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When Politics Is a Laughing Matter
By Alexander Rose
hen it is not at war, democracy is a comical political system. To
many of history�s greatest minds, the very idea of allowing the
rabble to choose its leaders, who then pander to its wishes, was
inherently ridiculous. Compared to the simple elegance of despotism,
the stability of baronial rule, or the divinely ordained reign of a
monarch, democracy is a messy, muddled method of government.
We, the people, know this. Because our leaders emerge from within our
own ranks, we feel entitled to insult them mercilessly, especially
when they get too big for their boots. And the worst insult any
elected politician may suffer is being voted out of office. No matter
how much dread he instills or respect he may inspire, his people do
not love him.
In times of peace, we recognize that our leaders are not only no better than we, but
in many cases, worse. We, at least, mind our own business and get on with making an
honest living; they, on the other hand, willingly th
rust themselves into the maelstrom of politics for what purpose? Power? Glory? Money?
Fame? We suspect, perhaps wrongly, that whatever the reason, it must be nefarious.
Some politicians may be motivated by a Great Vision,
others by Moral Fervor, and still others by Fierce Ambition, but one verity remains:
They want to clamber to the top of the greasy pole in order to run things and boss
other people around.
Given that the system is so endearingly ludicrous, the antics of our elected
representatives make entertaining viewing. Some commentators rue the disrespect with
which politicians are sometimes treated. In turn, they can
be accused of not only taking politicians altogether too seriously, but thinking
ahistorically.
he inventors of modern democratic politics, the British, occupied a great deal of
their time mocking its practitioners. The more rambustious and vibrant the politics,
the more malicious the mockery. Whereas parliamentaria
ns had once been lumped together as �the Commons,� the eighteenth century witnessed
the emergence of Tory and Whig political parties possessing distinct platforms. This
was a development, coinciding with the explosion in
political pamphleteering and newspapers, that bitterly divided the London coffee
houses (Jonathan Swift, misanthropic author of the political satire Gulliver�s
Travels, was a particularly vicious Tory hack) and unleashed
an extraordinary partisan rancor.
Turn to a typical eighteenth-century caricature and, even in our crass age, one is
horrified by the sheer delight artists took in portraying the great politicians
defecating, urinating, fornicating, being disemboweled, an
d suffering from flatulence. Take, for instance, the famous print of the Whiggish Sir
Robert Walpole � who served for more than 20 years as Britain�s first prime minister
and to whom the phrase �every man has his price� h
as been, no doubt inaccurately yet justifiably, attributed � straddling the gate of
government. The cartoon is entitled �Idol-Worship, or The Way to Preferment� and
depicts a servile place- seeker kissing Walpole�s enormo
us, naked buttocks. By comparison, Doonesbury�s �waffle� and �feather� jibes seem thin
gruel indeed.
Later artists and writers would downplay the scatology and instead focus on
grotesquely exaggerating the personal appearance and besmirching the characters of
politicians. By the late nineteenth century, when suffrage had
bestowed the vote on most of the male population and parliamentary government was
upheld as the epitome of Progress, middle- class publications such as Punch drew their
claws. Disraeli, Salisbury, and Gladstone were port
rayed rather harmlessly as (respectively) greasily unctuous, self-satisfied, and eye-
glazingly boring.
But the British were always fond of their idiosyncratic little democracy, even as they
poked fun at its ridiculousness. As Sir Joseph recounts in Gilbert and Sullivan�s HMS
Pinafore:
I grew so rich that I was sent
By a pocket borough into Parliament.
I always voted at my party�s call,
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
I thought so little, they rewarded me
By making me the Ruler of the Queen�s Navee!
Today, ad hominem attacks gleefully continue, though with claws once again extended.
For instance, on the satirical British television program, Spitting Image, Mrs.
Thatcher�s former minister of education and home secreta
ry, Kenneth Baker, was depicted as a perspiring, whiny slug. (He appears to have
exulted in the attention: He collects political caricatures.)
