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• 1 2022-12-26T15:18:17-08:00 Conclusion: Metapragmatics as Lifestyle 10 plain 2022-12-27T15:20:05-08:00

  “[Humor] helps us survive. It draws people together. United over a joke as over a meal.”
  —Mikhail Zhvanetskii, ”What is Humor?”

  
  Before television, people tuned in to baseball, football, and soccer games on the radio. Fans also read about results in newspapers, waiting anxiously to find out how their favorite teams had fared in competitions that only stadium-goers could witness. Most KVN games are not broadcast, either, taking place in local auditoria or, like performances at the Sochi and League of Laughter festivals, staged for internal audiences. Even performances in televised leagues are not broadcast live. Fans don’t see March Premier League games on TV, for example, until the summer. Thus, social media applications like Telegram and Instagram, as well as good old fashioned blogs, have assumed the role of radio for people who want immediate information about games and pre-game preparation.

  In a typical example, tens of thousands of KVN fans (over 33,000) read reportage about editing sessions and dress rehearsals in advance of the 2018 Musical KVN competition in Svetlogorsk, Kaliningrad. Svetlana Mudrik, reporting for Amik KVN's official website, kvn.ru, wrote the following when teams began work in Svetlogorsk: “In the evening of July14th, in the Amber Hall Theater, the first editing sessions took place. Four teams showed material to Dmitry Shpenkov and Aidar Garaev: Raisy, Russian Road, Intelligent People, and Muffins Named After Yaroslavl the Wise...reportage from the first editing session coming soon." Fans, thus, follow not only reporting on games, but pre-game preparations that members of the public rarely see.
  
  Svetlana Mudrik also acted as one of the administrators of a KVN Telegram channel that lists minute-by-minute commentary on games in progress, editing sessions, and dress rehearsals. Telegram is a social media app that works more like a textual, communal radio network than group chats or Facebook communication. The platform typically features very little discussion, at least on the channels that I follow (though there are chat channels). Usually, individual people send short messages about upcoming events, interesting links, or an event in progress. Live reporting on games and festivals are popular among KVNshiki, both for Top League games and for smaller, regional events. Around seventy people, for instance, viewed team-by-team reportage of Irkutsk’s Baikal League first-round competition, which was not open to to the public. In contrast, about 2,000 people followed the first and second rounds of the 2019 Sochi festival on the KVN channel Takstop! and over 1,500 followed the 2019 League of Laughter festival in Odessa on KARAGODINNN, the channel of Yuri Karagodin (from the KVN/League of Laughter team Dnepr). These are not the only channels that covered the festivals, though, so the total number of people who read about the performances—over one hundred performances per day at the Sochi and League of Laughter festivals—is difficult to estimate.
  
  Reading Telegram commentary is much like reading notes on a tennis or soccer match: And Rafael Nadal serves up another ace. Nice save by Croatia. Readers get a sense of what happened but can't see plays themselves. Writing about the Tver team “+7” at the Sochi festival, for instance, one commenter noted, “One of the coolest set-ups today. Perhaps even the very coolest.” Another wrote, “THIS IS THE FUNNIEST THING THAT HAS EVER BEEN IN KVN!” The posters didn't describe what +7 had done, however, leaving Takstop! followers to wonder what their extremely cool innovation could be. (Along with quite good jokes, the team opted to sing their musical transitions themselves, monotone, instead of using recorded background music.) A Takstop! poster provided the following commentary about +7's performance in the Premier League octofinals match:
  
  They won the audience quickly. A dog's wedding is already close to an ovation, and it's just the third [miniature]. That’s it—they killed it with the refrain about the cow! Ovation after the next one. Jeez, why are they always so funny?! The scarlet flower smashed it. That's it—we have the first favorite of the season.
  
  Takstop! followers glean that the team was successful, but the jokes the poster named, “a dog’s wedding,” “refrain about the cow,” don’t make sense to anyone who was not among the 1,000 people in the House of KVN for the game. Over 3,000 followers viewed the post. Most of those readers, though, would not understand why +7 was funny for three months, since the game’s broadcast was slated for June 2019.

