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• 1 2022-12-26T11:10:09-08:00 Kulturnost: Principle of a Worthy Life 6 plain 2022-12-26T13:46:30-08:00

  Writing jokes is hard. Coming up with funny jokes, quarterly, while also going to university or a full-time job, is even more difficult. But many post-Soviet children train to do this from the first grade onwards. KVN is an intellectual tradition, like chess. Participation takes a lot of work,  though, just like Mayan weaving, Tuvan throat singing, classical Thai dance, or battle rap. There has to be a payoff for putting effort into mastering these activities. The concept of cultural capital helps explain why parents choose to take their children to after-school KVN practice instead of, or at least in addition to, soccer or ballet. People value the skills KVNshiki cultivate: wit, intelligence, knowledge of literature, and current affairs. The reasons people do value these skills and not, say, excelling at rugby, are tied to the fact that people still idealize KVNshiki as role models under a deeply Soviet rubric of correct behavior.

  Players exhibit kulturnost, “culturedness,” a trait Soviets tried to instill using advertising campaigns, reading groups, and structured youth activities. Vladimir Volkov claimed that the Soviet person with kulturnost was required to ”read classical literature, contemporary Soviet fiction, poetry, newspapers, works by Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, as well as attend the cinema and exhibitions with the purpose of self-education” (Volkov 2000, 225). These days, KVNshiki lack knowledge of socialist texts. But just participating in KVN requires some measure of creativity and intelligence. It’s hard to write jokes, after all, if you don’t read the newspapers. KVN is an exercise in kulturnost, a quality editors motivate teams to draw out.
  
  KVN, as an activity, asks a lot of competitors. In Odessa competitors met with a coach every day for eight days before Odessa National University’s semifinal match. Teams would present what they had revised or written since the last meeting, the coach would often axe at least half of it, and the team was expected to spend the next twenty-four hours writing new material. Few KVNshiki went to classes during this time. Their sole focus was KVN. This is something that the university systems in Ukraine and Russia allow; it would be much more difficult to miss a week of classes in the United States and succeed in the course. But it also indicates how much motivation students have to put work into this activity. Few sleep much during the week leading up to a big game. Dima, a university competitor on the team “Knight's Move” in Irkutsk, likewise said, ”You're killing three months of your time for the sake of five minutes on stage.” His teammate, Aleksander, continued, “Right, yesterday how long did we spend? Five hours? Do you know what you could do with five hours? Finish a book. Go to work and work a bit. And you write jokes for five hours...That [the editors] cut out!” (interview with author, December 3, 2016).

  Competitors put in this much effort because it earns them prestige. Veteran Odessa KVN coach Valery Khait, now in his seventies, said, ”KVN is prestigious because you get a reputation as a sharp, witty person.” When I asked if playing KVN still garnered competitors esteem he said yes, adding that the real chance of landing on TV meant that Ukrainian KVNshiki could become minor (or major) celebrities. ”If it wasn't prestigious they wouldn't do it. And now it is even more prestigious because of [new Ukrainian TV programs]” (interview with author, January 26, 2017). Reminiscing about intellectual life in the USSR as compared to today, though, he concluded that the market economy had eroded kulturnost. He argued, 
  
  With us everything was from the soul. We liked to make the public cheery. The problem is the market. The level of culture [has gone down].137 All the result of social consumption. The market. Everything is for sale. It's one thing to sell goods, it is another to sell culture. The prestige of being cultured doesn't exist anymore because that doesn't earn anyone any money (interview with author, January 26, 2017).

  Khait said he had long-ago created a rule to live by that focused on enduring qualities instead of fleeting satisfaction, which he lumped in with consumption: “A person should live not for pleasure, but for happiness." The oppositions he drew between pleasure and happiness, commerce and culture, mirror the contrast KVNshiki draw between (mere) humor and (soulful) joyfulness. Happiness, kulturnost, and joyfulness all rang authentic, for Khait. But pleasure, money, and cheap jokes fell into the realm of the base—the uncultured.