The point is, notwithstanding the vicissitudes of humor, the democratic tradition of
ridiculing and teasing politicians enjoys a long and honorable heritage. London�s Tate
Gallery is currently advertising an exhibition de
voted to the eighteenth-century caricaturist James Gillray with the line, �Don�t Limit
Yourself to Laughing at the Politicians of Today.�
Following in the British tradition, American political jokes are mostly partisan jabs
and tend to reduce politicians to an irreducible essence, a clich�, a buzzword. Thus,
Nixon is incorrigibly shifty and sinister, Ford i
s an amiable bumbler, Carter is nice but out of his depth, Reagan is just dumb, Bush
Senior is a cold wasp, Clinton is a sex maniac, Quayle is stupid, Gingrich is callous,
Gore is a bore, and Hillary is a modern Lucrezia
de Borgia. A strange admixture of Reagan, Quayle, and Ford, Bush Junior was until
September 11 depicted as a fool prone to malapropisms.
A mid-90s joke had Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and Dan Quayle riding in a car in
Kansas. A tornado suddenly appears and hurls the car into the magical land of Oz.
Gingrich says, �Well, I�m off to see the Wizard and get m
yself a heart.� Quayle adds, �I�ll go with you and get a brain.� And a leering Clinton
asks, �Where�s Dorothy?�
A not altogether hilarious joke does, however, nicely summarize popular images of the
presidents. The last six occupants of the White House are stranded on a listing
Titanic. Ford says, �Oh, no, what do we do?�; Bush Seni
or sternly orders, �Man the lifeboats!�; Reagan wakes up, �Huh? What? Lifeboats?�;
Carter decently suggests �Women first�; Nixon growls, �Screw the women�; and, of
course, Clinton chimes in hopefully, �Do we have time?�1
A telling Hillary Clinton joke has the then-first lady and the president driving along
in scenic Arkansas. When they pull over for gas, Clinton notices his wife has jumped
out of the car, bounded over to the gas-station a
ttendant, thrown her arms around him, and kissed him with tears of joy. �Who was
that?� a bemused Bill asks as they drive away. �Oh,� replies Hillary somewhat
wistfully, �he was an old flame I haven�t seen in years.� �Wel
l,� says Slick Willie with a smirk, �I guess if you hadn�t married me, you�d be
helping him pump gas now.� �I don�t think so,� says Hillary icily. �If I had married
him, he�d be president now.�
No matter your partisan preferences, a truly magnificent Bush joke circulated during
the Florida imbroglio in late November. In a stylistically perfect spoof of
Nostradamus�s pompous prophecies, the �quatrain� ran: �Come
the Millennium, month 12/ In the home of greatest power/ The village idiot will come
forth/ To be acclaimed the leader.� For the most part, however, political jokes �
especially of the Clinton sex variety � follow the ba-
doom-boom formula favored by late-night comedians.
n the broadest level, nonetheless, what all these jokes have in common is that they
focus on the personal idiosyncrasies and foibles of individual politicians. None calls
into question the legitimacy of the political syst
em. Thus, one may have a great deal of fun with Ted Kennedy�s eye for the ladies, his
corpulence, and his veiny complexion, but who disputes the legitimacy and beneficence
of Massachusetts democracy? It is remarkable that
on September 10, having a laugh at Bush�s expense was almost de rigeur. Thereafter,
the nation looked directly to their elected representatives and president for
mastership and determined command in the face of an implac
able enemy. Even in the bar of the National Press Club, usually a hub of ridicule and
cynicism, political jokes instantly ceased. No stronger proof is required of the
democratic peoples� faith in their political system.
Put simply, ridiculing politicians does not belittle democracy, one reason being that
we cheerfully recognize the absurdity of a system in which Kennedys, Clintons, and
their ilk are successful. At the end of the day, we
are the ones who control the levers of power: We can boot them out of office. In any
case, the achievements of truly great politicians will inevitably overcome the
temporary slings and arrows of ridicule.