  It is not humor, then, that attracts people to KVN commentaries. Even when posters quote jokes, they rarely register as funny out of context. Instead, followers read commentaries because of their drama value. People, especially current competitors and former KVNshiki, become invested in the fates of individual teams and regions. And they want to know more than just who won. People value the commentator’s opinions, descriptions of audience reactions, and, often, how a team’s material stacks up in comparison to previous performances. Short, representative comments about teams at the 2019 Sochi festival included: “Simply funny,” “Ha ha ha,” and “No emotions in particular.” A Takstop! post about the Irkutsk/Ulan-Ude team ”Buryats” at the 2019 Sochi festival noted, “It’s like some kind of KVN acupuncture—hits just the right spots. Have to see it.” One of the jokes the poster quoted was the following, which I saw the team write and refine collectively between the first and second rounds:

  —I'm going to feed my sled dogs
  —Hahaha, he travels by dog!
  —Hahaha, he pays for gasoline!
  
  Other comments about teams in Sochi’s second round included, “No, I haven’t fallen asleep. Although I might have” (team Mama Will Be Happy, Kursk); “They re-wrote the material just a teeny bit not funny” (team Yura, Moscow); “They’ve somehow lost some energy since the first round” (team Recharge, Vladimir); “uncontrollable attacks of hysteria in the audience” (Mikhail Dudikov, Stavropol’). Commenters also paid special attention to two of the people who would be selecting teams for the televised leagues, Aleksander Vasilievich Masliakov (AVM) and his son, Alexander Aleksandrovich Masliakov (AAM). Comments about the reactions of these two, in particular, included:

  • “AVM is smiling” (team Buryats, Irkutsk/Ulan-Ude)
  • “AVM stopped smiling” (team Green Suitcase, Kemerovo)
  • “AVM is watching very interestedly” (team Peninsula, Simferopol)
  • “AAM laughed out loud (v golos) (team Surskii Region, Penza Region) • “AAM is in tears” (team Snezhnogorsk, Snezhnogorsk)
  Commentary like this relates not only results, but a game’s atmosphere. A poster wrote about the second of three 2019 Premier League octofinal matches, “Yesterday the auditorium was, of course, much more full. Warm it up!” A second person then commented, “Wooooot! After the applause from behind the scenes the auditorium seemed to remember that people are performing KVN for them and cheered powerfully.”195 Telegram followers want to read about audience reactions, too, often at least as much as they want transcriptions of the jokes themselves. A post about the third Premier League octofinals match in Moscow noted, for instance, “Their delivery is good, cheerful, but the audience doesn’t want to laugh yet.”
  
  Telegram posters write more informally, and often more candidly, than writers for websites or blogs. Unlike articles, posts are anonymous and unedited (although channel administrators ultimately decide whether or not to approve content). Both the register and the temporality of Telegram posts, then, differ from more traditional reviews of games (obzory). About the Temriuk team Hello, We've Arrived, for example, one person wrote, “They have great characters and gags, but it’s dragging.” Another poster observed at the Sochi festival, “Oh, miniatures are going to be rough for these guys, following +7” (team Those Very Guys, Stavropol). Telegram coverage describes action in a game as it unfolds rather than reporting on results, like traditional reviews. On Telegram, even if followers catch up on posts a day or two after a game took place, people feel less like they are reading about a past event than that they are experiencing, however blindly, a game.

  Telegram is not the only venue for game details, however. Leagues and individuals often post short, one- or two- minute videos from performances, usually shot from cell phones, on Instagram Live. The videos stay on Instagram for twenty-four hours and then expire, contributing to a sense of immediate spectatorship. The main platform for Top League reporting, however, is Amik’s website, kvn.ru. Articles on this website cover all the teams at the Sochi festivals, list results for seventy-four KVN leagues across Russia, and offer fans “behind-the-scenes” views of teams in rehearsals and editing sessions. The pages covering the 2019 Sochi festival's second round got over 11,000 hits. Takstop! reportage, in contrast, got around 2,000 views for the same events. More than 8,000 people, further, visited the kvn.ru page that described the first Top League editing session of 2019: “First Octofinals of Top League 2019. Run-through for the Editors,” subtitled, “An ideal chance to see at least a little bit of what will be in the game." Suspense, drama, and, sometimes, personal connections with team members drive the desire for information about games, both those in progress and those yet to be played. Individuals also publish written reviews of games on local KVN websites and video reviews on YouTube. Video reviewers tend to cover televised games, and they interlace voice-over commentary with video clips from the broadcasts.
  
