Emotion drives the popularity of KVN for competitors and audience members alike. Nikita, the Odessa competitor who played both on Team Igor and Light at the End of April, said he enjoyed playing KVN because of the feeling a crowd’s applause gave him. “When the audience blows up, you understand that it wasn’t in vain,” he said. “It wasn’t in vain that we didn’t sleep, that Slava [worked like] a machine, that the people at home don't understand why we do this. It just takes away all the meanness, all the fatigue.” Katia defined this feeling as a “high” (“kaif”), saying, “You go out on stage and perform, you get such a high from it” (interview with author March 23, 2017). Most competitors describe why they like KVN in much the same way—it’s fun for them, as performers. But they draw much of their own enjoyment from the audience’s reactions. Thus, they work to write acts that build excitement, create a “good mood,” and trigger out-loud laughter.

Intense onstage experiences bookmark key moments in some competitors’ lives. Yuri Isakov, introduced in chapter one, recalled a time when his Ekaterinburg team got straight high scores in the 1980s, saying, “Perhaps it is for the sake of such moments that it is worthwhile to play this game?” (Isakov 1996, 92). In a diatribe after a disappointing Odessa Mayor’s Cup quarterfinal match, main editor Nikolai also tied the emotional experience of competitors to the excitement of the audience. Nikolai told the teams that all the editors had played for a long time (all had played in televised matches), and all had gotten a lot out of the game. “We are from our souls trying to make KVN [possible]." A few of the teams, by skipping meetings and editing sessions, had both failed the audience and robbed themselves of the chance to ride the reactions of an elated crowd. “We want you to have those kinds of emotions,” he concluded.

Like Nikita, competitors on the Irkutsk team “Knight's Move” also shared narratives of emotional experiences in KVN. In the following excerpts, Dima and Aleksander of Knight's Move talked about the emotions they drew from enthusiastic crowd responses, including, “pleasure,” “indefinable sensations,” and “emotions” (interview with author, December 3, 2016). The exchange below followed a question from me about who coached children's leagues in Krasnoyarsk, where Dima grew up. I hadn't asked the team about emotion. I hadn't actually spoken at all for over a minute. Dima began reminiscing about his days playing in school leagues. He explained the enthusiasm Krasnoyarsk children had for playing KVN in terms of feelings, in terms of the reasons he, at least, enjoyed the game. Making people laugh gave him, he said, “moral satisfaction."

Dima
no KVN eto
well KVN is

ty na tsenu ukhodish
you go out on stage

no, ne znaiu
well, I don't know

dlia menia
for me

ia vykhozhu
I go out there

i ia poluchaiu moral’noe udovol’stvoe ot etogo
and I get moral satisfaction from it

Aleksander then agreed, saying that they all get that kind of feeling from playing KVN. He, though, linked this to the audience’s response. Unlike theater performers or singers, who only get applause at the end of a performance, people will applaud KVNshiki “however much you want” (line 16). After the crowd “screams and claps,” he said, “you somehow feel...” Aleksander did not finish this statement, putting words to exactly what he felt. He raised both pitch and loudness on “feel,” though, adding emphasis to the idea of feeling, in particular.

Aleksander
da, poluchaetsia
yeah, it’s like

nu i kak-to my vse
well and it’s like that for all of us

to est—
that is

[20 lines omitted]

ty ponimaesh’ v chem delo
you understand, the thing is

teatraly ili pevtsy
theatergoers or singers

im budiat appladirovat'
people will applaud them

tol'ko v kontse ikh vystuplenie
only at the end of their performance

a v KVNe
but in KVN

to est
that is

skol’ko ty zakhochish
however much you want

stol’ko tebe i budiat applaudirovat’
that’s how much they will applaud you

[3 lines of overlap omitted]

to est
that is

da
yeah

to est
that is

ty napishesh i
you write and

tebe budiat khlopat' posle kazhdoi tvoei shutki
they will applaud you after every one of your jokes

ty budesh poluchat’ ovatsii
you’ll get ovations

to est vot—
that is, like—

i posle etogo
and after that

kak by
it’s like

kogda tolpa krichit, khlopaet
when the crowd screams, claps

i kak by chuvstvuesh’
you somehow feel

chto, nu...
that, well...