In authoritarian societies, this happy state of affairs does not, for obvious reasons,
pertain. The Anglo-American tradition of personal and partisan ridicule does not
appeal to one-man or one-party regimes. As a 1960s Ge
rman joke revealingly goes: Walter Ulbricht (the Stalinist leader of East Germany) and
Willy Brandt meet and exchange pleasantries. �Do you have a hobby, Herr Brandt?� asks
Ulbricht. �Yes,� replies Brandt, �I collect joke
s about myself. And you?� �I collect people who collect jokes about me,� responds
Ulbricht. Indeed, according to Suetonius, Augustus Caesar, who could be amusingly
ribald, forbade jokes �against the emperor.�
Political humor of a different sort emerges in authoritarian societies. Unless the
regime in question appeals to the nation, its humor stabs at the heart of The System
and its representatives rather than individual politi
cians. Under the rigidly pan-Arabist Nasser, remarks Khalid Kishtainy in his book Arab
Political Humor (London: Quartet, 1985), jokes �were usually about his regime, his
socialism, his suppression, but hardly ever about h
is person; they hovered around him but never dared to touch him.�
There is a wrinkle to this rule: A purely military regime or an enlightened despotism
rarely produces a rich trove of political jokes, though the ones that do appear tend
to focus on personalities instead of The System. S
unglassed Latin American colonels or bewhiskered Habsburg emperors are more concerned
with maintaining control in the here and now than with fulfilling prophecies of the
dictatorship of the proletariat. Under Nasser�s les
s ideological successors, jokes turned personal. Sadat jokes were caustic and
scandalous while Mubarak is usually painted as a buffoon. One about Mubarak has him
asking his private secretary to draft a five-minute speech,
which he rehearses and annotates incessantly for weeks. Just before he is due to read
it to the nation, a beetle-browed Mubarak sits scratching his head. �I just don�t
understand,� he tells the secretary. �I asked for a
five-minute speech, but no matter how hard I try I can�t get this down to less than
twenty.� The secretary replies: �Your Excellency, there are four copies.�
Put simply, it is governments whose very reason for existence is to impose a grand
ideological vision on humanity which provide fertile manure for subversive jokes.
odern authoritarian humor has its roots in the Jewish struggle for emancipation in
mid-nineteenth-century Europe. The Jews, being outsiders, had developed a folklore
ironically exposing the hypocrisy, falsehood, and hollo
wness of political elites, their stupid or brutal bureaucratic minions, and society at
large. In the revolutionary ferment of Eastern Europe, such jokes � suitably amended �
would be devastatingly aimed at the existing re
gimes by disaffected intellectuals. Indeed, among non-Jews in the more fashionably
leftist salons of Berlin and Vienna, Jewish jokebooks were quite popular around the
turn of the century. Even in 1920s Soviet Russia, in t
he so-called Golden Age of what would become known as �Soviet jokes,� Jews excelled in
cracking jokes at the expense of the regime. Very soon, such merriment would be driven
first underground and then to the Lubyanka.
Soviet jokes, which also drew inspiration from the rich veins of witty Armenian
riddles and long-winded Georgian drinking-speeches, are the highest form of
authoritarian humor. It is a testament to their genius that they
cross borders and time so effortlessly: Jokes conceived in, say, Romania or Poland
would soon pop up elsewhere throughout the Soviet bloc. Variants, amended for local
consumption, would emerge decades later in Cuba and th
roughout the Arab Ba�athist world. Most anti-Castro jokes, for instance, appear to be
the work of Cuban immigrants to the United States using originally Soviet material.
As the classic Soviet joke goes, one secret policeman asks another, �So, what do you
think of the government?� His colleague looks around before replying, �The same as
you, comrade,� whereupon Policeman No. 1 declares, �I
n that case, it is my duty to arrest you.� Luis E. Aguilar, professor emeritus of
history at Georgetown University, recalled in Chistes: Political Humor in Cuba (Cuban
American National Foundation, 1989), �I heard the sam
e joke years later. Only then it was being whispered in Cuba.�
The lineage of some authoritarian jokes stretches back far farther than the benighted
twentieth century. One of the most popular jabs at the stupidity and dangerous
arbitrariness of officialdom may have first been told by
Arabs in the tenth century. The basic Arab version describes camels who run away
because an idiotic new law is pressing mules into service. By the 1920s and 1930s,
expanding on a Jewish joke of the tsarist years, the Sov
iet version described a group of rabbits who make a run for the Russian- Polish
border. Applying for admission, the rabbits cry, �The Party has given orders to arrest
every camel in the Soviet Union!� �But you are not cam
els,� replies the Polish border guard. �Well, you try telling that to the Party,� say
the rabbits. Later versions were popular throughout Eastern Europe.
