jokes would not even make the list. The jokes were an index of widespread alienation but were not a potent form of dissent. Did they keep up morale during the long night of socialism or were they a safety valve that helped the system survive? Who cares? Either way their effect was trivial. People told them because they enjoyed them. They played with the forbidden. They were an escape from and time off from the compulsory political discourse of socialism. They were not a means of expressing sentiments that could not be directly stated for those who were discontented expressed these views directly anyway to the same trusted intimate associates to whom they whispered the jokes. Besides most people were apathetic and dejected and saw no possibility of anything changing; the jokes were not resistance they were fun, though like many forms of fun they were accompanied by a degree of risk.