Dima chimed in, then, talking about the rush he felt on stage as an “indefinable sensation.” In a moment of rhetorical iconicity, Dima’s fluency of speech broke down as he tried to characterize this feeling in words. His intonation units became shorter and his narrative choppier as he paused to think about how to convey what a peak moment on stage felt like. Dima relied on more one-word filler phrases (“like,” “well”) and stopped several times to re-phrase, before saying that he really could not convey the feeling, but that “there were emotions...really." In a middle passage not transcribed here, Dima explained that his high school team was playing in a Krasnoyarsk finals match during their senior year, and it was to be their last game. “They loved us in the city, and they knew that we were graduating,” he said. During their last number, a musical skit for an event called Contest of One Song (Konkurs Odnoi Pesni), they’d hoped to rouse the whole auditorium—and they did. Dima said that he didn't care that he’d lost the final; he’d remember the moment forever.

Dima 
dlia menia
for me

dlia menia eto samoe neopredeliaemoe oshchushchenie
for me it is the most indefinable sensation

bylo togo, vot...
there was, like

[22 seconds omitted]

no u nas byl KOP
well we had a [song for the] Contest of One Song

pod Bon Dzhoviem
to Bon Jovi

“It's my life”
“It's my life”

i tam byl takoi moment
and there was this moment

ia nekogda ne zabudu
I'll never forget it

tam byl
there was

poluchaetsia
like

nu
well

pripev, i v kontse bylo tipa—
the chorus, and at the end there was like—

i khotelos’ by, chtoby ves zal
and we wanted for the whole auditorium

stal i nachal khlopat’
to stand and clap

i liudi
and people

oni prosto
they just

chetyre sto chelovek oni prosto stoiut i nachninaiut khlopat’
four hundred people stand and begin to clap

eto prosto neopredeliaemoe oshchushchenie
that’s just an indefinable sensation

tam prosto tam uzhe
there just there already

ty pro—
you jus—

nu tam uzhe ne pet’ nichego ne mozhesh’
well you can't even sing anymore

potomu chto ty prosto v shoke
because you're just in shock

pro— nu—
jus— well—

nel’zia
it's impossible

eto
it’s

nu tak ne peredat’
well can’t convey it

emotsii byli
there were emotions

voobshche
really

tam dazhe
there even

pofig chto etot final proigrali
I couldn't care less that we lost the final

no eto na vsiu zhisniu ostanitsia eto v pamiati
but that will stay in my memory my whole life

In a similar vein, Nikita from Team Igor in Odessa claimed that pride in writing funny material fueled emotion on stage, saying, “When you write it yourself, and you understand that people are laughing at what you wrote, that is the best thing.” His teammate Slava agreed, continuing, 

Slava
da i bol'she potomu chto ty sam eto pridumal
yeah and even more because you thought it up yourself

i sam eto sygral
and you played yourself

i ty ponimaesh, chto eto smeshno liudam
and you understand that it's funny for people

to chto ty sam pridumal
what you yourself thought up

chto tvoia komanda pridumala
what your team thought up

i kogda tebe nachineaet khlopat’
and when they begin to clap for you

nachinaet vot stoit ot etogo
it begins to seem worth it

Nikita
postaianno
always

These narratives about emotional experience are valuable because they illustrate why KVNshiki themselves enjoy the game. Katya even said that emotions were why she “loved KVN, and why everyone who plays does” (interview with author, March 23, 2017). The competitors cited here, though, drew distinctions between the feelings they get from KVN and those that a theater performer might also receive from being in front of a crowd. For one, Alexander noted that KVNshiki get applause and laughter (ideally) throughout each three- to five-minute number instead of only at the end of a performance. Teams actively modulate the mood of an auditorium. Nikita and Slava also pointed to the fact that they authored their own material, which was uniquely gratifying. The affective relationship between competitors and audiences is two-way and agentive. KVNshiki make people laugh, which is part of the fun. They are inciting laughter, creating a mood, not just reading a script.

Onstage

I played KVN during a competition only once during my fieldwork, though I was not actually on stage. I worked with the all-female team Friend Zone as a sound operator (zvukooperator or zvukar’) for the February 2016 League of Laughter Festival in Odessa. The team got in touch with me shortly before the festival in response to a post I had made on the social networking platform vKontakte. In my post in a local Odessa KVN group, I had described my research and said I would be happy to volunteer either as a sound operator or general helper for a team. Friend Zone needed a sound operator. I was in luck.

