Together we will create high spirits The laughter of rainbows ignites the sky A new century—a new generation! A new generation of KVN —Hymn of the KVN Youth League (Russia), 2016
On November 2, 2018, a poster on a Russian social media channel wrote, "I should have posted this on November 8th, but I know you all will be sentimental enough on that day without me adding to it." She then related a touching story about one of her students, a sophomore who had chosen to participate in the same extracurricular activity that the professor had in her youth. Why, though, had the poster told her story early? Why would emotions run high on November 8th? What's special about that day?
As the 3,000 readers of the post likely knew, November 8th is the anniversary of the first broadcast of a Soviet game show, the Club of the Cheerful and Clever (Klub Veselykh i Nakhodchivykh, or KVN), which debuted in 1961. November 8th is KVN's "birthday." It may seem a little unlikely that thousands of young people across Russia and the former USSR commemorate this day with parties, get-togethers, and KVN quizzes, but they do, and these are emotional events—not because of a TV show, but because of the student-led movement that KVN, a team comedy game, would become by 1963. KVN ranks as one of the most popular extra-curricular activities in the former Soviet bloc to this day, with millions of participants. KVN is a team comedy competition: part sketch, part improvisation, scored by a panel of judges. The state, in 1961, created a game; people crafted of it a tradition. And its Soviet-steeped practices continue to encourage orientations towards art and emotion that, if not entirely Marxist, read as not-quite-neoliberal, either.
KVN posed a set of riddles for me: How did a Soviet TV game show become a grassroots folk sensation? How did the activity survive an official ban in the 1970s and 1980s? And, most perplexingly, why are young people today spending dozens of hours a week playing this game from the 1960s?
There is a logic; there is a logic behind not only the history—why events have unfolded the way they have—but behind the tradition—why events continue to get recreated in the way that they do. There is a logic guiding the daily choices people make to write jokes with friends instead of playing basketball, to use KVN as a teaching tool in elementary classrooms, to go to a KVN game after work, to paint stage scenery. KVN isn't a Soviet relic, and it isn't still here out of inertia. It's here because it is embedded in, and reinforces, value systems that have meaning for the people I met in Russia and Ukraine.
This dissertation describes how, and why, social structures get reproduced. People re-make, alter, and reinscribe traditions as they orient towards locally-constructed regimes of value. In part, what follows is a story about how geopolitics shapes tradition. Mostly, though, this is an ethnography about joy, and about why people think its manufacture is worth the trouble.
Performing tradition
This dissertation argues that the massive Soviet socialization project, one that re-arranged people's relationships to time, to space, to money, to information, and to each other, left a legacy of traditions that re-entrench Soviet-marked moral frameworks. The ethnography describes one of the most popular extracurricular activities in the former Soviet bloc, the Club of the Cheerful and Clever (Klub Veselykh i Nakhodshivykh, or KVN), a team improv and skit game for young people that began in the Soviet 1960s, paying particular attention to the relationship between macro-level political structures, micro-level interpersonal discourse, and the traditions that result from the interaction between the two.
When describing the importance of KVN, many Soviet participants found value in comedy's ability to help them, as Ukrainian Eduard Chechelnitsky put it, get round the censors: young people (for the most part) saying what they wanted to say despite official prohibition. And for a while KVN itself was banned—at least on television. In fact, Soviet pedagogues embraced KVN as a wholesome educational tool, encouraging teachers and summer camp organizers to incorporate it into their programming (Kantorovich 1973, Kogan and Kantorovich 1975). Teachers continued using KVN while it was off airwaves from 1972-1986, and universities hosted internal competitions, as well. KVN endured as an illegal tradition that nearly all children participated in, strangely, with the full support of the Komsomol (Communist Union of Youth).
Most of the dissertation, however, concerns structural shifts in the contemporary era. The war that began in Ukraine in 2014 stunned the KVN world, creating physical barriers to travel between Russia and Ukraine, media blockages, and cleavages in KVN organizations that had operated for over fifty years. After MH17 was shot down near the Ukrainian border, direct flights between Russia and Ukraine stopped. All passengers now have to make an intermediary stop in a different country if they want to travel between the two countries. While technically possible for Ukrainian teams to continue competing in the Russia-centric international leagues—where they had historically held dominant positions—they didn't want to. How could a Ukrainian team write jokes for a Russian audience during wartime? And how could a Russian audience possibly applaud them?
Ukrainians did not stop playing KVN within Ukraine, though, in school, university, and city leagues. The problem, once again, was television. With all Russian TV programming blocked, a media vacuum emerged, and a need for Ukrainian comedy shows. But Ukrainians could not legally call any show "KVN" because the TV program is trademarked. Thus, two Ukrainians who had worked with the televised Top League in Moscow until the war broke out, its head editor Andrei Chivurin and head producer Naum Barulya, left Russia and created League of Laughter in Ukraine in 2015. They worked closely with the artistic director of production company Kvartal 95, Volodymyr Zelensky. The company, which Zelensky helped found, was named after his KVN team. During my fieldwork in Odessa in the spring of 2017, Zelensky was still two years away from the presidency he would go on to win in a landslide in April 2019. While I was in Ukraine he was the main emcee for the League of Laughter, and while he did not exactly schmooze with all the students, he was present at the annual League of Laughter festival and some of the nighttime events. I was in Moscow on the night he was elected; Russian KVNshiki there turned out to celebrate.
