| abstract | - Russian humour comes mostly in form of "anecdotes" (anekdoty) - joke stories with a punchline. Typical of Russian joke culture is a series of categories with fixed and highly familiar settings and characters. Surprising effects are achieved by an endless variety of plots and plays on words. The most common characters of Russian anecdotes are the following:
* Stirlitz. This is a character from the highly popular Soviet TV series Seventeen Moments of Spring. The series is about a Soviet spy Maxim Isayev, who infiltrates Nazi Germany under the guise of Standardentführer (see Common Ranks) Otto von Stirlitz and foils its plans to enter into separate peace treaty with the Allies. Stirlitz interacts with Nazi officials Walther Schellenberg, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Müller. In the jokes he interacts with them as well as with fictional female radio operator Kat, pastor Schlagg, professor Pleischner and other characters in the series. Most Stirlitz jokes are based on puns and wordgames. The series itself is dark and moody, similar to American Film Noir, and has a solemn Narrator's voice that narrates the inner dialogue of the characters. In the jokes, however, the stern voice tells hilarious puns instead of superlogical trains of thought. Here is a typical example:
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* Stirlitz was walking in the forest and found blue fir trees. He walked further and found that the gay guys were also drinking (the pun is that "blue fir trees" and "the gay guys were eating" sound and are written identically in Russian: "голубые ели").
* Stirlitz had a thought. He liked it, so he had another one.
* Stirlitz heard someone knocking on his door. "Bormann", thought Stirlitz. "Me", thought Bormann.
* Stirlitz, walking down the corridor, subtly pushed the door of Bormann's office. The door didn't move. Stirlitz stopped, looked around and pushed harder. No effect. "Hmm... It must be closed", Stirlitz deducted.
* Another variant of this joke involves some Fourth Wall painting:
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* Seventeen Moments of Spring was recently re-released in color. This led to a few new Stirlitz jokes, centered on colors. Here's one.
* "Stirlitz was surprised to see so many colored people serving in the Gestapo".
* Stirlitz wakes up to find out he has been arrested. "Who got me? Which name should I use?" - he wonders. - "Let's see. If they wear black uniforms, I'll say I'm Standartenführer Stirlitz. If they wear green uniforms, I'm Colonel Isayev". The door opens and a policeman in a blue uniform comes in saying: "You really should ease up on the vodka, Comrade Tikhonov!"
* Vyacheslav Tikhonov is the name of the actor who played Stirlitz. The uniform colours correspond to SS, Soviet military, and Soviet police.
* Stirlitz opened a door. The lights went on. Stirlitz closed the door. The lights went out. Stirlitz opened the door again. The light went back on. Stirlitz closed the door. The light went out again. "It's a refrigerator," concluded Stirlitz.
* While Stirlitz was driving at 120 m/h, Muller was running nearby, pretending he is not in hurry.
* Stirlitz heard someone knocking the door. He opened. There was a little dog. "What are you doing here, silly thing?" - he asked kindly. "You fool! I'm from Centre." (This joke spoofs tendency of secret agents to wear disguises)
* This dog and Stirlitz's line were in the series. The dog didn't respond though.
* Vasily Ivanovich Chapayev. He was a Red Army hero of the Russian Civil War, in the rank of Division Commander (roughly equivalent of Major General), and was featured in a hugely popular 1934 biopic. Other characters from the biopic like his aide-de-camp Petka, Anka The Machine-Gunner, and political commissar Furmanov, all based on real people, are also featured in the jokes. Most common topics are about their fight with the White Army, Chapayev's futile attempts to enroll into the Frunze Military Academy, his folk-cunning and his incompetence in book military science, and the circumstances of his death; Officially and in the book, he was machine-gunned by the Whites while attempting to flee across the Ural River after a lost battle.
* "I flunked again, Petka. The question was about Caesar, and I told them it's a stallion from the 7th cavalry squadron." / "Oh, sorry about that, Vasily Ivanovich, I had him moved to the 6th!"
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* Lieutenant Rzhevsky, a Hussar from the popular movie Hussar Ballad. He is renowned for being a womanizer, telling lewd jokes and dropping Cluster F Bombs in a Sophisticated As Hell manner. By some weird reason (maybe for sheer contrast), these jokes usually depict him interacting with characters from War and Peace such as Natasha Rostove or Pierre Bezukhov. The humor in these jokes comes from the futile attempts of this trash-talking, tit-grabbing Boisterous Bruiser to pass as an Officer and a Gentleman and fit into the polite, sophisticated noble society.
