The feelings team members from Knight’s Move and Team Igor discussed, pleasure, shock, “emotions,” and “the best thing,” came, ultimately, from audience feedback. Teams draw what many call “energy” from the auditorium (zal) and return it as glee. Some teams have textual styles, relying on punchlines alone to whip up audience laughter. Other teams excite through draivogo (“full of drive”) performances punctuated with songs and upbeat dance numbers. The Tver team +7 highlighted the contrast between these two strategies during the 2019 Premier League semifinals, saying, “Today we are performing, as always, without music. Because when God was handing out music to other teams, we were standing in line for jokes (miniatury)." Their jokes, in fact, ended up winning them that evening’s competition.

Both ordinary audience members and game reviewers gauge the success of performances according to emotional responses. Telegram commentary about the 2019 Sochi festival, for instance, included the observations, “Individual people in the auditorium are crying” (Team Korgalzhino, Kazakhstan) and, “Well, okay. No emotions in particular” (Baikal Coast, Ulan Ude). Dima from Knight’s Move said that he once sat transfixed in front of a live stream video from the Sochi festival, fascinated not by the jokes, which did not transfer well remotely, but by the intermittently-convulsing audience. “There were times when for a minute or ninety seconds the crowd could not get a handle on itself,” he told me (interview with author, December 3, 2016). Reactions like these spur KVNshiki to keep performing and audience members to keep showing up. I, at least, delight in the snorts, shaking shoulders, and cheers of others, and laugh more myself in return. Watching jokes together also makes you feel like a participant at an event (a party, a group joke evaluation) rather than a spectator.

Dima and Alexander from Knight’s Move argued that people should only watch KVN live, in fact, because laughter doesn't feed laughter except in the company of others. Dima highlighted “involuntary laughter,” the belly laughter Robin Dunbar (2012) linked to endorphin release, in his discussion of emotions in the audience (interview with author, December 3, 2016).

Dima
da i ty kak by sidish
yeah and you like sit there

i vot
and there

eti emotsii vot riadom dazhe
these emotions are just right there

kakoi-nibud' diad'ka usatyi
there's some kind of old man with a mustache

esli on nachinaet smeiatsia
if he starts to laugh

i ty ponimaesh chto ty shutku ponimaesh
and you understand that you understand the joke

ona smeshnaia i ty smeeshsia
it's funny and you laugh

Alexander
takaia reaksia, da, idet
that kind of reaction, yes, happens

Dima
da
yeah

kak by
it's like

i u tebia
and you have

neproizvol'niy smekh
involuntary laughter

i poluchaetsya ot siuda vot
and it works out from here, like

potomu chto KVN
because KVN

po televizory smotret' voobshee nel'zia
you absolutely cannot watch on TV

i on nuzhno smotret' tol’ko v zhivuiu
and you have to watch it live, only

Alexander
nu zhelatel'no konechno
well ideally, of course

Without audiences, KVNshiki wouldn't write jokes. Why, though, outside of pride, do game organizers and performers want to make people laugh? What do they get out of it?

In most cases, they don’t get money. KVNshiki earn the respect of their peers and parents and admiration from the opposite sex. But at the community level KVN generates no profit, for anyone. In contrast, even free stand-up open mics draw in drink-buying customers for the pubs that host them. Stand-up organizations that charge for tickets use the revenue to pay staff salaries. But community KVN tickets are either free or cost little (less than $4.00). As important as audience emotion may be for its own sake, the way people discursively frame the importance of audience sentiment also warrants analysis.

Editors, for instance, often justify the importance of emotion in terms of social responsibility, as we saw in chapter four. Pavel Demchenko, in particular, stressed that jokes should not merely entertain, but improve society—if only in the buoyed moods of people in the auditorium. He was not alone, however. Grisha, another Odessa editor, told teams in a debriefing session after the 2017 Mayor's Cup semifinals, “Have fun! The most important thing is laughter.” He went on to chastise a team that, in his opinion, had not considered audience reaction at all in their performance: “It's just dumb. Why did you even come here?” Grisha, like Demchenko, reinforced the idea that a KVNshik’s task was to create positive feelings for others, not to grandstand. Students could, of course, dismiss comments like these as an older generation’s whingeing. Instead, though, competitors tend to listen to, heed, and cite the editors, audio recording editorial feedback so that they can consult it as they re-write their skits. Editors issue advice about timing, syntax, thematics, and staging to queues of KVNshiki with as much authority as doctors do when they send home patient after patient with prescriptions, splints, and pamphlets.

