This page is referenced by:

• 1 2022-11-26T13:35:48-08:00 Conclusion: Humor as Tradition 3 plain 2022-11-27T08:07:24-08:00

  A painful loss in 1998 pushed Aleksei Eks, who now writes for KVN teams and television shows professionally, but was then a college sophomore, to get serious about joke writing. "It was about three weeks from the game. And I knew we wouldn't have time to write the skits. I knew three weeks before the game that we were going to lose. And that upset me very much." His team took third place out of six, but did not advance to the finals. Eks then started reading humor magazines and setting himself assignments to write jokes. "I came up with a system where you write ten jokes a day. And I stuck to that for several years." Eks spent the summer after his final round loss writing every day. So when the next school year started, Eks brought in three hundred quality jokes to the first team meeting. "Other people did nothing all summer, and I wrote jokes," he said, laughing. His team chose twenty-five out of the three hundred he'd written, wrote skits around them, and did well the following season. "We ended up at the gala concert of our local KVN festival, and we were even on TV," he recalled. Following his trip to the Sochi festival later that season, after watching hundreds of teams' performances, Eks picked up speed. "When I go to Sochi, I don't leave the auditorium for a week. There's humor going on for twelve hours a day." After Sochi he started writing twenty-five to thirty jokes a day. "Once I even wrote a hundred,' he said. "But that was just an experiment" (interview with author, October 28, 2018).

  Eks, at least during that summer, wrote alone. Many teams brainstorm together. In the writing session pictured above, during a three-day School of KVN training retreat held in the Moscow region, our team wrote topics on nine sheets of paper: sports, nature, relationships, politics, music, etc. Each person took a sheet and jotted down either jokes or humorous situations for five minutes. Then we switched papers. After everyone had written on every topic we read out the ideas, talked them over, and built three skits out of the best punchlines. 

  Less ad hoc teams also frequently make use of brainstorming circles. At the 2019 Sochi festival, for instance, the Irkutsk and Ulan-Ude team Buryats worked to write a few new jokes to fill out their existing numbers. The team, though, made up not only of competitors but also of several dedicated authors, split into two groups. They decided that one group would write jokes for the first skit and the other would write jokes for the second. I sat with the second group in their Sochi hotel room as they scribbled furiously. Tanya, who I'd met in Irkutsk in 2016, kept time. No one spoke. Write. Time's up. Switch. Write. Time's up. Switch. After about an hour the two groups got together and read what they'd come up with. A young man named Valera had the most jokes by far: "Ha ha! You pay for gasoline!" He read off one of his punchlines. Everyone chuckled. It was one of the best jokes of the evening. It would, in fact, end up not only in the team's Sochi performance but in one of their televised Premier League games in the spring.

  KVNshiki learn joke writing traditions from coaches, from older teammates, and perhaps even from competitors. Sergei Chumachenko, the director for suburban Moscow KVN leagues, stressed the idea that KVN was a mass, rather than elite, activity, during a KVN training event for high school students. "Anyone can play KVN," he said. "It is important, and Masliakov has always insisted on this, that you don't have to have special talents to participate in KVN." KVNshiki present humor as a teachable skill, not the result of individual brilliance. It results from—and requires—training. As Igor Lastochkin of the KVN—and now League of Laughter—team Dnepr, said, "It is a chance [for youth] to show their abilities...they need something to do" (interview with author, February 9, 2017).
  KVN lore gets passed down, too, in traditions like those associated with KVN's birthday. On November 8, 2015, about 100 people clustered around tables in the main dining room of Botanik, a Chinese restaurant in Irkutsk. Alexander Lanin, a nationally-successful KVNshik announced, "Welcome, everyone, and happy birthday, KVN!" Teams from universities all over Irkutsk gathered to celebrate with dinner, drinks, and a KVN quiz. "Which team made it to the final round of Top League three times?" Lanin asked. "Which team uses this jingle?" "Name the people in these photographs and give the league they competed in." Teams discussed answers, writing them down on answer sheets. Questions from televised Top League, Premier League, and First League competitions made up about 60% of questions. The rest were about local Irkutsk teams. In the hardest section of the quiz, Lanin read out 25 jokes and individuals competed to name which team—most of them local—had made it. The first person to get six correct won a baseball cap that said "Germany" and 1,000 rubles (about $14 at the time). Answering these required deep knowledge and attendance at local KVN events for years. And people did know the answers, shouting over each other and giving high-fives.
  
  The next year followed a similar format, with a new emcee. That year Sergei Ioffe from Irkutsk State University (Irkutskii Gosudarstveniy Universitet, or IGU) led the quiz, which, again, tested crowd's knowledge of both Top League and local teams. True to an event dedicated to KVN, the quiz was followed by razminka and biathlon (a joke contest). The birthday parties honored the game's history and acknowledged Irkutsk teams that had advanced to televised competitions (a team from Irkutsk State University won the Premier League championship in 2011 and three teams advanced to Top League between 2014 and 2019). People came out on a chilly Siberian night, though, to celebrate with the people with whom they play and played, toasting "Happy birthday, KVN!"