  For many, KVNshiki exemplify kulturnost’s creative values. Katia, an Odessa competitor, noted that KVNshiki are ”the pride of their universities.” Because KVN takes so much time, however, she said that ”either you study at university or you play KVN” (interview with author, March 23, 2017). There is not time for both, at least not before a big competition. Emily, from the 

  team Friend Zone, cited above, nonetheless spoke proudly of the fact that she and her teammates stayed up late more nights than not, crashing at each others’ apartments (they all still lived with parents) as they hammered out material. She said, ”There are people that don’t do anything. School and home. And you somehow feel that you are on a higher level than those people (vyshe etikh liudei)” (interview with author, March 7, 2017). Vitaly, a former KVNshik in Irkutsk, said that playing video games or athletics, especially if you excelled in these activities, would earn a person 55% of the benefits of KVN. Some kind of extra-curricular activity was better than nothing. He added, though, ”Of course, in comparison to KVN...” and trailed off. The conclusion seemed obvious. KVN presents tougher challenges, requires more work, and trains students in an intellectual sport that confers greater benefits than most extracurricular activities (interview with author, May 1, 2017).

  In terms of prestige, joke writing skills offer a sure ticket to cheers during performances, the respect of professors, and smiles from the opposite sex. Most teenagers long for such popularity. KVN makes cleverness look not just admirable, like winning chess tournaments, but cool. Success in KVN draws cultural capital, much like being a football quarterback does in the United States. And just as football players sometimes get special privileges in the U.S. (from field house access to coursework extensions), many people in higher education give KVN prima facie importance over, for instance, mundane school tasks. Ostap, now a professor in Poland, used to lecture in the journalism department at Odessa I. I. National University (ONU). He elaborated on the esteem in which university administrators held KVN, and they ways they worked to support KVNshiki. “If there was something Edward Arkadievich or one of his people needed—that was it. He got it, the cost did not matter” (interview with author, June 24, 2017). Ostap also noted, more with amusement than resentment, that administrators outright told ONU instructors to “help” KVNshiki pass their classes when they had to miss weeks or more preparing for competitions.
  
  Municipal governments often support KVN efforts, too, providing funding to leagues and sponsoring individual teams (those that travel to competitions in other cities). Naum Barulya, one of the founders of League of Laughter, said “[the government] understands that these kids are the most active segment of the youth. And they try to help them” (interview with author, February 10, 2017).

  Stanislav, in Irkutsk, likewise spoke about the amount of time he and his classmates spent on KVN when he was in high school (1999-2002). Joke writers would meet after class, working together. Then they would go over material with other teammates during school:

  Three of us, it turns out, would get together at my house: me, Sasha, and Oksana. We wrote all of the KVN that we showed on stage. And later we just handed out roles. We came to class later, got all the other people together. Those that had not taken part in the writing. Because it was just simpler for them to be off. We gave them some kind of roles, they performed them, and that's how we did KVN. In principle it's a normal way of doing things. The whole team can't write. Because there are, in any case, always differences. That's how I found two like-minded people and we as a trio did our KVN in school (interview with author, November 14, 2017).
  
  All of this effort eventually landed Stanislav his school’s championship. And fourteen years later, in 2016, he competed in KVN's Top League finals in Moscow, for a televised audience of millions. Stanislav, granted, has an unusual gift for writing humorous songs. As an adult, one of his KVN teammates at the factory where they worked (the local aircraft manufacturer) once approached him with an idea for a scenario and asked him to write a song about it. “I just went over into a corner of the room where we were rehearsing and started to write a song,” he said. “After a few minutes something was working out for me, and I called out: ‘Hey, Igoryok. I’ve got something here’” (interview with author, November 14, 2017). Several teams from other cities (Moscow, Tyumen, Bishkek) have used jokes Stanislav wrote at the highest level of KVN competition, Moscow’s televised Top League (Vysshaia Liga) (with his permission). Millions of viewers have likely laughed at his couplets. He learned to write those jokes, though, in the company of former KVNshiki who trained him and in a community that admired these efforts.
  