Speech about speech: emotion authorities

Valentin Voloshinov argued that reported speech is “speech within speech, utterance within utterance, and at the same time also, speech about speech, utterance about utterance” (1973 [1930], 115). As speakers bring the cited, narrated event into the world of the speech event (Jakobson 1971), they reveal their own stances towards the quoted material. Quotations, then, code evaluations of original utterances. In my interview with team Igor, for instance, Katya, while describing why she enjoyed playing KVN, recounted a story she said Demchenko often told at debriefing sessions after games, one that she said “everyone knows.” Katya voiced the editor, saying, “What is the point, after all, of humor? What is the point of your going out on stage...you don’t even understand the influence you have on people. When they are in a bad mood and so on.” She went on to relate a parable about a tired forty-year-old man who tells his wife jokes he heard at KVN instead of fighting with her (quoted in full in chapter four). “That's the clearest example,” she said, of the reasons she liked KVN: she held the power to improve people's moods (interview with author, March 23, 2017). In making this statement, Katya drew not only on Demchenko’s authority, but, in citing a story that “everyone knew,” on presumed norms in the Odessa KVN scene. She considered the tale important enough to share with me, a foreign researcher, while explaining what KVN was all about. KVN was about making people happier.

About a month later, at his lecture on theories of humor, I heard Demchenko himself repeat, at times nearly word-for-word, some of what Katya had said. “You have a great deal of power to influence people,” he told the assembled students—a sentiment that would serve as an underlying theme of the lecture. He concluded the talk by arguing that their task, as KVNshiki, was to improve people’s lives. For Demchenko, even laughter came second to spreading positivity:

We have a task. We have a task...Our task is not to make people laugh (rassmeshit’), even though you have things that will make people laugh. Humor has a very hard task...Because humor is a very large medium that brings the whole world closer, through positivity. One positive person leads to nineteen positive people, and you are all quite cheerful people...That person in the audience—we want to make his life better. That's the task you have. We don't need him to laugh. We don't need him to die laughing from jokes...Something different is important for us. We need for him to leave different [than the way he came in], and for him to not go beat his wife. What’s important for us is that he leaves in a good mood.

Demchenko believed that positivity on stage should filter out into the community, improving the moods, and therefore lives, of those outside of KVN auditoria. Katya’s repetition of these ideas demonstrates uptake; that is, it shows that at least one person, and probably hundreds, adopted Demchenko’s perspective. A few specific points of parallel between Katya’s narration and Demchenko’s humor lecture are listed below:
Katya’s story illustrates how moral discourses circulate and gain credence among a community of KVNshiki. This is how traditions get reproduced: reaffirmed as students follow the maxims of their mentors. Demchenko's own discourse recalled Odessa humor legend Mikhail Zhvanetsky, who also touted humor's potential to unite. More importantly, though, Demchenko evinced an orientation towards society rather than the self, towards the transformative function of the arts rather than their commercialization, that echoes Lenin himself:

Art belongs to the people. It must leave its deepest roots in the very thick of the working masses. It should be understood by the masses and loved by them. It must unite the feelings, thoughts and the will of the masses and lift them up. It should awaken artists in them and develop them.

In truth, though, I've never heard a KVNshik cite Lenin, and neither did Demchenko (at least in the text above), a young man born in the late 1980s. It could be said that KVN contributes to a Marxist-inspired hegemony, or a “lived system of meanings and values—constitutive and constituting—which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming” (Williams 1977, 110). That claims too much. But KVN does promote an aesthetic of humor that is consonant with Soviet values, and students continue to learn and pass on these ideas.

In her own analysis of the everyday speech of what Yurchak (2006) termed “the last Soviet generation,” Anna Kruglova argued that Marxism was still real and relevant in post-Soviet Russia (Kruglova 2016, 2017). I think she got it right for the wrong reasons. Kruglova’s strongest example described people who defined “ideology” in a manner conditioned by Soviet Marxism, that is, as a message designed to support a political position. She cited a discussion between herself and two others about whether Soviet books and films were “ideological.” Krugolva’s friend Svetlana insisted that they were not ideological, saying, “the authors never wanted to ‘say something’! They merely, simply, stated the facts!” (2017, 765). Conversations with Western undergraduates, though, would likely produce similar statements: “Star Wars / The Wizard of Oz / Legally Blonde wasn't ideological, it was just a movie!” Terry Eagleton may define ideology as ”action-oriented sets of beliefs” and ”the medium through which conscious social actors make sense of their world” (Eagleton 1991, 1-2), but for social theory laypeople “ideological” just means ”political.” Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz, and Legally Blonde all make ideological statements, if not outright arguments, about points of tension and inequality between states and subjects, parents and children, and men and women. When speaking of the relevance of Soviet Marxism today, especially among those born after the 1980s, it may be more productive to think about orientations —partial, situational—instead of hegemonies, and about significance rather than stasis.