At the summer 2017 “Singing KVN” in Svetlogorsk, Alexander Masliakov, beaming, greeted the crowd with, “KVN is always a celebration!" Local games, indeed, feel like parties. In Irkutsk women dress for a night out—cocktail dresses or jeans with jewelry. Excitement ripples through auditoria, many filled with 600 to 1,000 people even on weekday nights. Upbeat, usually Western, Top 40 songs pump up the crowd as they wait for teams to come on stage. “I keep hopin’, we'll eat cake by the ocean” boomed out as people filed into the auditorium of Irkutsk's Siberian Institute of Law, Economics, and Management in October 2016, about half running late. But not as late as the performers. Feet tapped as the audience waited. Friends air-kissed and chatted as they waited. College students scrolled through Instagram. People looked at their watches. “KVN never starts on time,” a local coach told me. “It's a tradition.” The half-hour of waiting only heightened anticipation, though, and the audience clapped loudly as the house lights finally went down. The first jokes rolled out soon after, and spectators lost themselves in laughter.

After the show, I bustled out into the night with the others. We pulled scarves tight against the Siberian autumn, smiling, milling around the entrance. It seemed all of us felt reluctant to go home, to end the euphoria. Some students made plans to go out drinking, recounting the best jokes of the night as they walked off.

“It is important to me to give people something,” Demchenko said of his duties to an audience. He wanted to gift a mood, one much like the Irkutsk residents had left with. Speaking about the teams themselves, he continued, ”It is important to me that people play well as a team and that their mood improves.” Humor, and KVN in particular, is not about entertainment; it serves a social function. “That person in the audience—we want to make his life better,” Demchenko said.129 Katya, a competitor in Odessa, shared a parable the popular editor often told teams after games:

What is the point, after all, of humor? What is the point of your going out on stage? Every person that comes, every member of the audience—A man comes, forty years old, he has a bad job. He works as a driver and he's tired. He wants to go somewhere and just relax his mind. Let's say he fought with his wife. He heard—he remembered some kind of joke, went home, and instead of quarreling with his wife he told her the joke. They laughed together and made up (interview with author March 23, 2017).

For Demchenko KVNshiki should write funny jokes not just to make people laugh, but to make them happier. And he is far from the only editor who thinks this. Data from “editing sessions” (redaktura) and “debriefings” (razbor poleta) illustrate how KVN editors, judges, and participants enforce KVN's pro-happiness interactional frames. During editing sessions teams present their material to between one and three of a given league’s editors.

Interactional frames

KVN competitors behave in certain ways in performance spaces, and with a particular set of goals. Clearly, they would like to be funny, to make the audience laugh, and to win the game. But norms pervade all aspects of social life, as Goffman explains, with interactional frames guiding the way we speak, the moral ideals we assume, and our understanding of rights and responsibilities in a given setting. The frame of a church service, for instance, differs from that of bachelor party. Goffman defines primary frameworks as interactional norms that range from formal rules to “a lore of understanding, an approach, a perspective” (Goffman 1974, 21). Socially successful KVNshiki absorb the frameworks editors work within and the perspectives they seek to impart. The most important of these values—KVN's cardinal value, its organizing principle, its metapragmatically regimenting dogma—is to create joy. Not just humor. Joy. KVNshiki layer rhythm, format, and content to bring about emotional and intellectual highs in the performance space.

KVN’s cheerfulness mandate disallows much content typical of American comedy. For instance, competitors rarely swear. Editors don’t typically allow dirty jokes, nor any jokes that would be downers, as Pavel's dismissal of the Muscovites’ arrival joke, above, illustrates. Cheerfulness always trumps mere humor. As Nikita, a current League of Laughter competitor and main editor of Odessa’s School League put it, “If a kid, five years old, starts saying a bunch of vulgarities—someone would laugh at that, of course. Everyone has their own sense of humor. But that’s not for us. That is not for the well-brought-up generation, you could say...[People in the audience] are thinking people” (interview with author, March 22, 2017). Editors in Irkutsk and Odessa disallowed anything vulgar (poshliy), sad, negative, or containing references to cigarettes, drugs, or alcohol. They uniformly asked teams to increase the density of jokes in their performance and to add upbeat music. They wanted to create an emotional high.