Indeed, the joke never dies. While I was in Beirut earlier in 2001, an activist
associated with the anti-Syrian movement told me its latest incarnation: The cia, mi6,
and Syrian Intelligence each send an agent to procure
a camel. The cia spook accomplishes his mission in a week. The mi6 man returns with a
camel soon after. A few months later, the Syrian secret policeman straggles into town
with a donkey. When queried by his boss, he repea
tedly strikes the beast across the face, shouting, �Say you�re a camel! Say you�re a
camel!�
emonstrating that while one apparatchik, appointed party leader, or secret police is
as ghastly as any other but The System is forever, when individuals� or agencies�
names were mentioned in these jokes they could be smoo
thly changed to reflect local circumstances. In democracies, this technique simply
could not work. Listeners would be left puzzled if someone told any Clinton sex joke,
and there are thousands of them, but replaced �Clint
on� with, say, �Woodrow Wilson.� But take an old Soviet joke like the one about the
man who goes to a post office and complains, �These new stamps with Lenin do not
stick,� to which the bored clerk replies, �Comrade, you
probably spit on the wrong side,� and substitute �Lenin� with Castro or Brezhnev or
Saddam. It still makes its point.2
Another distinguishing feature of authoritarian jokes is that they rely on the
teller�s and the listener�s mutual, covert, assumed recognition of the regime�s Big
Lie � namely, that despite its incessant promises of Utopi
a, of freedom, of victory, and its exhortations to work harder, tighten belts, and
watch out for saboteurs, the government�s program is continually frustrated by the
crooked timber of humanity.
It may take some time for the scales to fall from their eyes, but those living under
authoritarian conditions eventually realize that there is a chasm between what they
are told is the truth and what actually is the truth
. As the joke has it, Stalin, Khruschev, and Brezhnev are travelling on a train when
it suddenly shudders to a halt. �Fix it!� orders Stalin. The engineers repair it, but
still the train does not move. �Shoot everyone!� o
rders Stalin. All the engineers are shot, but the train obstinately refuses to budge.
Stalin dies. �Rehabilitate everyone!� orders Khruschev. The engineers are
rehabilitated, but the train remains stationary. Khruschev is
removed. �Close the curtains,� orders Brezhnev, �and pretend we�re moving!�
As modern Arab thinker Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad observes, �laughter is . . . a sudden and
fast comparison between the state in front of you and the state which you imagine� �
or are told should be. �Does two plus two equal f
our?� �I don�t know, what did Pravda say this morning?�
Without this tragic contradiction between the ideal and the real, there could be no
authoritarian jokes. Thus, a Hungarian goes to a Budapest hospital and asks for the
Eyes and Ears Department but is told there are two se
ctions: one for eyes, the other for ears. �Oh, but I must go to both,� he sighs, �I
don�t know what has happened to me lately. I don�t see what I hear.� Similarly, two
European communists are rewarded with a trip to the g
lorious Soviet Union, but only one comes back. At work, the fellow traveler is quizzed
by a colleague,
�How are living conditions in the Soviet Union?�
�Wonderful. I couldn�t believe my eyes.�
�And how is the housing? How is the food situation?�
�Splendid. I couldn�t believe my eyes.�
�But what happened to your friend?�
�Oh, he�s in Siberia. He did believe his eyes.�
In Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (Oxford, 1999), Sheila
Fitzpatrick has collected several examples of anti-Stalinist humor from the 1930s.
