Ben Lewis’ History of Communism Told Through Jokes
There are many ways to tell history. One of the most revealing may be by relating the jokes of a time and a place. Ben Lewis does that in Hammer and Tickle. These are jokes of people victimized by Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
A Stalin-era Soviet joke:
Q: Who built the White Sea Canal (a 141-mile ship canal linking the White Sea and Baltic Sea in Russia, built in the 1930s by convicts)?
A: The left bank was built by people who told jokes, and the right bank was built by people who listened to them.
A joke told by Czechs in 1968, the year of the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion:
Q. Why is Czechoslovakia the most neutral country in the world?
A: Because it doesn’t even interfere in its own internal affairs.
A joke from Communist-era Poland (reportedly told by Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev):
Q: Why are there always two people pushing every wheelbarrow?
A: Because the third guy’s off sick.
Also in this podcast from 2008: is German humor really an oxymoron? Of course not, unless you don’t get the jokes. Germans are trying to break out of their unamusing — and unamused — past. They’re even making fun of the Nazis. And why does the humor of say, The Office overcome language barriers while other comedies remain imprisoned within their own languages?
Finally, I take a look at how two video artists turned an obscure Finnish word meaning “complaints choir” into a worldwide phenomenon.
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