  On not being a clown

  The values of joyfulness and kulturnost work in tandem. Editors, audiences, and other competitors create an interactional frame that privileges joy. And the themes they call joyful, fun, and humorous often coincide with those considered cultured. Editors and competitors reveal how they align with this normative framework through the stances they take during editing sessions. “Be more witty!” editors called out in hourly refrain. They wanted jokes that were intellectual, sharp, and clever. This style of humor, in contrast to situation comedy or stand-up, typifies KVN tradition. In the 1960s, a teacher in Moscow wrote to KVN’s editors to praise the program, saying, “Save our souls, give us this show which has infused joy into our lives for a long time. We hunger to see the cheerful, talented, witty” (Gal’perina 1967a, 5). In response to a joke by the all-female team Friend Zone, for instance, Rivne editor Valentin asked the students to cut a number entirely if they could not deliver a more complex punchline:
  
  Yana
  v frendzone
  being friendzoned

  kak notbuk bez Windowsa
  is like having a laptop without Windows
  
  Valentin
  ”eto kak notbuk bez Windowsa”
  ”it’s like a laptop without Windows”
  
  eto ne shutka
  that's not a joke
  
  khochetsia ostroumnost'
  we’d like to see some wittiness
  
  Another team, the Bible Team from Kamenskoe, Ukraine, cracked some jokes about religion that would normally get discarded because they risked offending the audience. One of their lines included, “Our jokes are just like the Bible—we write [them] ourselves.” But legendary head editor Chivurin, said, ”Hmm, you've introduced a witty topic. Let’s experiment a little bit. We’ll decide based on the reaction of the audience [in the second round of the League of Laughter festival]." Here, the fact that the jokes were intelligent bought the Bible Team some leeway with appropriateness.

  Not all editors, though, would allow religious jokes, at least not for all audiences. During an editing session before the Moscow Region First League semifinals, held in Voskresensk, about sixty miles south of Moscow, editors Ksenia Shpileva and Sergei Chumachenko quickly nixed the following exchanges from a team from Moscow State Pedagogical University, the first because it was mildly but generally rude, and the second because it could be read as disrespectful to religious figures.
  
  Student A
  kakoi tepliy zal
  what a warm auditorium

  Student B
  da, zamechatelnye liudi
  yes, wonderful people

  Student A
  da pofig na luidei, glavno zal tepliy!
  darn the people, what’s important is that the auditorium is warm!

  Chumachenko
  nu kakaia raznitsa
  well, what’s the difference

  ne nada govorit pofig na luidei
  don’t say ”darn people”

  nu kak by
  it’s like

  <VOX > kakaia raznitsa,
  <VOX> what does it matter

  glavno zal tepliy <VOX>
  what’s important is that the auditorium is warm <VOX>

  shutka ne meniaetsia
  the joke doesn’t change

  prosto ne obizhaeshsia v zale
  you just don’t offend the audience
  
  Student A 
  a eto Masha
  and this is Masha

  ona nasto'lko pravil'naia
  she is so correct

  chto na den' rozhdeniia Khrista
  that on Christ’s birthday

  ona zadula vse svechki v tserkove
  she blew out all the candles in the church

  Shpileva
  ((softly and slowly)) Ne, ne Khrista.
  ((softly and slowly)) No, not Christ.

  Davaiete uberem.
  Let’s take that out.

  Chumachenko
  No vy zhe sami ponimaete naschet etu shutku.
  Well you yourselves understand about this joke

  Dal’she
  Next
  
  I’d heard jokes about drafty university and “house of culture” auditoria in both Russia and Ukraine, whose radiators often can’t keep up with the large rooms. Chumachenko seemed to object to the team’s phrasing more than their sentiment, adopting the voice of a character to suggest a variation other than “darn the people." The second joke, though, provoked something just short of horror from Shpileva, whose tone in rejecting the joke about Jesus said more than the words she used. Neither she nor Chumachenko, it seemed, needed to give much justification for why the joke could offend members of the audience. The editors may also have sought to avoid legal (or criminal) ramifications. In 2013, Russia passed a law prohibiting people from publicly “insulting believers’ religious feelings.” Stand-up comedian Aleksander Dolgopolov left the country in January 2020 because authorities had started investigating jokes about orthodoxy he’d told at a show a year earlier. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian team “Sex” announced during their 2020 League of Laughter performance, “Team Sex is a very religious team. And so, [we present], ‘Jesus and the cleaning lady.’” Teams in Ukraine only have to worry about audience and editor expectations, not felony charges (Schreck 2017, REF/RL 2020).
  