These are all the more remarkable given that the nkvd w
ould eavesdrop on conversations in shopping queues and markets, jotting down any
caustic jokes or subversive rumors. Particularly good jokes would lead to the teller�s
arrest on the spot for �anti-Soviet conversation.�
Soviet slogans such as �Life Has Become Better,� numbingly repeated in newspapers and
speeches, were satirized with rueful quips,3 as were the acronyms of various state
agencies. The initials of the 1930s Communist Party
� vkp � were mocked by some peasants as standing for �Second Serfdom� (Vtoroe
Krepostnoe Pravo) and a few, evidently suicidal, Leningrad teenagers joked that the
initials of the U.S.S.R. (sssr � or cccp, in the Cyrillic a
lphabet) meant �Stalin�s Death Will Save Russia� (Smert� Stalina Spaset Rossiiu). In
the same tenor, owing to the felicitous similarity of �grad� (city) and �gad�
(scoundrel), wits could have fun with Stalingrad and Kirov
grad.
hat we have dealt with so far is private political humor � the jokes cautiously
whispered between intimates in authoritarian societies. Often passed over are two
other sorts: semi-official and official.4
Semi-official humorists are those given space in party publications and newspapers,
typically during periods of �glasnost,� but kept on a leash. The political satire they
produce is tactful rather than outspoken, resembli
ng feints rather than knock-outs. As such, semi- official humorists tend to serve as
the modern equivalents of medieval court jesters, whose jolly ribaldry at the expense
of their patron could be permitted so far, but no
further. It was a matter of knowing where the line was.
Given that their work was often subject to a �committee of fun� before publication,
much has to be read between the lines. In the 1960s, for instance, the Polish satirist
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec penned ambiguous one-liners ma
squerading as �Thought For The Day� nuggets of wisdom in the Warsaw weekly Przeglad
Kulturalny: �I am usually requested to proclaim that life is beautiful by those who
have made it miserable for me,� or �If you want to si
ng in the choir, first take a good look at the conductor�s baton.� The penalties for
not knowing when enough was enough could be harsh. Dimitur Chevdarov-Chelkash, editor
of the Bulgarian magazine Sturshel, was sacked in
1961 for satirizing the fact that the government was storing thousands of pairs of
shoes during a shoe shortage. The Home Trade Ministry weakly retorted they were for
�emergency use only,� fatally giving Chelkash more amm
unition. Having gone too far, he was accused of being �out of touch with the people.�
More influential was official humor. Newspapers and newsletters carried a �witty�
cartoon, one-liner, or poem extolling the virtue of party domestic or foreign
policies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, official attempts at making
jokes were often � embarrassingly so � heavy, banal, and propagandistic. In each
satellite, the party established official satirical magazines. In order to pretend
that the party, too, could prick itself, the titles of t
hese � the Czech Dikobraz, the Slovak Rohac, Poland�s Szpilki, Bulgaria�s Sturshel,
and the Romanian Urzica � can be translated, variously, as meaning �stinging,�
�nettles,� �needles,� �hornet,� and �porcupine.�
When it came to foreign policy, the magazines mostly stuck to caricaturing foreign
politicians, inadvertently providing for us a glimpse into official party conceptions
of the great abroad. Adenauer fared particularly bad
ly: Usually portrayed as evil, deformed, and discolored, he was once depicted as a Fu
Manchu lookalike playing an organ with sheet- music in front of him titled Mein Kampf.
(Similarly, Willy Brandt was invariably drawn we
aring a Nazi uniform.) Uncle Sam, but of course, was fat, ungainly, greedy, bellicose,
and armed to the teeth, while John Bull acted as his sinister, craven accomplice. Very
occasionally, in the edgier publications, there
was a caricature of Khruschev (never of other Russian leaders, let alone Stalin):
Sometimes the cartoonist cautiously flattered the man by drawing him as taller and
slimmer than he was.
Domestically, official artists were allowed to blow off a little steam, especially
during times of shortage or crisis. In the aftermath of 1953, even the
ultra-apparatchik Czech vice premier Vaclav Kopecky urged reviving
�satire and cabaret humor� to damp down dissent. For the most part, acting in the
time-honored authoritarian tradition of exposing the �few bad apples ruining the
orchard,� official humorists aimed their blunted darts at
such convenient scapegoats as bungling functionaries, asinine regulators, and corrupt
bureaucrats. But they refrained from directly attacking party leaders or policies.
