“The real communicative 'products' which are usable signs are, on the contrary, living evidence of a continuing social process, into which individuals are born and within which they are shaped, but to which they then also actively contribute, in a continuing process.”
—Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature

I sat in the audience of the Baikal School League’s second quarterfinal match in December 2015, smiling at times, giggling at others, and occasionally joining the other three hundred people in the audience in waves of laughter. People delighted as the team Off Line poked fun of their parents’ generation, made skillful puns, and built jokes based on performances in Irkutsk’s (adult) Baikal League. As I waited to collect my coat after the performance I felt a bit giddy and a bit tired, more like I’d just run a half-marathon than spent an evening at the theater. Chemically speaking, in fact, KVN performances more closely resemble hard exercise than any other activity. Belly laughter, or laughter characterized by involuntary contraction of the orbicularis oculi (eyelid) muscles, floods the brain with endorphins that have opioid-like effects—only without all the sweating a runner’s high requires (Dunbar et al. 2012). Getting people to laugh out loud is not easy, of course, and teams can’t always achieve this. But even when KVN isn’t terribly funny the skits are still cheery, upbeat, and pleasant to watch. Stand-up that isn’t funny ranges from boring to unendurable.

This chapter argues that KVN, as an institution, produces patterned types of emotional experiences for competitors and audience members alike. Team members, at least those in Odessa, Irkutsk, and Moscow, largely orient towards the norms of joyfulness, positive humor, and out-loud laughter laid down by league editors. Audiences, in turn, revel in performances that occasion mass gaiety and, sometimes, paroxysms of laughter. Here, I link discourses about private emotional experience to the structures—including leagues, municipal organizations, national governments, and KVN traditions—that shape affective responses during competitions. I examine these narratives in terms of three levels of significance, the personal, the social, and the political, dividing discussion into the following sections:

(1) KVN as individual emotional experience

(2) The social significance of emotion in KVN

(3) Emotion and state objectives

Rather than analyzing emotion as an internal state, I view it as a socially-narrated, socially- produced phenomenon (Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1990, Lutz 1988). I do not make claims about what people might actually feel. Instead, I focus on discourses about emotion, specifically, joyfulness, elation, and love. Discourse anchors emotion in social life, where, in the examples considered here, it finds significance. This also means that I employ the categories made relevant by informants themselves. No one used “collective effervescence” when talking to me, though I sometimes thought of KVN performances in those terms. They did, however, say “joy,” “delight,” “emotion,” “mood,” “sensation,” “cheery,” “peppy” (“bodriy”), and “a high.” Considering emotion in terms of these categories allows for a fuller appreciation of what KVN represents to participants, as well as an understanding of how the values they hold give rise to certain kinds of performance experiences. At base, KVN differs from most other comedy formats in that editors and teams work to design an atmosphere that is joyful rather than jokes that are funny. KVN games are exercises in creating a “good feeling,” whatever that may mean in a given community. One team at the 2016 League of Laughter Festival in Odessa was even called “Architect of a Good Mood” (“Arkhitektor khoroshego nastroeniia”). At the same competition, the Kiev team ”Summer Evening” (”Letniy Vecher”) adopted the slogan, “Not a team, but an emotional state” (“ne komanda, a nastroenie”).

In KVN, emotions, interaction frames, and value systems intertwine. As those researching ”emotion pedagogies” have noted, socialization to cultivate certain emotional states often trains people in moral orientations, as well (Matza 2018, Wilce and Fenigson 2016). Instead of harnessing emotion in the service of neoliberal selves, however, KVNshiki discuss emotion, and the creation of emotional states, in terms of creativity, teamwork, and social responsibility, all within a frame centered on others rather than the self.