Towards this end, editors try to excise prohibited themes long before they can reach the stage. When an inexperienced, all-female team brought some stanzas about death into an Odessa National University editing session in April 2017, they met with pushback. Reading from plain white paper filled with handwritten lines, their captain chanted a song about a middle-aged man who electrocuted himself with an electric tea kettle. The editors, Pavel Demchenko and Viktoria Pis’michenko, went quiet for a bit, preparing tempered comments for the young team’s first forays into writing comedy. “The song is—very sad,” said Demchenko. Pis’michenko continued, “It's not just that it’s sad. It’s just very base.” Taking the stanzas one by one, Demchenko said, ”You can keep the first one. The second one, about the tea kettle, is a bit—cruel. The third one you can probably re-write.” The captain pressed her manicured, pale pink fingernails to her forehead, leaning on her elbow. “This is really difficult,” she said.

Grisha, an editor in Odessa's Polytechnical Institute League, criticized another team, Connected Odessa, for similarly dark material. Connected Odessa, though, had performed theirs on stage. Judges had already issued them very low marks. During the debriefing Grisha told them, “Depressing stuff (chernukha), Connected Odessa. Two jokes about death. Then—death, death. You need quality jokes.” Teams, thus, test boundaries as they try to write funny material. Editors consistently stress creating a joyful atmosphere, instead.

They also discourage references to harmful substances, such as cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs. Andrei, an editor for Rivne's League of Laughter told a team, “Drugs? What is that there for? We told you yesterday. Euthanasia, drugs...In the drugs bit there could be some kind of joke—but no. Just—think very carefully.” Here, Andrei told the team that these are inherently uncheerful, and therefore probably unfunny, themes. He didn’t tell these adults that they weren’t allowed to talk about death and drugs. But he did ask them to “think very carefully” before setting a negative tone, reminding them that the editors had already told them their thoughts on the skit. Unfortunately, a number of teams in this set of editing sessions annoyed Andrei by re-performing material the editors had already told them to cut out. One team read off a number that involved them hitting on their female trainer, an experienced League of Laughter competitor who played with them. “Shhiiiiii—,” (“blyaaa—”) said Andrei, raising his voice. Echoing Demchenko’s logic for disallowing Middle Aged Humor's arrival joke, claiming that laughter alone was not their goal, he said, “We took all that out yesterday. It is just a cheap joke (deshevka), guys.” It was a joke, true, and writing one is something not all teams can accomplish. But Andrei pushed them to put creating a positive atmosphere first. He ended by recommending that the team become a bit more cheerful as they worked out their material: “Have fun (khaifuete) yourselves, so that the audience will laugh with you.” Andrei urged the Kiev Princesses to make their performance cheerier, too, after first issuing a reprimand. He asked the team, “Who on your team is recording this? Because you still have jokes that we took out...From that kind of mood, you need to create a different mood. More cheerful!”

Later, Andrei told a local Rivne team that sexual jokes were not welcome. He asked this team, as well, to make their material “more cheerful,” reminding them that they were “building humor!”

Andrei
tam byl seks na dache
there was that part about sex at the dacha

eto ne nuzhno
that is not needed

Team member
my dobavili seksa
we added in sex

potomu chto ona beremena
because she is pregnant

Andrei
ne nuzhno govorit o sekse
you don't need to talk about sex

pochemu-to vse vokrug chernaia
for some reason everything is black humor

bodree, veselee
more peppy, more cheerful

my ustroim iumora!
we are building humor!

Andrei took stances that reinscribed cheerful frames. Maintaining a happy atmosphere, in itself, does not reference a Soviet value system. Employees in many spheres, from restaurants to yoga studios, get charged with maintaining positive environments as well. The reason this particular frame represents an orientation towards Soviet values has to do with the role of art in the USSR. For many Soviets, art was not about the artist’s vision, personal expression, or even creativity—at least not for its own sake. Much like KVN editors stress that humor is necessary but not sufficient for a number’s inclusion in KVN, the socialist approach to art mandates that creativity achieve something in the realm of politics, not just aesthetics. Art represented a tool that could be used in the transformation of society, most particularly in the training of the new socialist person (Arnol’dov 1974, 11). Demchenko voiced a version of this ideology in his comments to Middle Aged Humor when he said, “Right now you're talking about funny and not funny. And what about the strength of the joke?” The “strength of the joke” refers to the function of the material, either in the performance space or socially, not just its entertainment value.

