There is nothing intrinsic to acting or improv that promotes orientation towards the collective. However, the norms and interactional frames of KVN do encourage a collective, rather than individual, view of social relations in two respects. First, the game itself is generally played in teams of three to fifteen. As distinct from open mic nights or stand-up comedy, KVN is a group activity. “I played KVN to socialize,” a 27-year-old editor in Irkutsk told me. Second, whether or not it is uniformly true, people stereotype KVNshiki as civic-minded. Irkutsk journalist Elena Vlatan argued that KVN participants are more willing than other students to do volunteer work: “For any kind of good work, for example, community service (subbotniki), it is much easier to gather KVNshiki than ordinary school children or university students” (Vlatan 2010, 11). Vlatan did not analyze why this should be the case, but observed, “KVN is a conduit of a particular worldview, one which promotes helping out, supporting people, and being easy-going” (2010, 11).

The traits Vlatan named represent aspects of idealized moral personhood, a concept that Robin Shoaps defined as “an ethnographically situated concept that encompasses morally evaluated notions or models about the relationship between the individual and the social order, as well as conventional subject positionings” (Shoaps 2009, 93). KVN, as an activity and institution, keeps Soviet values in circulation because each practice session and each performance references a moral cosmology that privileges wit, intelligence, and education—in and for the collective.

KVN as collective activity

Not only do students rehearse and perform together, as in theater groups, but they usually collaborate to write material, as well. Working with a team is part of the appeal for many KVNshiki. “It is fun to be in a collective (v kollektive),” said Evgenii, an Irkutsk law student (interview with author, October 21, 2016). KVN teams break up sometimes, just like rock bands, and sometimes particularly talented singers or performers will swap teams, trading up to improve their chances of competing on national stages. But many teams stick together for years and maintain close friendships even after they stop playing. To cement their bond, for instance, the Odessa team the Trump Cards, which has four members, each got a tiny tattoo of a playing card suit on their right ankle: one heart, one spade, one diamond, and one club. One of the reasons KVNshiki become so close is that many teams spend a lot of time together outside of institutional spaces. Team members very often work together late, writing material and practicing. Speaking about the inside jokes and internal shorthand team members come up with, Nikita, a member of Odessa team “Igor” said, ”[Teams] are like different countries. Each one has its own language, its own relationships, and its own mentality” (interview with author, March 23, 2017). Adding to Nikita’s observations, Slava and Katia chimed in, noting that they call a team member that works through the night a “machine” or a “monster.”

Slava
mezhdu soboi
among ourselves

my shutim inogda
sometimes we joke

kogda kto-to
when someone

priam'
just

nu my lozhimsia spat i
well we all go to sleep and

kto-to odin ostoetsia i prosto—
someone stays up by himself and just—

Nikita
monstor
monster

Slava
ochen mnogo rabotaet my nazivaem ”machina”
works a whole lot, we call him ”machine”

Nikita
monstor
monster

Katia
da
yes

monstor
monster

Nikita
vot eto u nas Slavik
that's our Slavik

vsia kommanda lozhitsia spat
the whole team goes to bed

i on sidit pishet
and he sits and writes

i do utra stanovitsia mashinoi
he's a machine until morning

Slava
s krasnymi glazami
with red eyes

In this narrative, it emerges as quite normal for teammates to live together for periods of time, sleeping in the same apartment, perhaps working through the night, and rising to start again in the morning. Team Friend Zone described a similar work pattern before games, but their shared spaces were likely even smaller since all four girls still lived with parents in Odessa. Teams that travel to other cities for games pack into train compartments and hotel rooms, often spending close to a week together rehearsing, going to editing sessions, performing in the competition itself, and taking what might be a fifteen-hour train ride back home. Teams eat meals together, walk to class together, and seem to leave little space for secrets. It is easy to see how teammates could become close, and why many would value working in creative collectives of friend groups.

At the same time, the teams do work. University students, already saddled with homework, could much more easily socialize with their friends by watching television, playing video games, or drinking beer instead of staying up until dawn—writing. The intellectual labor required to produce KVN material is valued by large segments of the Russian and Ukrainian populations, and KVNshiki pour sleepless nights into the activity because there are emotional and social benefits to doing so. At least in some teams, people earn respect by working a lot, demonstrating commitment both to KVN and to the team. The norms of game preparation, thus, encourage close relations between team members and set up creative labor as a normative social good.

