Leagues of Laughter : War, comedy and the Soviet legacy in Russia and Ukraine

Abstract

Leagues of Laughter traces how a Soviet-created youth game changed as students’ nation states collapsed, competed and went to war. The game, called KVN (Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh, or Club of the Cheerful and Clever), spread to universities across the USSR in the 1960s. It is scored by a panel of judges, like figure skating, but is played in school and university leagues, much like football. KVN rocketed to mass popularity, oddly, due to Soviet censorship. Young people could not protest in essays, speeches or fiction, but the referents of live jokes are hard to prove. KVN became a forum for Aesopian free speech. Soviet pedagogues promoted the game as a wholesome, intellectual youth activity, leading to a preponderance of ordinary schoolchildren gaining at least some experience writing jokes. Even after the fall of the USSR, millions of young people across the former Soviet bloc continued playing KVN in schools, universities and semi-pro leagues. Drawing on fieldwork in Russia and Ukraine between 2015 and 2019, Garey compares KVN traditions in two post-Soviet nation states at war. A series of interconnected, cross-border stories spanning 60 years illustrates how laughter and oppression entwined in the long cultural context of the war in Ukraine.