French channel ARTE will broadcast Hammer & Tickle, Ben Lewis's acclaimed documentary about the history of humor under communism, on Monday, January 8th at 11:10 p.m., and again on Thursday, January 11th at 3:15 p.m. The film's French title is Humour aux pays des soviets.
Lewis's May 2006 article in Prospect magazine gives background information to the film, discussing the communist joke in its cultural, political, and sociological contexts. "Jokes were an essential part of the communist experience," he writes, "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. 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." To learn more about this intriguing intersection of humor and politics, tune in to ARTE next week.