KVN as civic action

Pavel Demchenko reinforced the idea humor should benefit the public in his comments to a team from Summy, a city in eastern Ukraine. They proposed a skit in which a young man's arm gets frozen, then shatters. His friends, trying to piece it back together like a puzzle, sigh, “They say the sky is the hardest part.” The editors had already spent hours listening to teams make excuses about why they had not written new material since the previous day, float ideas for skits for which they had not written scripts, and present skits that had plots but no jokes. Summy’s puzzle joke, then, struck me as refreshing and funny. But Demchenko told them in an irritated tone, “What you just showed is nonsense. It is cool when you show something social. Like showing a mother smoking in the park. That's a window on life.” Here, he compared the puzzle number to one in which Summy mocked teen mothers who drink and smoke in parks, towing their babies along in carriages. The puzzle joke was funny, but carried no social message. Demchenko disapproved, it seems, because the teams wasted time on an empty joke instead of offering a critical “window on life.”

After the Odessa Mayor's Cup quarterfinals match, two Odessa editors also reinforced the idea that teams were meant to please audiences with their performances, not themselves. They took one local team to task for ignoring their advice in editing sessions leading up to the game. Grisha asked them, “What's with your script? Why did you sing songs that we cut out? Why did you show material that we cut out? I am ashamed of you.” Nikita, likewise, continued, “We gave you a chance to play for a full auditorium. There were teams that people clapped for. There were teams that not many people clapped for. And that is important.” Grisha and Nikita, thus, told the team that by performing material offensive to the crowd, they had let the editors and the audience down.

It is this view of KVN as a platform for both individual moral development and other- oriented social action that has led some pedagogues, such as Ukrainian Olga Kol’tsova, to argue for including KVN in school curricula. In language that sounds strikingly Soviet, Kol’tsova wrote: “With this in mind, the essence of collective creative education can be defined as the formation of the individual in a work process in the interests of other people, process of the organization of a certain life of the collective, where everything is based on the principles of morality and social creativity” (Kol’tsova 2013, 111). In a departure from Soviet dogma, Kol’tsova also argued that KVN could act as a vehicle for teaching self-realization, self-determination, and individual decision-making (2013, 110). This parallels some of the priorities Thomas Matza observed in “psychological” training camps for children near St. Petersburg (Matza 2018). But while those camps were ultimately geared towards creating successful, money-making businessmen— cultivating individual prowess—the goal of pedagogues using KVN is to teach children a sociocentric moral code.

This statement resonates with Soviet ideas about children's ideological training. Nikolai Bogdanov, a Soviet journalist and author of children's literature, wrote in 1961, “[Heroes] help Soviet society to educate the children to grow up to be humane, kind, freedom-loving, to actively build a better world and to wish well and do good to their fellow creatures” (Bogdanov 1961, 164). Kol’tsova’s assumptions about the training of creative, moral future citizens who concern themselves with the welfare of the collective is a sentiment alien to most Western educational contexts, and normative in Soviet ones. Whatever Soviet socialism was, it was not neoliberal. But it isn’t joke contests, in themselves, that keep a particular worldview in circulation. It is, rather, community expectations of how KVNshiki should act and the types of values they should uphold.

Since the KVN format is so pervasive in Russian culture, the game commonly features in primary school lesson plans even today. Irkutsk’s public and municipal libraries stock monthly and bi-weekly publications that outline lesson ideas which integrate theater, readings, games, and, as a combination of all three, KVN. This is an example rhyme from a 2015 lesson which uses KVN-style skits to explain the history of terrorism. This lesson was published in December 2015, only two months after a bomb detonated aboard a Russian passenger jet over the Sinai peninsula. Teaching students about terrorism via KVN exposes them to frightening events through a familiar medium. The lines are sing-songy in Russian, in a meter marked for children's rhymes.

“Терроризм не пройдет"
“Terrorism Will Not Go Forward”

Терроризм многообразен Во многих странах побывал
Terrorism takes many forms It has visited many countries

Подлый, очень безобразен,
Vile, monstrous

Всю планету он достал!
It has taken the entire planet!   (Savelov 2015, 5)