During a training session for participants in Odessa National University’s semifinal match, Demchenko put it even more plainly, “I'd like you to come around to the idea, so that you understand, that humor is a big weapon. That humor changes people.” Humor has the power not just to amuse, but to transform. And by changing individuals, society could be changed, as well. Later in the speech Demchenko elaborated on this theme, telling the roughly seventy competitors assembled that they were free to make petty jokes if they so chose. But they wasted time. “You have this weapon, in that you can say anything you want,” he said. ”And it turns out, we talk about [trivialities]. We spend time to do this, and it turns out that we only have jokes about people’s thighs. The Trump Cards only have jokes about thighs.” Joking about trivialities comes at the expense of material that “changes people.”

Editors take stances such as these not just so that customers will return, as in yoga studios. Instead, they make claims about the social function of KVN. Editors prod teams to stay within a joyful frame. A competitor could always violate the norms, telling dirty jokes or, in Russia, trashing Putin, but it would seem as inappropriate as peddling stolen watches at church. It's just not done. Maybe in stand-up, but KVN is not the place. That said, local presuppositions influence the material that gets considered joyful. Ukrainian KVNshiki revile Putin often, to the delight of crowds. The frame in both Irkutsk and Odessa is the same, though. KVN is jolly, it’s wholesome, it's intellectual. It’s warm. At its best, it is emotional. KVN competitors revalidate these expectations, judges reward them for doing so, spectators flock to watch it, and millions view performances on the internet. People that attend KVN games share presuppositions about what it is, was, and should be. Attending KVN—a Soviet island institution that has lost the nation state that created, promoted, funded, and regulated its activities—is a bit like going to church picnics for a church that no longer holds religious services. There are no sermons. No one preaches to the picnic participants about right and wrong, sin and good works. Yet people at the picnic will presuppose and orient towards Catholic or Baptist or Seventh-day Adventist ideas about society, correct behavior, and appropriate speech. Attendees will shape their speech to match the frame of the event. KVN works the same way.

Despite these seemingly structural constraints, however, individual actors negotiate tradition in line with their own goals. Stanislav, an Irkutsk competitor who has played in Russia’s Top League, described how his team eventually won his high school’s KVN championship in the late 1990s with jokes about smoking and alcohol. He recalled,

In the end we wrote a number that made us the champions of our school. It was difficult for us to win in our school because there was the impression that we joked about adult themes: smoking, alcoholism. We ridiculed them, and for that reason the director of the school would scold us. He always gave us low scores for the performances because he said, “Don’t talk about those things in school.” We tried to explain to him that we weren’t praising [these things], we were ridiculing them so that people would understand that they were negative. He said that they weren’t jokes, that it wasn’t allowed. But we hewed to our own line, and, anyway, in the end he had to accept that we were funnier and give us that ill-fated five, [the score] that made us champions of the school (interview with author, November 14, 2017).

Even this apparent aberration from KVN norms might have upheld an overall joyful frame, though. Stanislav noted that his team’s skit both (1) made the audience laugh and (2) promoted a positive social message, referencing smoking and alcohol only to satirize their abuse. To win a school competition, a team would almost certainly have to make both their peers and the adults judging them laugh out loud, and it difficult to imagine them doing that with material that rang negative. So smoking and drinking are not downer subjects a priori, but KVNshiki must incorporate them carefully. The same is true for numbers about death. A team from Tambov, about 500 miles south of Moscow, managed to bring off some terribly jolly assassination humor in the 2016 Top League competition. The skit, entitled “an incident on a roof,” begins with a sniper taking aim at a businessman who is talking on his cell phone, pacing. Just before he shoots, though, a competitor in a pigeon costume pops up in front of the rifle scope. The pigeon moonwalks, belly dances, and, with the James Bond theme playing in the background, turns to confront the assassin through the crosshairs. Assassination is a particularly dark theme in a country where politicians get murdered with some regularity. The joke’s topic, coming straight from recent headlines, made the audience laugh with the help of a cute, life-sized bird and a clever juxtaposition of the everyday (pigeons, assassinations) and the absurd (moonwalking birds). Tambov met the hard standard of being both funny and joyful.



The funny / joyful distinction was echoed in a slightly different way by Igor, the French professor from Irkutsk, who said, “Humor is when we laugh with kindness. Satire is when we laugh with meanness. And so I’d rather have humor” (interview with author, October 20, 2016). KVN stood on a foundation of humor, which he associated with goodwill, rather than satire, whose punchlines sometimes hinged on bringing someone down rather than lifting everyone up. Editors Pavel, Nikita, Grisha, and Andrei all reinforced a distinction between funny and joyful, systematically telling teams to cut material that would not contribute to a positive atmosphere.