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* Rzhevsky and Natasha are at a ball. They walk onto a balcony.
* Rabinovich. A sterotypical Russian Jew: smart, crafty, and very mercantile. Most jokes revolve around Rabinovich finding improbable sources of income and, in older stories, vigorously hating the Soviet government. Nowadays, can become a slight faux pas. The most famous contemporary Rabinovich joke involves Pamyat, a Russian ultra-nationalist (and thus antisemitic) group:
* Vovochka (a diminuitive form of "Vova", itself, in turn, a diminutive form of "Vladimir"). A stereotypical Russian school student (depending on the story, his age may vary from kindergarten to high school): not too bright, not interested in studying, either, prone to underage drinking, smoking, and swearing. Think Bart Simpson, only sometimes worse. He's apparently a subversion of young Vladimir Lenin, who was a role model character in many didactic tales for children. His most common counterpart is Marivanna (shortened of "Maria Ivanovna"), a stereotypical Russian schoolmarm, whose portrayal varies from sympathetic to outright offensive. Ever since Vladimir Putin got elected President, the joke-tellers went meta and started considering Vovochka anecdotes political jokes.
* The teacher asks the class to produce a word that starts with the letter "A"; Vovochka happily raises his hand and says "Asshole!" The teacher, shocked, responds "For shame! There's no such word!" "That's strange," says Vovochka, "the asshole exists, but the word doesn't!"
* Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, mostly based upon their portrayal by Vasiliy Livanov and Vitaly Solomin in the 1980s Soviet film adaptation of Conan Doyle's works. The content is similar to Stirlitz jokes above, only less centered on puns and more on Holmes' improbable ingenuity in deduction, and Watson acting as Straight Man. Another prominent theme is making fun of Victorian Britain stereotypes, especially porridge, which is believed to be the primary food of a Quintessential British Gentleman.
* "New Russians", the Nouveau Riche a la Russe. The stereotype of arrogant and poorly educated post-Perestroika businessmen and gangsters, who seized enormous wealth in The Nineties and were driving around in Mercedes cars and expensive suits, but have no idea what "style" is, only price. Typical plots involve them interacting among each other, bragging about their ill-gotten wealth, or with normal, poor but well-educated people. Or they are rammed by the Arch Enemy of a Mercedes, an old ugly Zaporozhets.
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* A sheer chaos when anything could turn in any way was another source of jokes.
* A Mercedes stops, and an old Zaporozhets crashes into it. Two goons in suits get out, approach an old man in old car and ask him: "Hi, now you owe us so-o much... you're going to pay or we'll talk ...differently?" Old dude replies "Ah, i haven't much money with me, perhaps you need to talk with my son." "And who's your son?" "Chief of the poultry farm." "Well, call him." Five minutes later an armored carrier stops nearby and several big, armed troopers jumps out. "Dad, how many times i must tell you? My job's called not Chief of the Poultry Farm, but Commander of the Falcon Special Detachment..."
* After an operation, the surgeon tells the patient: "We'll have to operate again, I forgot a glove inside of you". The patient, a New Russian, replies: "Here's a hundred bucks, go buy yourself a new one".
* One New Russian is boasting to another: "Look, this tie cost me 600 dollars!" The other replies: "You've been had, they sell the same ties round the corner for 1000 dollars!"
* A New Russian exits the Hermitage Museum (Russian Imperial Palace filled with precious works of art): "Meh, what a hovel" (people around look at him reproachfully) "but a tidy one!"
* A police investigator asks a New Russian: "Do you have an alibi?" - "Yes, I do. Can I pay in foreign currency?"
* A New Russian is in an auto accident. He stumbles out of his car, and his left arm has been torn off. He starts yelling "Oh God, my car! My car!" A bystander says, "Your car? Look at your arm!" He looks down an says, "Oh God, my Rolex!"
* Animals. These jokes are based around animal behavior stereotypes, which have their roots in Russian Mythology and Tales: the violent Wolf, the sneaky (female) Fox, the cocky coward Hare, the strong, simple-minded Bear, and the king of animal kingdom Lion. The Hedgehog is a complex case, since he is basically the all-round Russian penguin.