  
  KVNshiki value writing, as opposed to buying, funny material. Some people, like Stanislav, mentioned above, are so talented that they can sell their jokes. A joke markets exist across Russia and Ukraine and, at the highest levels, across national borders. Professional joke writers, “authors,” tend to be experienced former KVNshiki who see a way to keep their hands in the game —and profit from it. Teams commonly buy jokes, especially before big competitions. Usually these are small-scale transactions between a friend in the local KVN community and a team they would like to help. No team will get voted down for animating a script someone else wrote. But people do not consider a team comprised entirely of actors to qualify as true KVNshiki. This emphasis on creativity rather than acting skills got reflected in some of the editors’ comments. After a March 2017 Odessa Polytechnical University quarterfinal KVN match, one of the league editors told a team, “Well, your jokes aren't actually that funny. But it is obvious that you write them yourself.” The audience may only see non-stellar jokes. But editors see potential in budding joke writers, even if they cannot quite deliver zingers yet. The editing process teaches them how to do that.
  
  Another Ukrainian League of Laughter editor, Valentin Ivanov, said that KVN was a valuable activity because, “Young people can present their thoughts publicly. It’s not just a show. It’s a mode of creativity for youth. Students. Not professionals” (interview with author, May 17, 2017). Alla Podkosova-Fokina, an editor in Kharkhiv, Ukraine, likewise stressed creative development, saying, “We teach them how to walk, speak, write. And it is important that they write their own jokes. Form teams. Because KVN is a team game. And you just have to start from zero” (KVN Kharkov 2016).

  Examples from editing sessions illustrate what falls into the category of “witty,” for editors, and what does not. An all-Armenian League of Laughter team from Kiev, for instance, showed Chivurin and two other editors three numbers based on Armenian stereotypes. In the final one, a competitor joked that he could not see his watch through his mass of arm hair. Chivurin told them, “A little more intelligent. Not too stereotypical.” About the watch joke in particular, he commented, “It's a funny joke. That's true. But is it witty?” In KVN, jokes must be more than funny. They must further kulturnost.

  Editors also regulate un-cultured material. Rivne league editor Andrei cracked down on a team for ignoring previous advice to cut out base material. As soon as the team walked in for an editing session after dress rehearsals, he gave them a stony glare and said,
  
  Do you not want to play, or what? You don't rehearse. We give you advice, and you do your own thing. Did you not practice with the sound operator or what? It was the same thing in Odessa [at the League of Laughter festival]. It was the same last season.
  
  The team kept forgetting their lines, which was part of the reason for Andrei’s ire. But they also performed a number that the editors considered gross. The skit featured a young man in a long-sleeved denim shirt. Underneath the shirt he had worn pantyhose colored with a red sharpie. I’d seen the team outside diligently making their costumes, working with markers in the warm May sunshine. “How much did you pay for those hose?” asked a member of team Friend Zone. “One hundred hryvna,” one young man replied (about $4). “You can find them for cheaper!” the girls told them. The young men, therefore, had invested some time and money into the skit Andrei wanted to cut. In the number they proposed, a young man tries to prove how tough he is by pulling off the skin on his arms. On stage, a team member rolled back his shirt sleeves to reveal arms in pantyhose colored blood-red. Andrei told them, “Why did you go back to that? The first time you showed some kind of grossness. And now it is still gross.”
  
  As a first-order stance, calling the skit gross comments on its lack of humor value, at least to Andrei. But Andrei's second-order stance orients towards intellectual themes overall and an idea of politeness that, like not spitting on the floor, also falls under the umbrella of kulturnost (Fitzpatrick 1999, 82). Of course, some popular humor is gross. Much of American comedian Jim Carrey’s repertoire is exactly that and millions of people like it (Dumb and Dumber, Dumb and Dumberer, The Mask). Andrei enforced a vision of comedy based on wit, instead, and in this way policed the bounds of KVN’s interactional frame. People can revise the frame, of course. Traditions change. So when editors privilege certain kinds of material over others, they are making choices rather than following rules. These choices reveal values, some of which are related to stagecraft, theories of humor, and the tension between KVN as a game and KVN as a performance. But some of these values reference ideas about qualities of the ideal person (what editor Nikita called the “well- brought-up person”), and kulturnost emerges as one of these.
  
