Nearly twenty years ago Caroline Humphrey revised her classic Soviet-era ethnography, Karl Marx Collective, under a new title: Marx Went Away—But Karl Stayed Behind (1998). The book describes changes to collective farm life after socialism, but notes structural continuities, as well. At least in 1998, there were no good alternatives to collective farms in the rural areas Humphrey studied. Tradition persisted because it was economically easier. In contrast, people have little monetary incentive to continue participating in KVN. Students could spend their time playing video games, watching the hundreds of (largely Western) cable channels that flood TV screens even in Irkutsk, or working at part-time jobs. Instead they devote dozens of hours a week, in person, to an intellectual comedy game. The Komsomol went away, but KVN stayed behind.

Competitors play KVN (1) because they enjoy it and (2) because competing earns them cultural capital. It is the continued significance of this prestige that links KVN to Soviet systems of value. With each rehearsal, in each editing session, in each performance, KVNshiki orient towards a moral framework that privileges the elements of joyfulness, kulturnost, and the collective—all in a non-profane, intentionally family-friendly style. The activity has remained popular among audiences because people like to laugh, almost universally. Unlike scrolling through memes or watching comedy on TV, activities which might also make people laugh, KVN is an event; competitions feel more like parties than theater performances. The games pull communities together in laughter in regular, predictable, and accessible ways, which causes KVNshiki to gain local esteem for some of the same reasons that hometown football players do in the United States.

No central authority dictates KVN game play or content, certainly not across international borders. However, norms in KVN prove consistent enough to count as “real.” Observations of live game play in Irkutsk, Moscow’s outskirts, Odessa, Rivne, and Kharkiv demonstrated that the themes KVNshiki and editors say are not allowed—sex, drugs, death, and anything else negative— tend not to crop up in performances. But each league, and each audience, determines negativity in its own way. Odessa’s Jewish Community Center League (Vzlёt), for instance, instructs teams not to make jokes about politics (especially Israeli politics), but in other leagues political humor is common. Vzlёt also encourages teams to write jokes on Jewish themes, but asks that they avoid allusions to Christianity. Likewise, jabs at Putin generally get considered joyous in Ukraine. In Russia, though, only those punchlines which in some way complimented Putin got staged in the performances I saw: “It is highly possible that Vladimir Vladimirovich was a child at some point.”150 Participants constantly negotiate KVN norms according to audience expectations and their own objectives. But thematic prohibitions are not written down anywhere. They are not official, explicit, or centrally dictated. They are not Durkheimian social facts or “moral rules impressed...from without” (Goffman 1967, 45). Players reaffirm the meaning and mores of the game as they practice “doing-being-ordinary” KVNshiki (Sacks 1984).

As participants discuss what is appropriate in KVN, they take stances not about rules, but about what the game represents: a positive, joyous, intellectual space. Editors in both Russia and Ukraine cut material that interferes with this vision. That's base. That's not funny. Be more cheerful. That's dark. That's cruel. That's a cheap joke. Further, the value of the activity bleeds into people's understanding of the characters of KVNshiki. In order to play KVN, the thinking goes, someone must be intelligent, creative, and sociable. Katia, on the Odessa university team Igor, said that editors praised them as role models: “All of the editors tell me, we are glad that you don’t drink beer, that you don’t do drugs. That, in short, you are doing something healthy and good...The stage is our drug” (interview with author, March 23, 2017). Of course, KVNshiki do very often drink beer at post-game parties. But not to excess, in my experience, and always after the game.

KVN has not remained popular because of indifference. Stand-up comedy, with its individual format, reduced labor time, and license to make crude jokes could have taken KVN’s place. That it hasn’t indicates that audiences and performers alike still prefer PG-rated, intellectual, joyful, socially-engaged comedy—a format that hands out gifts spectators take home with them. Humor in this context is a social donation, it is an ethics, and it is a statement about the kind of society participants want to build. If KVN survives as an activity, in the face of Western alternative formats, it will be because participants uphold this tradition of joyfulness rather than humor—a commitment to “making life better” through their craft.