Sound operators manage the music that plays as teams enter and leave the stage, sound effects during and after jokes, and short musical clips that serve as transitions between skits. Friend Zone had eight clips for their three-minute performance, some of which were repeated. Sound operators have to memorize the skits so that they can play clips at exactly the right time, cued by the performer's lines. Ideally, the sound operator rehearses extensively with the team so that they can nail timing and adjust to changes the team makes. We were only two days away from the competition, though, so the team and I worked together only a few times. I met Yana, Nastya, Emily, and Vika at the hotel complex where teams had assembled to compete for twenty-five slots in the central League of Laughter televised league. We found a hallway where we could practice. Rehearsing teams took up nearly every inch of the OK Odessa hotel, some leaping about, others sitting atop teammates' shoulders. Friends who had not seen each other since the last year’s competition crowded around the bar area. In a relatively quiet spot, the team showed me their skit and told me when to play sound clips and songs on Nastya’s laptop. We ran through their material for about thirty minutes, then went to meet with editors Pavel Demchenko and Vladimir Borisov in a different hallway. Neither Demchenko nor Borisov edited for the central League of Laughter event, but both served as editors for the Odessa regional League of Laughter competitions. Demchenko, too, had worked with Friend Zone several times over the past two years through the Odessa National University league. Demchenko and Borisov volunteered their time to Friend Zone in part because it was a team they knew, and in part because they wanted Odessa teams to make a strong showing in this national competition.

I’d already interviewed Demchenko, so didn’t feel terribly nervous trying out a gig as a sound operator in front of him. But Vladimir Borisov, who I’d watched on television in Top League competitions for years, left me feeling a little star struck. With only thirty minutes to rehearse, I really hoped I remembered all the girls’ lines. I said hello to Demchenko and introduced myself to Borisov, who smiled. “And so, we have a zvukar’ from America,” he said, looking amused.

Both editors sat in chairs with their backs to a wall in the hallway, near a slightly larger space by the elevator landing. I sat on the floor a few feet away from them, with the laptop. The girls lined up to the left of the editors and prepared to make their entrance on “stage.” They walked forward. Silence. They all looked at me. I’d missed the cue. I hadn't estimated correctly where the imagined stage began so that I could play the team's opening theme, a slick pop voice that proclaimed, “You've been friendzoned!” We tried again. I was still late. I got it the third time, and we went through the rest of the skit successfully. Demchenko told the team they should get to punchlines more quickly and write a few more jokes. Afterwards, Emily said they were going to go home to work on new material. We agreed to meet the following day, before the performance.

The next day, I got to the OK Odessa theater at 9:00 a.m. and watched about an hour of the first round performances before the girls arrived. The team had been up late practicing and trying to add speech bubble graphics to a video they'd recorded. In the end they cut the video and added in two numbers that I had not yet seen. The music, thus, had to be changed. The girls put on their red performance dresses, applied makeup (bright red lipstick), and sat discussing how best to arrange the skit. We did not begin to rehearse the new material in earnest until noon, about two hours before the performance. We practiced in the sunlit circular hall surrounding the theater. All the other teams were talking and rehearsing, too, so the team had a hard time hearing the sound from my dinky laptop speakers. After a number of re-tries, with the girls stopping to stare at me even when I had played clips, unhearable over the din, we seemed to have the number down pat. This is going to go just fine, I thought to myself. I believed that for all of ten minutes.

About forty-five minutes before Friend Zone, team number 56 in the queue, was due on stage, we met with Demchenko again for one more run-through. He recommended re-arranging the order of the skits and changing the final line (coda). He left, then, to help other teams. We managed to go over the new order five times. The girls seemed shaky in their lines. I was thrown a little, too, trying to re-order sound clips even as I played them. With fifteen minutes before our time slot, it was time to head to the auditorium. The girls lined up alongside the stage, waiting for their three-minute turn in front of the League of Laughter editors, Andrei Chivurin, Valentin Ivanov, and Chingis Mazinov, who decided which teams would advance to the next round. Emily, unofficial team captain, stared straight ahead and clenched her jaw. She may have sensed disaster. Competitors from the other teams filled the thousand-seat theater, most awaiting their own first- round showings. It was the largest crowd Friend Zone had faced in the two years they’d been competing.

I sat on a platform mid-way up the theater, behind a large black sound console with ten or so sliding bars. I didn’t know what any of these bars did. Panic set in as I wondered if I was about to completely ruin the team’s performance. I watched carefully as the three sound operators ahead of me slid the bars up and down, creating fade-out effects with the music. All of them did this. It does, of course, sound much better for a theme song to slowly decrease in volume instead of just cutting off mid-phrase. It occurred to me that I would have to do this, too, if I didn’t want Friend Zone’s performance to sound choppy and strange. But I had never practiced modulating volume on a console and it threw another variable into a performance that felt less rehearsed by the minute. Stage fright nagged at my psyche like a bored, hyperactive child. As I took over from the sound operator for the team ahead of ours, I confirmed which bar controlled volume. Okay, I thought. This might be okay.