  Vlad, from the Irkutsk team Knight’s Move, similarly equated the intellectual style of a KVNshik with their qualities as a person. In a series of parallel statements, Vlad listed the kind of person a KVNshik was, to him. The organization of his discourse, here, demonstrates an alignment of direct object attributions after “you” and the linking verb “are”: you are a KVNshik, you are a person, you are not a clown, you are exactly a person who can present, write humor. He added special emphasis to the word “clown,” setting up a contrast between silliness and what Vlad considered “humor” (interview with author, December 3, 2016).
  
  esli ty KVNshchik
  if you are a KVNshik
  
  ty chelovek—
  you are a person—
  
  ty ne klon
  you are not a clown,

  v pervuiu ochered
  above all

  ty imenno chelovek,
  you are exactly a person

  kotoriy imeet podavat', pisat' iumor
  who can present, write humor
  
  Igor, the former French professor in Irkutsk, also tied KVN to a person's internal qualities. He claimed that Soviet KVN, in contrast to similar French improvisation games, required cleverness (nakhodchivost’), not just theatrical know-how. Sipping tea in his tidy kitchen, Igor told me that cleverness was a widespread, particularly Russian trait. Cleverness led Russians to defeat the Nazis. Cleverness allowed Russians to live where no one else in the world could survive. “Everything you see here, I do with my own hands,” he said, pointing to the lamp he had made and the staircase he had built. “And Russia has a lot of people like that...Cleverness is a quality of the Russian person” (interview with author, October 20, 2016). He continued, saying that a good KVNshik did more than simply improvise well. They could “orient themselves,” or find unconventional solutions. “As I said,” he told me, “How Russian KVN—Soviet—differs from French [improvisation], is that there, an actor comes out, they give him a topic, and he improvises. That's it...With us it is different and it comes from human qualities, from the abilities of the person” (interview with author, October 20, 2016). For Igor, playing KVN well comes less from theatrical skill and more from a creative disposition towards practical problems encountered in daily life.

  Another Igor, Igor Kneller of 1960s Odessa Chimney Sweep fame, characterized the talent required for KVN in a similar way. “Let's say someone gives you a choice, either A or B. You have to come up with a third way. KVN is finding the third way” (interview with author, June 17, 2017). Both men depicted KVN as, fundamentally, a game of wits. For Igor from Irkutsk, KVN is one of several arenas in which Russians brandish primordial cleverness. In converse fashion, Igor Kneller saw KVN as a training ground for cleverness that could be applied to other aspects of one’s life. Neither used the word “kulturnost,” but for both KVN was anything but slapstick.
  
  Discussing his approach to both KVN and theater (he still directed local plays), Igor in Irkutsk said that he worked to make sure nothing indecent ended up on stage. He told me that no one (meaning no one in the Soviet government) ever stopped him from performing something that he wanted to. He said, though, that he practiced “self-censorship,” to keep material appropriate for all ages—much like the editors quoted above. Igor called this all-audience stance “a principle of a worthy life." He explained, “That is, it is commendable when a young child listens and is interested not because someone said something indecent, but because the form is interesting. Well, and the content” (interview with author, October 20, 2018. Igor located the importance of cultured performances more in their effect on young people than in creating a joyful atmosphere, necessarily. But his emphasis on appropriateness as fundamental to a “worthy life” speaks to the same overarching values of kulturnost that guided the KVN editors.
  
  Black humor

  People filled every table on the top floor of Corvin’s Pub in Odessa in May 2016, anticipating a better-than-average stand-up open mic night. A member of Odessa’s successful League of Laughter team, Ilya, had come to compete for the open mic's first prize: 500 hryvnia ($18). Amateur comics often face stony, silent audiences as they forget lines and tell anecdotes that fail to amuse. But Illya was a professional, had competed on television, and people expected a charismatic three minutes from him. And, if nothing else, open-mic regulars knew that the night’s emcee, Alexander Sas, would come up with a few jokes even if none of the participants managed to. Sas had won a Moscow-based televised competition called Comedy Battle in 2014 and was a local celebrity in his own right. That night he wore his trademark uniform, a flat bill baseball cap, sneakers, and jeans.