Rather than an activity limited to a few hundred or even thousand elite comics, KVN is a commonplace format, a competitive framework that can be used to achieve a variety of pedagogical and recreational objectives. People of all ages and backgrounds play KVN, in rural and urban areas, casually and competitively. Dima, a university competitor, said that in Krasnoyarsk “they practically require you to play” KVN in school. Unlike Irkutsk, which has one inter-school league for primary school students, Krasnoyarsk has three. Dima argued, though, that Kransoyarsk children themselves showed a lot of enthusiasm for the game. Twelve year-old students, he said, had “a rabid (beshenoe) desire to play KVN.” Krasnoyarsk also organizes a three- to-four-day summer workshop for KVNshiki, run in conjunction with a larger youth camping and self development program (interview with author, December 3, 2016). But informal KVN games among primary school students influence far more students than these competitive leagues. Stanislav Mazylkin, the director of Irkutsk’s Regional Children's KVN league, which covers rural areas as well as the city of Irkutsk, said that in villages children do KVN exercises (razminka) every day, even though most of them do not travel outside the village for competitions. Doubtful that the students really played KVN that often, I repeated my question to the director, who competed in KVN's Top League in the 1990s. “They do razminka every day” he said.

The Russian federal government also distributes special funds for KVN in non-urban areas. Rural children compete in a set of regional competitions that run separately from the Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk school leagues. Travel and expenses for these competitions is completely underwritten by the government, and finalists fly to Moscow (interview with author, December 6, 2016). The Russian government, it seems, much like the Soviet government before it, deems KVN a wholesome, beneficial activity for youth, and one that serves as a “conduit for a worldview” seen as socially valuable.

Enforcing norms

Stanislav Mazylkin no longer judges KVN competitions, but as director of the Irkutsk Regional Children's League he is in a position to allocate funding, organize events, choose editors, and implement a KVN training program in schools. He is a member of Irkutsk’s old guard KVNshiki, from the Irkutsk State University (IGU) team who were the most successful Top League players before the all-female collective Raisy made it to the televised leagues in 2013. Most KVN judges are former competitors—all of them successful, many of them, in Irkutsk and Odessa, internationally so. Members of the community, like deans and ministers of culture, local celebrities, and successful local business owners also judge KVN. They all help enforce KVN norms, in ways less direct but at least as important as the editors. Because teams want to win, they write material that judges will reward with high scores. They also give public feedback at the end of every competition before final scores are announced. These comments, like those of the editors, tell competitors (and audience members) explicitly what they believe KVN norms are and what KVNshiki need to do to meet them. At the primary school level, in particular, these often include advice about stage placement, timing, and rehearsal. More often, though, judges discuss joke content and effect. For instance, after a 2015 quarterfinal match among primary school students in Irkutsk, one judge told a team from Primary School #21, “I liked a lot of your jokes, they were social (sotsialnie).” ”Social” in this context means socially-oriented. The team had performed a rap about the importance of making schoolwork a priority. The judge, Anton Gerneshev, in addition to being the chief editor of the Baikal League, was a history teacher. In part to tease the editor, judge Stanislav Gospersky had asked teams during an improvisation contest to describe their favorite subject in school and to say a few words about history. One girl said that her favorite subject was gym because she could break a leg and skip history entirely. During the comments section Gerneshev told the team, “I wasn’t completely happy with your response, the one about history. We can talk about it afterwards.” Perhaps predictably, the former KVNshik issued a dry joke masked as offense. Gerneshev did, however, speak sternly to adult competitors after the 2016 Baikal League finals. “Let's talk about the future,” he said, beginning a ten-minute reproof. The highlights were that the teams had not worked hard enough, had not written material that was funny enough, and had under-rehearsed. “As we all know, KVNshiki are in their best form on the day of the game. But it seems like you started practicing three days before the competition. That’s fine in internal university games. But this is the Baikal League.” He also piled on shame, reminding them that the league's organizers had worked very hard to provide them what they needed for the competition, only to have the players themselves fall short. “People who were very successful in KVN are organizing all of this for you. When we played KVN, there was nothing like this...In my opinion, KVN has gotten much weaker. Next year the level of humor must be unbelievably better.”

Teams that want to win take judges’ preferences into account. In this way judges reinscribe KVN norms. Audiences appreciate wit. Judges do too, but they are also guardians, in a sense, of KVN tradition. One young judge who had recently stopped competing in KVN himself told students at the end of the quarterfinal match, “I no longer play KVN. It is yours. KVN is my gift to you.” KVN’s aim is an altruistic one, ultimately. The goal of going out on stage, one coach argued, was not to show off, find personal fulfillment, or even, strictly speaking, to entertain. It was to create a joyful atmosphere. “No audience member should leave empty-handed,” said another Odessa competitor, recalling the advice of his favorite editor, Demchenko. “They have to leave with some kind of joke, amusing song, something...they have to take something home with them. That’s our task” (interview with author, March 23, 2017).