I plugged my laptop into the speaker and sat down at the console. Yana’s head peeked out from behind the curtain. They would enter when I began playing the music. I pressed play, my right hand on the console's sliding volume bar. “YOU'VE BEEN FRIENDZONED” blared out before I could adjust the volume down a bit. A bauble; I managed to fade out the theme song successfully. The girls performed the first two skits as rehearsed and I did not flub their sound clips. Then things fell apart. One of the girls missed some lines, causing the other team members to impromptu skip punchlines and move on to the next skit. In negotiating this, Yana said lines for a skit that had originally followed the one that had gotten cut off, not for the next skit in the new order established day-of. I caught it and played the right song. But everyone was floundering. My carefully arranged playlist suddenly became irrelevant. I had to adapt to whatever the girls might say next, playing sounds wherever a punchline or transition might appear. When Nikita from Team Igor later told me about how he felt after a performance, saying, “I remember every second of rehearsal, but on stage—nothing,” I understood what he meant. It is as if I blacked out for ninety seconds of the performance. I was simply reacting. The number ended with me not really knowing how the girls, “we,” had done. I knew only that what had just happened was not what we had planned, that the audience had clapped politely rather than enthusiastically, and that I had not messed up, at least not a terrible lot. I felt enormously relieved, actually. I had not let the team down and had not shamed my country, being, most likely, the only American to compete in team comedy in Ukraine.

Friend Zone did not advance to the next round. The girls looked hangdog after the performance and bickered among themselves, chastising each other for missing lines. But all seemed forgotten by the nighttime party, that night, like every night at the festival, in a rented-out top-floor nightclub near the OK Odessa. Friend Zone danced and chatted with the other Odessa KVNshiki, happy to be a part of a pan-Ukrainian, semi-international tusovka (party) of competitors. People made friends at these social events, danced, sang karaoke, played trivia games, drank, and faced off in razminka. Only twenty-five teams out of one hundred and sixty made it through the editing gauntlet to the televised gala concert a week later. But all of them partied, for days.

Love of the game

Games themselves form only a piece of KVN sociality. KVNshiki meet and forge friendships, both within and between teams, at brainstorming meetings, rehearsals, editing sessions, after-game events, and festivals. When people speak of “love for KVN,” then—and many do—they refer to this larger set of interpersonal activities, not just what happens in the space of two-hour performances. Discourses of friendship and love, in fact, commonly crop up in student discussions about KVN. For instance, the vKontakte page (like Russian Facebook) for Russia’s First League says that the online community is “For everyone who loves KVN. For everyone who played and plays, or has a relationship with the First League.” Likewise, Irkutsk's KVNshiki organized a get-together on Valentine’s day, calling it “A Good Occasion to Meet.” The announcement for the event ended with the lines, “Eternal love. Love for KVN” (“Vechnaia liubov'. Liubov k KVN”). The Youth League in Kharkiv, Ukraine also hosted a special Valentine's Day competition in 2016. In an interview before the match, Yulia, a university student, described KVN as not only fun, but addictive. “KVN is a game,” she said, “And it’s a way of life. It's socializing, it’s a party, and it’s about meeting new people. And if you try KVN once—that's it. It’s like a drug...It's impossible to kick the habit” (KVN Kharkiv 2016).Dima of Knight’s Move described KVN in terms of community, as well. “KVN is not a competition,” he said. Teams competed, to be sure, but this was just one facet of the activity, for him. Just as in the song “My First Festival,” Dima called KVN a family, saying, “All in all KVN is one big family...all the teams are friends” (interview with author, December 3, 2016). “Behind the scenes,” he said, “everything should be kind” (”za kulisy dolzhno byt’ dobriy”).

KVN's culture-as-constituted, if not necessarily culture-as-lived (Sahlins 2000), is one of camaraderie rather than cut-throat competition. In truth, rivalries do sometimes turn into feuds, teams occasionally steal material from each other, and some people play KVN for fame and wealth rather than “love of the game” or abiding friendships. But spectators want to see warmth, not infighting, and judges praise teams with, “that touched my heart” or “stole my heart.” Yuli Gusman, who competed in the 1960s and now serves as a judge, highlighted some of KVN's core values in his comments to the 2013 KVN Top League finalists. “Our game has been going on since 1961,” he said. “Since 1961, and it's already the 2000s...and if the television audience, people taken [with KVN], cry, suffer, make merry, become joyful, laugh out loud, and become friends—it's a wonderful thing, and we call it KVN.” In 1967, KVN's television editor, Elena Gal'perina, similarly said, “And anyway, KVN IS. And it exists because people want to be in the collective, to think, to joke, to laugh—to be happy, at the end of the day!” (Gal’perina 1967a, 28). But explicit statements like Gusman’s and Gal’perina’s would matter little if performers themselves did not reinscribe KVN as an activity that promotes positivity both on- and offstage.