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• 1 media/odessa-2553669_1920.jpeg 2022-12-26T11:06:45-08:00 Taking Stances 11 plain 2022-12-28T10:52:02-08:00

  The scene: three Muscovites take a train to a town in western Ukraine (Khmelnytskyi), a place known for its historical resentment towards the Soviets and, now, the Russians with whom Ukrainians are at war. Denis, Aleksei, and Roman step onto the platform. “Okay,” says Denis. “One...two...three...Ha! And they said we wouldn't survive three seconds here!” The joke, despite its simplicity, relied on three sets of contrasts. First, there is the disjunction between people's general warnings and Denis’ too literal interpretation—he counts off exactly three seconds, rebutting the letter if not the spirit of naysayer claims. The second contrast is between Denis’ proclamation of safety and the nastiness the audience predicts will soon follow. Muscovites might not die in Khmelnytskyi, but they won't make a lot of friends either. The third contrast invokes the performance space itself, a theater in Odessa, Ukraine during the May 2017 Odessa League of Laughter octofinals. The team members on stage, Denis, Aleksei, and Roman, were, in fact, KVN competitors from Moscow. (They were the only Russian team competing in any Ukrainian league that season.) So the skit hyperbolized their actual situation. They were Russian “enemies” visiting a place where no one wanted them.
  
  Yet they got a warm welcome, even so, as the audience applauding them well knew. Unlike western Ukraine, Odessa is a Russian-speaking city; feelings about the Russian Empire, the Soviets, and the Russian Federation tend to be milder. One man in Odessa even told me, “I don’t think the sanctions [against Russia] accomplish anything. They just hurt everyone. They should remove those.” In contrast, a young man near Lviv, in the west, railed against Ukrainians who spoke Russian instead of Ukrainian. “How can they speak the language of the imperialists!” he exclaimed. There is real animosity between Russia and Ukraine right now. But there are also perduring ties of culture, kinship, and shared history.
  
  People outside of Odessa, of course, recognize these commonalities too. The Ukrainian League of Laughter trainer who played with the Muscovites that season was from Khmelnytskyi. Both trainer and team used the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, often, as a foil for displaying bonds between the two countries. In one skit, the Russians roll into town stereotypically searching for shchi (Russian cabbage soup) and vodka. But Ukrainians drink their share of vodka, too, and can see themselves in these characters. The trainer spoke to the team in Ukrainian. They answered him in Russian. He called them imperialists (vatniki). They called him a Nazi sympathizer (Banderovets). There was contrast, conflict, and the pairing generated jokes that hit like aces. All in good fun. The audience applauded long after their performances, tears pricking the corners of many people's eyes (including my own). When the team, “Middle Aged Humor” (Iumor srednogo vozrosta), competed at the main League of Laughter festival in February 2017, chief editor Andrei Chivurin told them, “Thank you for your daring. I am glad that you are with us.”
  
  Middle Aged Humor did not make it into the top, Ukraine-wide League of Laughter season in February. But they did advance to the octofinals in Odessa’s regional League of Laughter competition in the spring. They, along with sixteen other teams from across Ukraine—Kiev, Lviv, Rivne, and Odessa—pored over material for eight days before the May 2017 game, writing a lot, rehearsing a lot, and sleeping very little. At eleven or twelve each morning, teams began filing into ONU's “Gentlemen Room,” the room where the Odessa Gentlemen rehearsed in the 1980s, current ONU teams practice today, and where, in their capacities as both ONU league editors and Odessa League of Laughter editors, Pavel Demchenko and his mentor, Viktoria Pis’michenko, based editing sessions. They, along with Vladimir Borisov, a League of Laughter representative from Kiev, sat on a couch near the second-floor room’s windows, faces a little stern, taking notes on legal pads as teams pitched their intended performances. They are all former KVN Top League competitors. Pis’michenko played during the 1993-1995 seasons, Borisov from 2010-2013, and Demchenko from 2013-2014. The editors met with each of the sixteen teams for thirty to forty-five minutes on each day leading up to the on-stage rehearsal (progon). Sometimes teams would come back later in the evening to go over new revisions, too, so the editors rarely left before ten or eleven o’clock in the evening. Demchenko told teams, “You can email me stuff until 2:00 a.m. tonight, and I will go over it.”
  