The most interesting aspect of officially sanctioned humor is the conviction by
authoritarian governments that jokes could be harnessed and put to good use. A year
after backing �satire and cabaret humor,� Kopecky laid do
wn that �on no account may humorists ridicule the activities of the Party. . . . Not a
shadow of blame or mockery must affect the glorious native Party which deserves to be
esteemed and loved to a supreme degree.�
More revealingly still, in 1961 the Bulgarian leadership decided that the purpose of
humor �is to collaborate with the Bulgarian Communist Party in solving the economic
and other problems of the nation, and in bringing up
the workers in the spirit of communism. . . . In the struggle for the building of
socialist society, our humor and satire must be a sharp ideological weapon.�
eorge orwell�s 1945 essay, �Funny, But Not Vulgar,� tends to be regarded as the most
perceptive analysis of political humor. He wrote that �every joke is a tiny
revolution� and defined humor, brilliantly, as �dignity sitt
ing on a tin-tack.� So �whatever destroys dignity, and brings down the mighty from
their seats, preferably with a bump, is funny.� Yet considering the efforts that
authoritarian regimes devoted to turning humor into a too
l, this typically democratic idea � itself based on the Freudian belief that jokes
allow us to revolt against authority and terror in order to liberate ourselves � that
mocking politicians cuts them down to size is overly
deterministic.
That is very true of Western democracies but not necessarily so of authoritarian
regimes. Orwell, it is sometimes forgotten by those who apply his thoughts too
universally, was writing about the decline of English humor f
rom its eighteenth-century zenith. Nevertheless, referring to his movie and now
Broadway musical The Producers, Mel Brooks recently explained that �if you ridicule
[dictators], bring them down with laughter � they can�t w
in. You show how crazy they are.� Andrew Stuttaford, writing for National Review
Online (October 15), similarly believes that �far from trivializing a conflict, humor
can be a very useful weapon in its pursuit.� Referring
to Osama bin Laden, Stuttaford observed that �this is someone to jeer and scoff at, a
clown in a cave to be mocked, parodied, derided, lampooned, taunted, and ridiculed, a
jerk on a jihad that we can only despise. . . .
He�s a loser.�
However, it is questionable whether ridiculing the Soviet regime �brought it down.�
Was the communist colossus, or any other authoritarian/totalitarian regime, ever
really a laughingstock? Likewise, in the 1930s, the Brit
ish sniggered at Adolph Hitler�s ludicrous mustache and manic gesticulations, but did
that persuade millions of Germans he was �crazy�? Bin Laden may well be a �loser� and
a �jerk,� but the nicknames retard the dreadful r
ealization that he represents a coalescing Islamist totalitarian ideology. In any
case, dictators like Saddam Hussein may very well be cheaply dismissed as �crazy,� but
laughter does not lessen the dangers posed by them,
let alone explain why creatures such as Stalin proceeded utterly rationally with their
plans � and persuaded others to join them.
>From a distance, it is easy to say that Russians recognized communism�s ultimate
>absurdity and so laughed at it to �liberate� themselves before its �inevitable�
>collapse. But it may be more realistic to argue that, despit
e their recognition that communism was murderously absurd, Russians quietly cracked
jokes just to endure it. Authoritarian jokes are not tiny revolutions; they are
temporary pain relievers serving as a substitute for bein
g allowed to participate in real politics.
The sentimental axiom that jokes in, or against, authoritarian societies are
liberating certainly does not stand up to scrutiny in the singular case of Nazi
Germany. German jokes � and, in particular, those of working-cla
ss Berliners, who seem to have conjured up most of the gags � were unusual in that
Nazi leaders, not Nazi ideology or the state apparatus, were their butt. This
idiosyncrasy would seem to indicate that, at least until ver
y late in the war, many Germans identified with and accepted the regime and its aims.
Given that the Reich lasted but 12 years (half of which was occupied by fighting) and
the Soviet Empire lasted eight mostly peaceful de
cades, Germans were not given the same opportunity to witness the Big Lie.
In the German case, political jokes were neither �tiny revolutions� nor pain
relievers, but good-natured fun akin to jokes in democratic societies where the
political structure is assumed to be legitimate.