  Metapragmatic communities
  
  All of these discourses about KVN are metapragmatic. That is, they are talk about talk, and talk about the social functions of linguistic choices (cf. Lucy 1993). Fans discuss how jokes could be improved, the emotional effects of numbers, and the ramifications of a performance for various KVN communities—who will advance, who will be upset, who got unfair scores, what a performance means for the upcoming season. A poster commenting on the team Dynamo Station during the 2019 Premier League octofinals, for instance, situated it in terms of the team’s past and rumored, though not realized, performances:

  Dynamo Station starts out a bit rough, but it seems the people like Katya's character...Katya messes up her lines a bit, it was better at the [Moscow and Moscow Region] Festival. A completely new number about unnecessary gifts is funny. Olya’s hysterics go over very well. The rumors were true; the really funny bloc with inside jokes got cut out...it all went over less than ideally.
  
  These metapragmatic discourses do a few things, socially. First, they bind together a community of KVNshiki that share knowledge not only about KVN, but about a large catalogue of teams in both local and televised leagues. In Ukraine, KVNshiki tend to follow, and deliberate about, note only local KVN teams and televised League of Laughter competitions, but also televised (Russian) Top League competitions. For instance, when the team Medics came in for an editing session before the 2017 Odessa National University semifinals match, Pavel advised them to watch a Top League team from Chita, in Russia (Sbornaia Zabaikal'skogo Kraia) to see how they stitched together short musical couplets and sharp, clear scenes. “Watch the Zabaikal’skii take on it. It should look like that.”200 Before another editing session, Viktoria Pis’michenko and Pavel Demchenko discussed a recent League of Laughter broadcast in which a team had dressed as clowns and shaken their rears at the audience. “Horrible. Before, Chivurin took them in hand. Masliakov never allowed that kind of vulgarity.” She continued on about another team in the competition, “I can't stand them. What they did—is that a joke?201 Active KVNshiki discuss other teams’ performances to learn from them, to see how their team measures up, or, as a community of people who enjoys laughing, to let someone else’s sense of humor amuse them. The wider community of KVN fans discusses what they like and dislike, and why. For Pis’michenko, vulgarity ruins humor. Discourses like theirs reinforce ideas about what comedy is, or should be.

  Success in KVN requires attention to such expectations as well as to other teams’ performances, local and mass-mediated. Talking about these performances, further, is a key component of social interaction among KVNshiki. With thousands of participants, there are never as many KVNshiki gathered in one place as there are at the Sochi festival. In 2019, over 7,000 competitors, editors, authors, and journalists settled in and around the iconic festival hotel Zhemchuzhina. Nearly all the teams try to get a room in Zhemchuzhina because activity starts in the morning (around 11:00 a.m.) and ends—in the morning (at around 5:00 a.m.) The day before the 2019 Sochi festival began, one of the Top League editors, Dmitry Shpenkov, posted on Telegram, “Guys, I hope you are prepared—fasten your seatbelts, get a lot of sleep tonight. Tomorrow we will be breakfasting in HELL.” People sleep very little and most work very hard during the festival. Being in Zhemchuzhina allows people to be close to other teams, to league editors, and to all the events. For one to two weeks, depending on whether they advance to the second round, team members spend their time rehearsing, watching other teams in the hotel’s auditorium, and, of course partying, either at the official nightly entertainment events (improvisation contests, trivia games, rap battles, live concerts), in Zhemchuzhina’s so-called “American Diner,” so crammed with people by 2:00 a.m. that one can hardly move, or, perhaps, less frenetically but no more soberly, in people’s hotel rooms.
  