  Just like editors for print publications, KVN's editors make recommendations about what bits to cut out entirely, what jokes to re-write, and where to add material. The term “editor” is especially appropriate since these leaders pay such close attention to a team's language; they suggest revisions to the phrasing, tempo, and wording of jokes. Teams usually meet for at least two editing sessions before any performance. Some leagues require teams to meet with editors every day for the eight days leading up to a show—resulting in marathon fifteen-hour days for the editors themselves.
  
  However, if a newspaper editor decides they do not want to print a sentence, they own the printing presses and get the final say. KVN and League of Laughter performances are live. Teams, therefore, do occasionally buck editors’ mandates and tell forbidden jokes anyway. It happens rarely, though, in part because teams respect the editors, in part because they would like to get invited back, and in part because the editors are professionals who truly can help teams improve their jokes, stage presence, and timing. Just as college football players need good coaches to succeed, even talented KVNshiki need feedback from experienced comedy professionals if they hope for long-term success. If they annoy the editors they will not get help from them in the future. In extreme cases, editors can ask judges to subtract points from teams in upcoming games if they perform off-limits jokes.
  
  Editors and judges may also lambaste intractable teams in debriefing sessions, which occur immediately after each game. In these, the league’s editors and the game’s judges give the teams honest—generally brutally honest, often obscenity-laced—opinions about what went well during the performance and where teams could improve. Together, editing sessions and debriefings offer insight into the regulation of KVN norms, the teaching of tradition, and the reinforcement of moral orientations. Editors take stances towards certain Soviet-marked ideals through the material they encourage and the type of atmosphere they seek to build in games.

  Experienced comedians know that eliciting laughter from strangers requires wit, good timing, and practiced delivery. Live audiences rarely give pity laughter. And viewers at home turn off boring shows. So editors already spend a lot of time honing timing, syntax, joke content, punchline density, and overall theme. Demchenko, Pis’michenko, and Borisov, though, also had to walk a fine line between helping Middle Aged Humor write relevant jokes about the war in Ukraine and offending people. The Russian team and the Ukrainian editors did not always agree about what constituted an offensive joke. In one editing session, the Muscovites pitched a piece about Ukraine’s recent acceptance into the European Union's visa-free zone. They joked that now there would be incentive to get the roads fixed. Demchenko, told them, “From you—no...About the roads. I don't want you to point out inadequacies in my country.” He said the joke could possibly work if their trainer, who was from Khmelnytsky, said the line instead. In the end they omitted it without further comment.
  
  Another joke, however, spurred much more debate. Middle Aged Humor thought it was funny. Demchenko said it was “terrible.” At base, the conflict over including the joke revolved around a clash of values. The team considered rattling off clever zingers to be their most important task. Demchenko, though, told them that their mission in Odessa, ultimately, was a diplomatic one. For him, maintaining an overall friendly atmosphere in the performance space took precedence over a witticism, even if the audience appreciated it.

  Some background information is needed in order to understand why the joke raised hackles. Russia has long maintained that its military is not involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine and does not support the pro-Russian rebels there with either personnel or equipment. However, several Russian soldiers who were officially deployed to the Russian city of Rostov, near the Ukrainian border, were suspected of fighting on the Ukrainian side (Yaffa 2015). Russian soldiers had also been routinely captured on the Ukrainian side of the border, but the Russian government maintained that any personnel found had either “accidentally wandered into Ukrainian territory” or had gone to fight with the rebels out of personal conviction (Bertrand 2015). The Kremlin insists that Ukraine's war is a civil one; Ukraine's leaders accuse Russia of fueling fighting in the east. Given its relevance to a Ukrainian audience, Middle Aged Humor decided to cite this controversy in one of their jokes. Just like the soldiers, they would say they had “accidentally” found themselves in Ukraine.
  
