Dark humor is like food not everyone gets it Shirt

In these circumstances, the truly amazing thing about jokes shared by Soviet citizens is that they were told at all. Yet diaries, memoirs and even the records typed up by stony-faced bureaucrats reveal that many couldn’t resist poking fun at the regime, not only at home, but even in the workplace and at official meetings. Like a flower pushing its way through concrete, laughter could never be wholly suppressed.When the Soviet media tried to elevate Stalin to the status of a demigod sitting benignly above politics, ordinary citizens would respond by hanging his portrait above the toilet, mocking his Georgian accent, or replacing the ‘t’ in his name with an ‘r’, making him ‘Sralin’ — not the ‘Man of Steel’, but the ‘Man of Shit’. While the radio rhapsodized over Bolshevik achievements, most people were forced to spend hours each day lining up to receive meager rations. As one joke ran:Two people argue over who is the greater leader, President Hoover or Comrade Stalin. One says: ‘Hoover taught the Americans not to drink.’ The other responds: ‘That’s nothing — Stalin taught the Russians not to eat!’

Dark humor is like food not everyone gets it Shirt

Some of the jokes told by Soviet citizens can, with just a little adjustment, even speak to our country’s current predicament. How about this one, about empty shelves in shopsA customer walks into a store and asks: ‘Does this store have any fish?’The sales assistant replies: ‘No. This is the store that doesn’t have any meat. The store that doesn’t have any fish is next door!’Or this one making fun of forces beyond our control:Retired married couple on the bus:he old man lets out big sigh.is wife snaps back: ‘I thought we agreed not to talk about politics in public!ust replace the word ‘politics’ with ‘the pandemic’.he suffering of the Soviet people under Stalin was of course far worse than anything that we are experiencing in our lockdown. Yet, like the jokes of the struggling Soviet population, the gallows humor of so many coronavirus memes and group texts is an attempt to laugh in the dark, to use jokes as a way to create psychological distance from the things which frighten and disturb.When people are searching for answers during times of uncertainty, an absurd answer is often better than none at all. In this way, dark humor offers a powerful placebo: objectively it should do nothing, but subjectively it can make all the difference.