  I, incidentally, was also performing that evening. It was my first attempt at stand-up, in Russian or any other language. Much like the time I ate liver from a freshly slaughtered sheep in a Siberian village, the raw, bloody organ still radiating body heat, I did stand-up as an exercise in cultural immersion rather than from genuine inclination. Several KVNshiki I knew did stand-up as well as KVN and I thought I should participate as much as possible in Odessa’s comedy world.
  
  I sat nervously sipping mineral water in the pub as Sas warmed up the crowd. “I didn't know there was a ring in the middle of the chocolate egg!” he said, explaining how he had accidentally proposed to his now-fiancee with a Kinder Surprise. Then he went over the open mic’s ground rules. There were only two: don't go over the time limit and don’t curse (materitsia). After this brief introduction, Sas picked up a clear glass bowl filled with scraps of paper. All the contestants had written their names on these strips as they came in. He drew the first name, read it silently, and put it back in the bowl. He drew a second name, read it, and again returned it, muttering something I could not hear. Then he drew a third name. It was mine. “Amy Garey, applause!” he said, as I nervously approached the microphone. Voice shaking only a little, the first anecdote earned a few chuckles. Ilya laughed and nodded his head. “Someone who is funny thinks I'm funny!” I thought. It was the best encouragement I could have received in that moment. In the end, my three-minute monologue—about the interpersonal implications of the chill in Russian-American relations—got laughs, applause, and fourth place out of the twelve contestants. After the show was over, Ekaterina, co-organizer, with Sas, of the Stand-Up series, told me, “You did well.” She said that I’d had the “cleanest” performance of the night. They sought humorous, intelligent jokes, she said, like mine. “Too many of the performers tonight had bad, black material,” Ekaterina added.

  “Black” humor includes crude, usually sexual themes. In a move I have never before seen at stand-up open mics, Sas intervened twice during the performance when contestants started making sexual jokes. After the third man did this, regaling the audience with a story about a glow-in-the-dark condom, Sas took the microphone. “Everyone is going along, telling normal jokes,” he said. “And then, suddenly, ‘Oh, and by the way, I have a MEMBER (chlen).’” He parodied the contestants, miming a man unzipping his pants and waving his member at the audience. Sas asked those in the crowd, “Honestly, do you guys even like these jokes about sex and prostitutes?” No one had laughed, or even smiled, during the spate of crude jokes that afflicted the male open mic contestants that night. So the question was less to the audience than to the competitors that had told the jokes. He said, in effect: “You yourselves know that you made no one laugh with this material. So why did you come here? What is your purpose? What did you hope to achieve?”
  
  Only about half the contestants had performed. Sas may have hoped ridiculing black humor would change the tone of the evening, cutting off an unpleasant trend early. But the rule-breaking and vulgarity continued. First, almost all of the remaining performers annoyed Sas by going over the time buzzer, sometimes by a minute or more. He manifested his frustration by slapping the table with his hands. Whack! Whack! Whack! He did the same thing, mouthing “why?” and looking up at the ceiling in exasperation, when people started making crude jokes again. I felt relieved to see Ivan, a former KVNshik I had met in the audience at a previous open mic, stand to take his turn. I smiled, thinking that the clean-cut young man in the blue Oxford shirt would definitely deliver something family-friendly. Instead he spoke literally and at length about his member. Sas interrupted him after the first ninety seconds. “Okay, that’s good,” he said, taking the microphone and motioning Ivan back to his seat. “Now you know the rules, and you can come back another time.”

  Black humor demonstrates what kulturnost is not. Not all open mics have rules against telling dirty jokes and profanity. Sas and Ekaterina preferred this. It seems the audience at the pub did, as well. Stand-up illustrates how frame influences content. Unlike KVN, there is no editing process. At open mics there are no auditions, either. They represent, thus, what comedic spaces can look like when there are fewer traditional norms and fewer people in charge of regulating them. Nonetheless, people in the KVN world often work to reinforce values from that format outside of KVN's interaction framework.