  In the lines below, Roman and Denis are Russian members of the team, Kostya is a Ukrainian competitor who is helping them write jokes for a Ukrainian audience, and Demchenko is advising them in the capacity of official league editor. The joke, about how to explain how they ended up at a train station in Khmelnytsky, ran like this:
  
  Aleksei:

  nu, khorosho, my zhe ruskie
  well, okay, we're Russians, after all

  skazhem, chto byli v Rostove
  we'll tell them that we were in Rostov

  guliali k granitse
  we were walking near the border

  i sluchaino zabludilis’
  and we accidentally got lost
  
  The punchline presupposed an audience that would immediately grasp the parallel between Russian soldiers “accidentally” finding themselves in Ukraine and Middle Aged Humor, who would seem to have no business in Khmelnytsky. Demchenko did not like the joke—at all. He told the team that it was ”really bad,” not bothering to spell out why he thought so. Middle Aged Humor, in contrast, knew that any reference to Russian soldiers in Ukraine would be controversial. That is why they considered the quip effective. As Chivurin put it, punchlines only get laughs if they are relevant and unexpected. The Rostov joke achieved both. It was relevant because it indexed the root of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and unexpected because no one was prepared for Russian competitors to contradict the Kremlin party line and imply that Russian soldiers in Ukraine were hardly “lost.” Demchenko told them to cut the joke, saying,
  
  Demchenko
  kak vstretili, ne nado
  when you meet, not that one
  
  eto uzhasno
  that's horrible

  Kostya
  kakaia?
  which one?
  
  Demchenko 
  nu, mesto kak vstretili
  well, the place [in the script] where you meet
  eto plokho
  that is bad
  nu tak plokho
  just really bad
  
  Kostya
  chto kak vstretili?
  what about where they meet?

  Demchenko
  nel'zia takogo govorit'
  you can't say things like that
  
  Demchenko told them the topic was off limits (“you can't say things like that”). This was, in fact, the second time during this editing session that Pavel had told them not to include the joke about Rostov. About four minutes earlier, as they were discussing all the team's jokes in order, Pavel said, “Not the first one. You don’t need to say things like that, obviously...that’s not a joke." The first time Aleksei did not argue, responding only with another off-the-cuff joke: “So we’re leaving without Rostov” (“My ostavim bez Rostova”). In this context, the phrase implied that the Russians were retreating without taking Rostov, in a military sense. The pun played off of both the battle overtones of the Rostov joke and the team’s decision to back down from using it. When it came up again, though, Aleksei tried to defend leaving the joke in the skit. He argued that the bit was funny and it acknowledged what everyone knew, i.e., that the Russians were “jerks” who really were (or had been) sending troops over the border:
  
  Denis 
  nu bylo
  well there was

  bylo my i skota
  there was—we were jerks

  i ostavit
  and to leave it

  potomy chto eto smeshno
  because it's funny
  
  tvoia versiia [iavlaetsia] gumannoi
  your version is humanitarian

  a uzhe, eh
  and already, uh
  
  pered vami
  in front of you
  
  a uzhe uh pered
  and in front of—
  
  Aleksei countered that the joke was funny, even if it wasn’t “humanitarian,” in this case, meaning “politically correct.” He continued, saying that even the other competitors they had performed it for in rehearsals thought it was funny (“in front of you and in front of—”). But Demchenko asked the team to do more. He wanted them to think not just about whether they could get a cheap laugh, but about the ”strength,” or merit, of the joke. What did the joke do to earn its inclusion in the six-minute performance? In other words, he wanted the team to tell jokes that meant something, especially in the Russians' role as ambassadors, as it were, from Moscow. Demchenko cut off Aleksei’s protests with a value-laden accusation, telling him to work harder instead of worrying about one joke:
  
  Demchenko 
  vy lenite
  you're being lazy

  vy sechas smeshno ne smeshno reshaite
  right now you are talking about funny and not funny

  a po sil' shutki
  and what about the strength of the joke?
  
