Not about me. In defense of the genre. I myself became tearful and thoughtful. I myself began to dive into words. I myself lost my life, and out of that—humor. And, after losing everything, walking around in the threadbare jacket of a disheveled philosopher, I can say—there's nothing better in life. And humor is life. It’s a condition. It’s not jokes. It’s sparks in the eyes. It’s love for your interlocutor and a willingness to laugh to tears.
—Mikhail Zhvanetskii, “What is Humor?”

Zhvanetskii might claim that humor lies in emotion rather than jokes, but it is jokes, nonetheless, that fuel KVN. As Marfin and Chivurin wrote, “So—jokes, jokes, and only jokes. Every thing else just frames them. And the KVN audience member, whether we want them to or not, takes in a performance fitfully: from joke to joke” (Marfin and Chivurin 1998, 15). Even in televised Top League performances, which often feature large dance ensembles and expensive costumes, teams succeed only if they write good jokes. Oil giant Gazprom’s 2019 Top League team, for instance, started the first game of the season with a full orchestra, twelve Cossack dancers, six Brazilian samba dancers in full feathered regalia, and seven kimono-clad Japanese dancers. Flush with cash but short on punchlines, they took last place.152 As Odessa editor Pavel Demchenko told the team the Trump Cards, “Always start with the jokes. You have to start with jokes and write scenarios around them. It never happens the other way around.” When the team members protested, saying, “It’s just not that simple,” Victoria Pis’menchenko suggested that they write jokes about familiar subjects until they found inspiration. Demchenko continued, saying, “Write one joke about our university. Write one about the game’s emcee. Write two about life. And there, done.” Demchenko, like other editors and team members themselves, used the verb “write” to describe the creation process instead of “come up with,” “develop,” “plan,” or “sketch.” A KVNshik writes skits as surely as a journalist does articles—and often with as much brute force sit-down-and-do-it. Kurt Vonnegut once said of the writing trades, “They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence.” Vonnegut thought more or less anyone could learn to write essays. And KVN editors think more or less anyone can learn to write jokes. Aleksei Eks, a successful competitor on the Ekaterinburg team Dumplings from the Urals (Ural'skye Pel’meny) from 1993-2000 and now a professional KVN writer said, “Don’t believe those that say you can't learn to write jokes. If you have the desire, you watch TV and read, and you can look around you and find something funny in what you see, you'll get there!” Pavel, similarly told teams at a training session, “I want you to think about the fact that if you write a ton of jokes and you know some interesting set-ups...if you know a few small rules about how to put together numbers, you cannot be stopped.”

Humor may be more art than science but, as with painting or writing, people who train in basic techniques can reach fair proficiency. Not everyone will create masterpieces. Still, most people can be taught perspective and shading. Student joke writers learn not an activity, then, but a craft. This chapter analyzes the social life and architecture of KVN jokes, semiotic complexes designed to create specific emotional effects. What makes a joke funny? What distinguishes a joke from a statement? What ideologies of humor underlie punchline construction and topic selection? Here, I survey semantic theories of humor, outline a semiotic approach to understanding jokes, and illustrate how KVNshiki themselves theorize humor. I conclude with a discussion of how social media reporting on KVN events constitutes a culture of comments on comments, of metapragmatic evaluation as lifestyle.