Hammer & Tickle, Ben Lewis' critically acclaimed documentary about the history of humor under communism, has been picked up by Berlin-based media distribution company EYZ Media for theatrical release in Germany. Working with Aktion Mensch, a national welfare organization, EYZ Media will be curating a series of three film festivals between November 2006 and November 2008; they will be dedicated to work, economics, and globalization. Hammer & Tickle's inclusion will mark the film's German premiere and will bring it to over seventy screens across the country. Screenings will be accompanied by lectures and discussion on relevant topics; they will also be publicized as part of a national information campaign.
Ben Lewis initially got the idea for the film while living in Romania and working on a documentary about Nicolae Ceaucescu. Noting that his hosts had a seemingly endless supply of Ceaucescu jokes, Lewis began to wonder if their penchant for political humor was not part of a broader pattern of joke-telling in communist countries. A quick Internet search confirmed his hunch, and the project was launched. Over two years in the making, Hammer & Tickle is the product of Lewis' tireless and resourceful research. As he explained in an interview with the BBC, "It's my baby. Almost every story is primary material -- no one knows the story of the German cabaret troupe who were imprisoned by the Stasi in 1961 for telling bad jokes (bad in both senses). No one knows about the Romanian public transport worker who collected overheard jokes and then analysed his material statistically so he could calculate the speed of the average Romanian communist joke."
Working from George Orwell's observation that under repressive political regimes, jokes are "tiny revolutions," Lewis' film shows how, in the former Soviet bloc, jokes offered people a means of dissenting from state authority during an era when such dissent was strictly forbidden. Offering a means of bridging the gap between individuals' lived experience and official state-issued propaganda, jokes eased the cognitive dissonance of life under communism in ways that were at once culturally important and politically significant. "Jokes were an essential part of the communist experience because the monopoly of state power meant that any act of non-conformity, down to a simple turn of phrase, could be construed as a form of dissent," Lewis explains. "By the same token, a joke about any facet of life became a joke about communism. There have been political and anti-authority jokes in every era, but nowhere else did political jokes cohere into an anonymous body of folk literature as they did under communism."
Hammer & Tickle premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last spring. On October 10, it aired on BBC Four as part of its Storyville series.