  to est—
  that is—

  Denis
  a my—
  but we—
  
  Demchenko
  my—
  we—

  my boremsia s tem chtoby liudi poverili chto mezhdu
  we are fighting, so that people will believe that between—
  
  chto v ukraine smeiutsiia ot—
  so that in Ukraine they laugh [at jokes] from

  Rossiia
  Russia

  kommanda iz Rossii
  a team from Russia

  chto etom
  and that

  a vy govorite pri etom
  and you say, thus,

  vot u vas zapreianie
  that you have restrictions

  vot tak
  like that
  
  With the phrase, “we are fighting, so that people will believe,” Pavel introduced the idea of an external audience. The Muscovites were not just visiting friends in Odessa, joking around and putting on some skits in someone's living room. Instead, their performance would be broadcast on an Odessa television channel, during primetime, and would go up on YouTube, too; Russian as well as Ukrainian viewers could watch. Demchenko said they were working to prove something to these publics. If Ukrainian audiences could laugh at the jokes of a Russian team it would show that, despite political conflict, they shared elements of a common humanity. But the Rostov joke felt a little too much like cutting up at a funeral for Demchenko. Nearly 10,000 Ukrainians had been killed since fighting began in 2013 (Council on Foreign Relations 2017). The joke referenced the fact that Russian troops came over the border with guns and tanks and mortar shells, taking aim at young Ukrainian soldiers and maiming grannies when their bombs exploded. To Demchenko, “that is not a joke.” The restrictions he referred to, here, are supposed limitations on the team’s artistic freedom. He argued, instead, that the Muscovites could make the audience laugh with jokes that served a larger purpose, in the context of Russian-Ukrainian relations. He continued, 
  
  Demchenko
  ya posle etoi shutkoi ne vazhno mezdy razberus'
  after that joke it's not important to me to sort things out between

  Denis
  oikai
  okay
  
  Demchenko
  negativo uzhe nabralsia
  negativity has already accumulated

  [seven lines omitted]
  
  da, potomu chto my borimsia za eto
  right, because we are fighting for this

  vy zhe kommanda dlia chego?
  you formed a team for what?

  dlia chego vy ezdite—
  for what do you come here—

  pochemu vy igraete v KVN tam?
  why do you play KVN there?

  pri etom Liga Smekha
  and, for that matter, in League of Laughter?

  Kostya
  [inaudible]

  Demchenko
  stavit' mosti kakie-to
  to build bridges of some kind

  a my govorim ‘pri etom’
  and we say ‘for that matter’

  u vas i pizdets
  what you have is fucked up
  
  In the end, Pavel drew on two sources of moral authority. First, he asked the team to recall that their performance had ramifications outside the space of the game. He implied that they had a (moral) obligation to join him in “fighting for this,” a line that referred back to his earlier comment about demonstrating human connection through conflict. He further justified his perspective, though, with an appeal to KVN's moral authority. He invoked KVN tradition, and even the KVN theme song, to remind Aleksei about his presumed values as a KVNshik. KVN’s theme song includes the lines “We are starting KVN. For what? For what?” The full second stanza of the theme song runs like this:
  
  We are starting KVN
  For what?
  For what?
  So that no one stays on the sidelines
  No one!
  No one!
  Even though it won't solve all our problems
  It won't solve all our problems
  Everyone will become happier
  Everyone will become more cheerful
  
  KVNshiki know these lyrics well. The question, “For what? For what?” (“Dlia chego? Dlia chego?") is repeated twice in the song, and Demchenko, likewise, repeated this twice. In a context mirroring that of the song, he asked, with a repeated “for what...for what,” why Middle Aged Humor played the game “there,” in Russia, or in League of Laughter, in Ukraine. if not, in the end, to “build bridges of some kind." “This indexes repetition of KVN’s rationale in the song: “We are starting KVN. For what? For what?...Though it won’t solve all our problems...everyone will become more cheerful.” Pavel, thus, reinforced the idea that their goal was not (merely) to crack jokes, but to make people happy—or at least happier, at least for a little while.
  
  In this performance, in particular, the team had a chance to act as diplomats. Exchange between Russia and Ukraine had become increasingly difficult for everyone, and all but impossible for KVNshiki. Middle Aged Humor performed just over two weeks after Ukraine barred Russia’s 2017 Eurovision entry, wheelchair-bound Yulia Samoylova, from competing in Kiev (Stolworthy 2017). A connection, any kind of connection, serves a diplomatic purpose in this context. Moreover, the team could bring laughter to a Ukrainian audience, demonstrating that Russians and Ukrainians were not so different, in the end. Rather than accomplishing that, Pavel said they wanted to include a joke that was “fucked up,” ruining a cheerful mood and killing the desire “to sort things out."