* Also a cockerel or rooster, however jokes featuring a cockerel only really work if you know from the start of the joke he's supposed to be a closet homosexual: these jokes made more sense back when the Soviet Union criminalised homosexuality and have been dying out since the 90’s. This comes from petukh (cockerel) being a Fenya term for a passive homosexual. A typical story would be the Wolf, the hare and a cockerel in a holding cell awaiting trial and telling each other what they are in there for: the Wolf will go on a long story about he started a fight and beat someone up, but that they deserved it and he doesn’t deserve to be there, the hare will tell an equally long tale where he will come over as a cocky but cowardly thief, black-marketer or conman but that he doesn’t deserve to be there because he’s not really done anything that wrong, and the cockerel will listen to both of their long and complicated stories and then just say “Me, oh. I’m a political prisoner: I pecked [name of unpopular local bigwig/ “Young pioneer”/ “Soviet new man”] in the Arse.”
* The Golden Fish is the Russian equivalent of a Genie in a Bottle (with whom it is interchangeable), first appearing in a poem by Alexander Pushkin. The story usually revolves around a person finding/catching a Golden Fish and being granted three wishes, after which Hilarity Ensues. Sometimes, three people are granted one wish each.
* "Three men, stranded on an island, catch the Golden Fish and are granted one wish each. The first one says: 'I want to go home,' and disappears. The second one says: 'I want to go home, too,' and also disappears. The third one says: 'I'm alone. I want a bottle of vodka and those two to come back here.'"
* The joke is lost on non-Russians and even some modern Russians, but in the Soviet times three was considered the optimal number of people for collective drinking. The reason for that was that the price of a bottle of vodka was 2 roubles 87 kopecks, so if each person contributed a rouble they could buy a bottle and 13 kopecks' worth of snacks.
* A similar joke is common in the west, but usually has the three characters as a brunette, a redhead and a blonde. Guess which one wishes for the other two to return?
* And then there's the other variation with character traits and yet another one with nationalities. Now, guess who's the third nationality?
* Drunkards. These jokes usually revolve around a drunkard's ill-fated attempts to get another bottle of vodka, since sale of alcohol to drunk persons was outlawed in Soviet Union.
* Policemen (-Militsiya- Politsiya since march 2011). These revolve the stereotype of a dim-witted, corrupt law officer, which was formed during the worse times in the Soviet Union and Russia (read: 1990s).
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* Another versions of the same joke:
* Ethnic stereotypes. The Russians have a lot of ethnic stereotypes similar to Rabinovich above. A typical joke goes like "An Englishman, a French guy, and a Russian sit in a bar..." and is quite similar to analogous jokes in British humour. Favorite targets are:
* Chukchi, the native people of Chukotka related to Northwestern Native Americans, are the all-time favorites, often seen as generally primitive, uncivilized and simple-minded, but clever and philosophic in a naive kind of way.
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* Sometimes, the character of the naive Chuckcha was used to vocalise things an average Soviet citizen would never say.
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* Ukrainians are depicted as rustic, greedy and fond of salo (pork fatback).
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* Georgians are perceived as Hot-Blooded, Highlander types and usually very rich. Also, they have a ludicrous accent (also seen in Stalin jokes) and sometimes are Ambiguously Gay. For instance, it is said that in common showers or public bathhouses it's best not to bend down for soap when Georgians are around.
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* Also, widely perceived as buying their way through life (for a Soviet Republic, Georgia enjoyed a good amount of economic freedom and Georgians tended to be rich compared to the rest of the population). At the same time, their adherence to highlander honor was recognised.
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* In the 90-s, many Georgians took to selling their national fast foods on the streets in large Russian cities.
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* Armenians. Same as Georgians. Minus the Hotblooded part. A meta joke has people telling Georgians jokes about Armenians and vice versa.
* The fictional Armenian Radio is used in jokes with questions and answers (usually revolving around sex and politics).
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* Estonians and Finns are commonly seen as very slow-witted (partly due to their tendency to speak Russian very slowly compared to native speakers) and ironically referred to as "Hot-Blooded Estonian/Finnish guys".
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* Jews. See Rabinovich above.
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* Chinese. Most jokes revolve around their sheer numbers and sometimes backwardness mixed with ambition.
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* Alternatively, the jokes are about Chinese language, whose words often sound inherently funny or obscene to a Russian ear.
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* Africans. In jokes, they are usually exchange students suffering from cold weather and explicit (yet unintended) racist sayings by straightforward Russians.
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* An African student met on his turf in an anecdote is likely to be a chief of a Cannibal Tribe.