Methodology
I conducted fieldwork in Irkutsk, Russia (eight months) and Odessa, Ukraine (six months) for a total of fourteen months of fieldwork between 2015 and 2017. I returned to Russia in 2019 and completed some additional research in Moscow from January-October 2019. My data consist of participant observation at rehearsals, brainstorming sessions, editing sessions, and post-game debriefings; interviews; attendance at live KVN and League of Laughter competitions; archival sources; and performance footage. I attended eighty live games and interviewed sixty-five individuals.
Most of my informants were KVNshiki or former KVNshiki. Some of them are already celebrities, some are local celebrities, and a great many want to become famous. Most, therefore, preferred that I use their real names (in some cases, including last names) rather than pseudonyms. While I did attend competitions among school-age KVN competitors, my informants are only those eighteen years and older, and it is this population that is the subject of the dissertation.
I'd like to make a brief note about my positioning as a researcher. No one's yet accused me of being an ethnographic ambulance chaser, of profiting off of the war in Ukraine because it's a good story, but I can see how that could happen. I didn't plan to do this dissertation research in Ukraine, though, when I initially proposed it in 2009. It was supposed to take place in Kazakstan, which boasts a very strong KVN infrastructure, focusing on how KVN, a Soviet tradition, changed in a non-Soviet time and a non-Russian space. In the best case I'd hoped to site the project in both Kazakhstan and Russia.
Then the war between Russia and Ukraine broke out, and it rocked KVN's competition base like nothing had since the Soviet government "banned" KVN in the 1970s and 1980s. When, in the spring of 2014, the Ukrainian team "Odessa Tales" simply failed to attend an important semifinals match in Moscow, I knew I had to reframe the dissertation. If I was going to write about "changes in KVN tradition from the 1960s to the present," I would have to find a way to conduct research in both Russia and Ukraine.
Chapter overview
Chapter one examines how state-level policies on education, socialist morality, and recreation became realized in two cities outside of European Russia, Irkutsk and Odessa. Odessa, self-styled "capital of humor," hosted some of the most successful KVN teams of the Soviet era. Irkutsk teams have consistently competed at top levels in the post-Soviet era, and KVN has had a strong community presence since the 1960s. Historical accounts from these two cities illustrate how individuals worked with and within local Communist Union of Youth (Komsomol) cells to play a game that often featured subversive content. After discussing how the KVN movement developed in the USSR, I outline trends in KVN's history during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, tracing how government policies shaped KVN practice.
Chapter two describes typical games, their features, and traditions associated with KVN competitions. It also lays out league structures in Russia and Ukraine, provides an overview of multi-week humor festivals, and concludes with a discussion of how people maintain joke writing as craft.
Chapter three discusses recent changes in Ukrainian KVN traditions, including ruptures in KVN institutions since 2013. Ukrainian KVNshiki stopped competing in the main, international Russian leagues in 2014. KVN still exists in non-televised leagues in Ukraine, but on television, for copyright reasons, a new program had to be created. In 2015 former Top League (Moscow) editor Andrei Chivurin and others created League of Laughter, which has not only a central league, but regional leagues and satellites in Israel, Estonia, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. It concludes with an examination of the new kinds of KVN publics created by the Russia-Ukraine war.
Chapter four draws on data from backstage rehearsal and feedback sessions to illustrate how KVNshiki take stances about the social function of humor, appropriateness, and comedic quality. Through these interpersonal negotiations, always structured by KVN norms, I argue that KVN as an institution reproduces Soviet-marked values. The activity keeps Soviet ideas in circulation, in a sphere where those elements carry social currency. KVN is not the only institution which accomplishes this, and, of course, alignment with Soviet moral frameworks co-exists with neoliberal strivings, Orthodox prescriptions, and other, more individualized valuations of right and wrong, worthy and shameful, admirable and embarrassing. But some of the principles the Soviets worked so very hard to instill—through written behavior codes, mass media, reading groups, youth organizations, and more—took root and endure. I trace how the pro-happiness frames of these games interact with Soviet ideologies of moral personhood, describing how competitors discursively reinforce the cultural capital associated with socialist ideas as they fashion themselves into ideal KVNshiki, today.
Chapter five analyzes the social life and architecture of KVN jokes, semiotic complexes designed to create specific emotional effects. What makes a joke funny? What distinguishes a joke from a statement? What ideologies of humor underlie punchline construction and topic selection? Here, I survey semantic theories of humor, propose a semiotic approach to understanding jokes, and illustrate how KVNshiki themselves theorize humor. I conclude with a discussion of how social media reporting on KVN events constitutes a culture of comments on comments, of metapragmatic evaluation as lifestyle.
Chapter six argues that KVN, as an institution, produces patterned types of emotional experiences for competitors and audience members alike. Team members, at least those in Odessa, Irkutsk, and Moscow, largely orient towards the norms of joyfulness, positive humor, and out-loud laughter laid down by league editors. Audiences, in turn, then revel in performances that occasion mass gaiety and, sometimes, paroxysms of laughter. Here, I link discourses about private emotional experience to the structures—including leagues, municipal organizations, national governments, and KVN traditions—that shape affective responses during competitions.