  Fostering joyfulness is, in fact, an unwritten KVN rule. Editors and players alike constantly orient towards this value in editing sessions, both explicitly and through the interactional texts they construct. When Demchenko said, “That is terrible,” he voiced an opinion. But he also took an interactional stance. And, at several points during this one-minute interaction, Demchenko also adopted moral stances. He prodded the team: (1) to avoid laziness; (2) to fulfill a diplomatic responsibility—to their own country and to the Ukrainians hosting them; and (3) to conduct themselves like proper KVNshiki, i.e., people whose reason for playing is to create a joyful atmosphere. Pavel did not say all this denotationally. Some stances, like the interactional implication of quoting the KVN theme song, coded a moral evaluation both more subtle and, perhaps, more effective.
  
  Defining stance

  In his description of stance, John Du Bois explains that, “Stance has the power to assign value to objects of interest, to position social actors with respect to those objects, to calibrate alignment between stancetakers, and to invoke presupposed systems of cultural value” (2007, 139). The dialogue above illustrates how two actors, Demchenko and Denis, assigned value to a particular joke and assessed it in terms of cultural codes of behavior. Denis argued that the Rostov joke should be included because it was funny. As a competitor, showcasing (his) cleverness seemed the point of the game. But in his role as editor, Demchenko’s stake in the performance differed from the team’s. He made maintaining a joyful atmosphere in the auditorium his overall priority, with a secondary goal of displaying amicable relations between Russians and Ukrainians.
  
  For him, the potential “negativity” the joke introduced outweighed its merit as humor. He, personally, also did not find the exchange funny (“after that joke it's not important to me to sort things out”). Even though people from other teams had laughed at the joke during rehearsals, Demchenko thought it marred the team's diplomatic mission, something he asked the Russians to value as much as he did. Through argument, implicature, references, and tone of voice, Denis and Demchenko took stances not only towards the joke itself, but towards the competing values of humor versus joyfulness.

  We could simply analyze the conflict above in terms of opinions: Denis wanted to crack a joke, Demchenko thought it was inappropriate, and the two laid out the logic of their respective positions. Stance, though, offers several conceptual benefits. First, it shifts emphasis away from what people think, at which we can only guess (cf. Briggs 1986), and towards what people do, which we can observe. I cannot with confidence say that Demchenko thought the overarching goal of KVN was to create joyfulness. But I can state that he aligned with that idea by quoting the KVN theme song; that he indexed a presupposed cultural value when critiquing the team's motivations (“You formed a team for what? For what do you come here?”); that he evaluated the proposed skit according to moral rubrics; and that he asked the team to adjust their performance in accordance with the values he cited. Demchenko’s discursive stances in this interaction reveal how editors (and others) re-entrench moral frameworks as they instill KVN tradition. Attention to moral stancetaking builds, as well, on Susanne Cohen’s use of the term “metapragmatic morality” to describe the regulation of conduct, speech, and appearance among female, white collar employees in Russia (Cohen 2013).123 Like the women Cohen worked with, KVNshiki, their coaches, and their editors discuss ways ideal performers should behave, speak, look, and interact with one another. KVNshiki adapt their behavior to normative expectations, not only about humor, but sportsmanship, preparation, stage presence, and friendship.
  
  In these data, moral assessments often take the form of explicit evaluations: “that is horrible;” “that’s rubbish;” “don't talk about sex;” “be more cheerful.” However, as the reference to KVN’s theme song illustrates, not all stances are referential; that is, a stance may be articulated with an index rather than an argument. The conceptual vocabulary of orientation, evaluation, and alignment describe how individuals situate opinions in fields of cultural value.

  As Clifford Geertz said, “Culture is public because meaning is” (Geertz 2000 [1973], 12). Rather than looking at (private) moral selves, stance-taking lends itself to examining (public) social persons and the way they orient towards moral values (Shoaps 2004, Du Bois 2007). For instance, in the dialogue above Pavel invoked two values that Denis could hardly contest: being hard- working and furthering KVN’s goal to promote joyfulness. He had to convince the team, however, to view their performance in terms of diplomatic obligations instead of just entertainment. Attention to stance moves such as these allows us to track how value systems, and the traditions that support them, shift and get maintained. It happens haltingly, incompletely, and with reference to presupposed concepts of the right and the good.