In 2015, a member of the Ukrainian team Dnepr, Vladimir Borisov, made an inquiry about a survey on KVN that I'd put up on vKontakte. "Why are you studying KVN?" He'd asked me. I'd answered, probably gushing too much about what a big fan I was, and he didn't write me back. It happens. Besides, he's a star, along with all of team Dnepr. But nearly two years later I sat in the green room of an Odessa theater with Borisov as we waited for teams to come in for editing sessions before a performance. "So, as far as I understand, you're studying this here because you like it, because you wanted to—and my head is just spinning, thinking, 'Why did this person come here from America, who needs this?!'"

I asked about the status of KVN in contemporary Ukraine. "I view it very simply," he said. "Young people come out on stage, joke, and people laugh. What we call it—what does it matter?" KVN or League of Laughter, as long as young people participated, it was all the same for Borisov.

But Ukrainian teams, always among the best, have stopped competing in international competitions like Top League. In March 2014, Alexander Masliakov announced, "A few weeks ago the captain of the Odessa team called me." Pause. "And [the captain] said that—well that it wasn't possible for them to find sponsors, or to find what they needed to pay for the trip from Odessa to Moscow." Only four teams instead of five faced the audience for the 2014 Top League semifinal round. "I agreed, understood," the seventy-something Masliakov continued, shrugging his shoulders and fluttering his lips in resignation. "And I hope that we'll see this team, a very good, funny team, 'Odessa Tales,' in the future" (KVN 2014). End transmission. Cue comedy.

Odessa not attending a semifinal round is tantamount to Andy Murray skipping the tennis U.S. Open "for lack of travel funds." In truth, Odessa Tales' withdrawal caught few off-guard: fighters, no one knows whether they were pro-Russia or pro-Ukraine, had shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 near the border only three months before that competition. As Pavel Demchenko, a member of the team told me, "We debated going to the semis. We were already in Moscow. But every day, for an hour before rehearsals, we would see what they showed about the war on Russian TV. And there was nothing to joke about" (interview with author, January 18, 2017).

Four years later, Ukrainian teams still abstain from competition in the international, televised, Moscow-based leagues. But KVN leagues remain active within Ukraine itself. Odessa, for instance, has four regular leagues and one for school children. People still watch the game, too. Over three hundred people attended a KVN game hosted by the Odessa Jewish Community Center in February 2016, sitting in the aisles of the theater when they ran out of seats. Eight games took place in Odessa in the month of March 2017 alone. So the game is as popular as it ever was. But the tradition is now cut off from the larger KVN community. It is becoming insular, like an island language, and significant changes in tradition—conditioned by radical shifts in the game's political context—have already presented. First, Ukrainians recently created a new format called "League of Laughter" with markedly different rules than KVN. Second, Ukrainian teams can no longer, by law, reference Soviet symbols. KVN teams in international games very often index the Soviet past because this is something that people in Russia, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Israel, and Great Britain all share. But Ukraine banned all Soviet symbols in public discourse in 2015. Finally, since games are now for an exclusively Ukrainian audience, people often speak Ukrainian and Ukrainian metis (surzhyk) within their performances. This shift in language use, too, signals disaffiliation with Russia. People still like KVN as an activity, but take pains to redefine it as not Soviet and not Russian.

Ukrainian KVN is a tradition in flux. It is a real-time example of how structural political and economic changes affect cultural practice. Raymond Williams, also concerned with the ways structural constraints affect everyday life, suggested that students of tradition examine three cultural levels: everyday experience ("lived culture of a time and place"); recorded culture (texts, media, videos); and the strand that he said linked these two spheres of activity, "the culture of the selective tradition" (Williams 1961, 101). Ukrainian KVNshiki are crafting the culture of the selective tradition through both everyday practices, like rehearsals and live games, and the circulation of digital texts: recorded performances, Instagram photos, memes, and humorous online surveys. Both levels, of course, interact with and inform each other. In university leagues, students spoof performances they watched on YouTube. Memes featuring local players circulate on social media. Students poke fun at other teams. They write jokes about local judges. Dramatic moments of the local season—who did well, who failed to measure up (again)—get re-purposed in both interpersonal and media spheres. Largely, though, these inscriptions of tradition stay local, shoring up city and national KVN imaginaries rather than linking them to the international (read: Russian) KVN community. I begin a discussion of recent changes in Ukrainian KVN traditions by outlining ruptures in KVN institutions since 2013. I then analyze the ways KVN participants represent the current conflict and the Soviet past. I conclude by examining the new kinds of KVN publics created by the Russia-Ukraine war.