Compare, for instance, the bitter Soviet transliteration of such acronyms as vkp as
�Second Serfdom� to their playful German equivalents. As R. Grunberger reports in The
Twelve-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany
, 1933-1945 (De Capo Press, 1995), the abbreviation KdF (Kraft durch Freude �
�Strength through Joy�) became Kind durch Freund (�Child by a Friend�) or Kotz durchs
Fenster (�Vomit through the Window�), and BdM (Bund deuts
cher M�dchen � �German Girls� League�) turned into Bund deutscher Matratzen (�German
Mattresses League�).
Before the war, unless one was stupid enough to tell anti-Hitler or unpatriotic jokes
loudly in the Gestapo�s earshot, the great majority of jokes ribbing the Nazi elders
were not vicious enough to qualify non-Jewish Germ
ans for life-threatening punishment. During the war, openly telling an anti-Nazi joke
merited a death sentence � though this was unlikely � but then again, so did
committing a myriad of other offenses such as race defilem
ent, marriage-swindling, stealing goods during a blackout, and submitting a bogus
claim form.
In his 1972 memoirs, the leftish (non-Jewish) Weimar political comedian Werner Finck
recalled that in the early Hitler years Gestapo men would occasionally come to his
cabaret, note down his double entendres and waspish a
llusions, and then leave inconspicuously. After a brief spell in a concentration camp
in the mid-1930s, Finck was allowed to reopen his cabaret. The Ministry of Propaganda
would sometimes send him admonitions but for the
most part he was left alone. The cabaret was finally closed down after Goebbels
declared in the V�lkischer Beobachter that he had been �forced to take a series of
measures concerning political humor. Naturally, the German
people have lots of humor, but even this has limits!� As punishment, Finck was
expelled from the Actors� Guild, but served in the Wehrmacht during the war as a radio
operator.
Many German jokes centered on the blatant disparity between the physical appearances
of a portly Goering and a club-footed little Goebbels, or the well-known reputation of
Ernst R�hm as a homosexual, and the Nazi ideal of
blonde, nobly-countenanced, stoutly straight Aryan Man.5
Hermann Goering jokes, which were generally good-natured teasing, concerned (a) his
fatness and (b) his mania for accumulating decorations, titles, and uniforms. Typical
ones run as follows: Goering�s adjutant urgently in
forms the great man that �a pipe has burst in the Air Ministry!� to which Goering
replies, �Quick! Bring me my admiral�s uniform!� Or, on their wedding night, his wife
awakes and catches a naked Goering waving his marshal
�s baton around. �What are you doing?� she asks. �I�m promoting my underpants to
overpants.� Victor Klemperer�s remarkable I Will Bear Witness, 1933-1941: A Diary of
the Nazi Years (Random House, 1999) records just one jo
ke between 1933 and 1941. It contrasts the 1917-18 punchline to the question, �How
long will the war last?� with its modern equivalent. During the Great War, the answer
was, �Till the officers have to eat the same food as
the men�; during the Second World War, �Until Goering fits into Goebbels�s trousers.�
As for Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, jokes about him ridiculed his
deformities, height, and complexion. It was only his many enemies in the party who
tended to circulate those more waspishly commenting on his prop
agandistic distortions. Ernst R�hm, the brownshirted sa commander executed by Hitler
in the Night of the Long Knives, generated a huge number of jokes, all of which harped
on his homosexuality, towards which an �innocent�
Hitler averted his eyes for a suspiciously long time (as a 1934 joke went: �Just
imagine how upset the F�hrer will be if he gets to know Goebbels has a club foot!�).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the only leading Nazis to esca
pe laughter were Reichsf�hrer SS Heinrich Himmler and his chief executioner,
SS-Obergruppenf�hrer Reinhard Heydrich (whose unusually high-pitched voice would
otherwise have marked him as a prime target).
