Persistence of Vision

Congratulations to MPI fellow Ben Lewis, whose remarkable documentary about Communist jokes, Hammer & Tickle, now has a hardcover companion. Here's what the London Times has to say about it:

This marvellously original new study of the collapse of the Soviet bloc began as an article on communist jokes in Prospect magazine. Ben Lewis's thesis is not simply that jokes alleviated the sufferings of those who lived under Soviet communism during those long, grey decades, but that by constantly depicting communism as ludicrous and unworkable, they ultimately - along with numerous other factors, of course - helped bring about its collapse.

Lewis has worked hard and travelled far and wide in pursuit of his mission, or obsession. He interviews an ancient Soviet-era cartoonist in his Moscow tower block, now aged 107, who once made jokes against Trotsky to please Stalin. He looks up Lech Walesa, still living in Gdansk, and now rather an embittered figure, like so many former political leaders. And he unearths the kind of jokes that wouldn't necessarily work too well today in the pub. One from the early days, for instance, goes, “An old peasant woman is visiting Moscow zoo, when she sets eyes on a camel for the first time. ‘Oh my God,' she says, ‘look what the Bolsheviks have done to that horse!'

[...]

[H]is study is a fine tribute to the joyous, humane anarchy of laughter, whose nearest political analogue is that ramshackle, chaotic system of political wishful thinking called democracy. His book even has a moral, which is that we should never stop making jokes about Gordon Brown and David Cameron, eco-warriors and idiot police chiefs, billionaire oligarchs and incompetent jihadists... the targets are countless, as always.

Meanwhile, my favourite joke here, for what it's worth: “What stage comes between socialism and communism? Alcoholism.”