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* Russians. Largely self-referential humor, which sets Russian ethnic jokes apart from most others. The Russians are depicted as simple-minded, negligently careless, fond of alcohol but physically robust. Sometimes fatalistic about the general state of affairs.
* Military jokes. Much like policemen and Chapaev jokes, these revolve around interaction between dim-witted non-commissioned and warrant officers and intelligent privates, who are usually conscripted students.
* "Industrial" jokes. Russians mock their own often ineffective and military-centered industry, as well as questionable work discipline and widespread workplace theft. There is a recurring theme of the Cluster F-Bomb "language" that workers use — the extremely offensive but wonderfully versatile Russian Mat replacing all nouns, verbs, adjectives —, with the traditional joke being that when their new boss orders them to clean up their language, the whole factory grinds to a halt. At the same time, these often proliferate the (often founded) myth of Russians possessing a miraculous resourcefulness, enabling them to achieve stupefying results seemingly effortless, with zero resources and despite total disarray surrounding them (Russians have a special word for that bedlam-like irresponsible disarray, bardak (lit. whorehouse), which they like to use to describe the state of things in Motherland).
* Black humor. A very popular subgenre which makes fun of (and exaggerates) the more morbid aspects of Russian life, leading to a sometimes tilted perception of it by foreigners. These jokes frequently revolve around medicine (ill people and doctors), Chernobyl victims, and various disabilities.
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* Sometimes involves more-or-less religious material as well, since the Soviet regime tended to punish the free expression of both religion and black humor (and then people engaged in both anyway as soon as the humorless atheist officials' backs were turned).
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* "Sadist couplets", forming a good chunk of children folklore but not limited to it. Involves heavy machinery, lost military hardware, Ax Crazy people, etc. Usually Crosses the Line Twice in the first two lines and then each next tries to top the previous one.
* The rhyme "I got bitten by a hippopotamus... So now i'm here and my leg's over there" is so mild a search shows it's recommended for a summer camps' game that involves tracking the narrator's appendages already removed by that hippo in the long version. And a reminder that you don't want to play a chew toy for an ill-tempered living truck, however superfluous it seems to be.
* Mothers in Law.
* Something like: My love to your mother is measured in kilometres (between us).
* Man, his wife and her lover - very popular story pattern. Almost always begins with "Man came home after business trip and his wife is with a lover". Hilarity Ensues. In this plot lover may try to hide in a wardrobe or under the bed, escape from the apartment or convince husband that he is not a lover.
* A man came home after a business trip. The same day in the middle of the night a naked man with a knife jumps out of the wardrobe and shouts: "I am fugitive criminal Ivanov!" and then run through the door. A few second after that another naked man jumps out of wardrobe and shouts "I am police detective Petrov, have you seen where fugitive criminal Ivanov gone?" The confused husband gestured to the door. "Thank you, citizen, SWAT team, follow me!"
* Political/historical "anecdotes", a venerable genre that descended from anecdotes in the classical sense and was already quite popular in the early 19th century (Pushkin was pretty fond of them). Those are mostly jokes about Russian (and later Soviet, and now Russian again) rulers, revolving around their most famous achievements and facts related to them mentioned in history textbooks, famous quotes (such as Lenin's "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country!", often treated as a mathematical formula that can therefore also be written as "Soviet power is communism minus electricity" and so on), other phrases commonly associated with them (like Peter the Great's "cutting a window into Europe") and various "characteristic traits", like Stalin's arbitrary trigger-happiness, Lenin's and Stalin's funny accents, Brezhnev's senility and Yeltsin's alcoholism. Stalin jokes seem particularly popular no matter what, though, probably because he fits the archetype of the smug, whimsical, unrestrained tyrant so very well and also happens to overlap with ethnic jokes about Georgians:
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* Supplemented recently with the jokes about the peculiar nature of Putin/Medvedev duo, namely the ambiguous distribution of power between them:
* Asylums. The stock joke is that the personnel is Not So Different from their patients. The stock insanity is Napoleon Delusion.
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* Well, this is not nessesary funny, because of political abuse of psychiatry in USSR time, nicknames as Карательная психиатрия (punitive psychiatry). Some asylums got funny names, based on word-plays and later influenced internet culture. Russian humor is extremely pervasive. Almost every print publication will have at least a few jokes in it, up to and including the TV guide. They say that while in most countries, The Internet Is for Porn, in Russia, the Internet Is For Jokes. Not to be confused with the Russian Reversal.
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