Even when jokes assumed a seemingly anti-institutional hue � such as the ones
remarking on the stupidity of sa men � these were frequently the product of
institutional rivals. In the sa�s case, ss officers, who cultivated
a more elegant image, liked to lord it over the Brownshirts. It appears that most of
the truly anti-Nazi jokes which do survive were either conceived after the war, or
before it by Jews and transported abroad by �migr�s.
inally, it is unfortunately difficult to unearth many political jokes from the world�s
largest authoritarian country, China. This dearth may be partly attributed to
translation problems, lack of Western interest in fields
unrelated to the high politics of economics and foreign affairs, and, perhaps,
societal structure.
Though migration from the country to the coastal cities has risen in recent years,
vast numbers of Chinese citizens are rural peasants. Historically, as is the case in
most cultures, the agricultural and illiterate poor e
njoyed a rough-hewn peasant humor centering around slapstick, sex, and Schadenfreude.
Ridicule was common, but it seldom targeted the Imperial system, the central
bureaucracy, or regional governments; rather, peasants wou
ld laugh at particularly buffoonish local officials or village headmen. In a manner
resembling Roman �high� humor, the great Chinese traditions of clever wordplay and
literary allegory were confined to intellectuals and p
olitical elites.
Though some crude jokes � usually of a sexual nature � circulated about Mao�s cruel
widow after Deng Xiaoping�s reforms, and despite a degree of disillusionment with the
communist regime today, there is a widespread absen
ce of outright alienation between the Chinese and their government. The communist � or
semi-communist, as it now is � government has been in power only since 1949 and until
the 1960s was undoubtedly popular. Then came the
Cultural Revolution, in which even the merest suspicion of thinking about an
�intellectual� joke resulted in death. Unlike the Russians, who had decades to learn
to see through the gauze veiling their relative poverty an
d official protestations to the contrary, the income and prospects of the average
Chinese appear to be rising. Despite sunny prognostications about Chinese calls for
political liberalization following the transition to �m
arket socialism,� these hopes have not, as yet, borne much fruit.
China not only lacks the Jewish folkloric tradition of social and political
commentary, but, aside from such places as Xinjiang and Tibet, is ethnically 90
percent Han. In the Soviet Union, subjugated nations from Poland
to Central Asia could at least mournfully joke at the expense of their Russian
tormentor. Indeed, there is an entire category of Soviet humor targeting
discrimination by the Russian majority against a particular national
minority, or the domination by a strong state over a weaker one.
Given time, however, China�s political humor may come to resemble Soviet-style humor,
perhaps by appropriating the old stand-bys. And perhaps, if we�re lucky enough to see
the day, the Chinese will even crack democratic j
okes.
Notes
1 A 1988 joke has it that Nixon, Carter, Gary Hart, and Joe Biden are in the sinking
ship. Carter wants to save the women; Nixon wants to screw them; Hart asks, �Have we
got time?�; and Biden asks, �Have we got time?� Thi
s is a reference to the revelation that the Democratic senator from Delaware had
plagiarized a speech.
2 The post office joke is a remarkable, and seemingly unique, example of an
authoritarian joke being transferred to a democratic politician, namely Richard Nixon.
Thus, a 1970s joke ran that the Nixon stamp was cancelled
because people kept spitting on the wrong side. The reason probably lies in Nixon
being, among certain sectors of the population, the most loathed of American
politicians.
3 On a serious note, regarding Stalin�s �Life Has Become Better� slogan, an nkvd agent
was present at a 1937 factory discussion centering on the new Soviet constitution. He
reported: �When discussion turned to the fact th
at life has become better, life has become more cheerful, [one worker] threw the
brochure of the draft constitution on the floor and began to trample it with his feet,
shouting: �To hell with your constitution, it has giv
en me nothing. . . . I am going hungry. . . . My whole family is going hungry. . . . I
have begun to live worse. . . . It was better before.� Such outbursts, often sparked
by drunkenness, were common. Quoted in Fitzpatric
k, Everyday Stalinism.
4 On these matters, see J. Sanders, �The Seriousness of Humor: Political Satire in the
Soviet Bloc,� East Europe, XI (1962), No. 1, pp. 22-29, and No. 2, pp. 23-27.
5 See F.K.M. Hillenbrand�s eclectic collection of jokes and anecdotes, Underground
Humor in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 (London: Routledge, 1995).
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