  On the third day of the festival I sat around with the team from IGU in the early evening as they took a break from rehearsing. Six of the team members plus me wedged ourselves into a hotel room some of them were sharing at Zhemchuzhina. As the team lounged on the room’s two full- size beds, Alexander asked me what teams I’d watched that day and which ones were funny. I told him that I’d been in the auditorium since 11:00 a.m., and that one of the best teams I’d seen was from Tula. Chingiz and Alexander were both scrolling through reviews of teams on kvn.ru. “Hmm, five stars,” Alexander said, seeming to scan the coverage for the most successful teams. Kvn.ru reporters give each team at Sochi an “audience reaction” score of up to five stars. IGU themselves, when they competed, earned four stars, which is a very good rating. Alexander suddenly laughed and showed Chingiz a video clip of a KVNshik fumbling her words that would become a festival and post-festival inside joke. Chingiz smiled. They guys stared down at their phones and I took out my own, to check Telegram. Logistical information, including frequent schedule and location changes, happened through Telegram, not on the official timetable posted on kvn.ru. It seemed everyone was reading the Sochi festival channel, constantly, to find out where in the line-up their friends or favorite teams would be performing, to see pictures from the festival, and to watch festival-related videos on Instagram and YouTube.
  
  At Sochi people reveled in talk about talk, and often talk about talk about talk. “Have you watched Denis Kosiakov’s answer to Agafonov?” one of the members of team Buryaty asked me one evening. Kosiakov had recorded a negative video review of a team coached by Stanislav Agafonov, a successful writer and producer from Irkutsk. Agafonov then uploaded an answer on YouTube, and Kosiakov uploaded a rebuttal. Team Buryats and I sat in one of their hotel rooms at Zhemchuzhina the day before Sochi’s second round listening as someone played Kosiakov’s diatribe from their phone. It had been uploaded just that day. “I, for example, love my son,” he said. “And I'd never dress him in terrible clothes, knowing that he would look silly...And if I really loved a team, I wouldn't let them...go out on stage without a single joke, as Raisy did in the final.” No one said anything when the clip ended. Kosiakov had lambasted another Irkutsk team. Regardless of their opinions about Kosiakov or his review, though, it seemed important to stay current on KVN commentaries.

  Telegram reporting keeps performances at Sochi alive in the popular imagination longer than they might otherwise. As teams advanced through the Top, Premier, and First League seasons, Telegram posters often noted how skits differed from those at the festival. About the Premier League octofinals performance of the team Surksii Region, for instance, a Takstop! writer observed that they started off with a number that had been cut out of the Sochi gala concert broadcast. The writer immediately noticed and commented not only on the recent history of a team, but of a single joke. Reporting on the same octofinals match, a commenter wrote about the Arkhangelsk team Arktika, “Even things received well in Sochi aren’t hitting the mark. San Sanich [Aleksander Aleksandrovich Masliakov] is tapping his foot to the music, but he’s looking up at the balcony through tight lips, disappointedly.”203 Since Aleksander Aleksandrovich Masliakov emcees Premier League games, he stays on stage, off to the side, for performances. His father Aleksander Vasilievich, though, sits, generally alone, on a balcony above the auditorium. Arktika’s content had not changed much in the two months since Sochi; perhaps AAM and AVM had both expected it to.
  
  But if KVNshiki like reading about national-level games before they are broadcast, they are, perhaps, even more interested in reviews about local games that they have seen (or competed in). Local competitors all know each other, often know the histories of predecessor teams that go back decades, and know the people who write reviews, who are usually students or recent graduates who have stayed very involved in the local KVN scene. Daniel Bibnev, for instance, of the Irkutsk team that would evolve into team IGU, frequently wrote reviews of Irkutsk games in 2018 on Irkutsk’s main KVN webpage. He praised IGU’s performance in the 2018 Baikal League finals, arguing that they presented objectively funnier material than the team that had, in the end, won. He wrote,

  Take out some paper and write the following: killer joke, joke, half-joke, and cute images. If you count up the number of these elements each team has, you'll put a lot of people in their places. It's like the xG model in soccer—expected goals.205 With this model we can calculate how many actual goals a team should have scored, taking all shots into consideration. Each shot gets assigned a quality value. In KVN goals are the reaction of the audience. The quality value is the strength of that reaction. So without a bunch of scales and dust in our eyes, we can evaluate the final match in terms of pure humor.

  Of course, not everyone agreed with Bibnev’s calculations, including the game’s judges. Bibnev even added the following disclaimer to his review: “The opinions of the author do not necessarily coincide with the views of the organizers or your own.” The day after the piece was published, one person even wrote in on an Irkutsk KVN Telegram channel, “Things are kind of dull. Maybe someone could write a review of the Baikal final?” A brief exchange then followed, with one poster reminding readers that a review had already been written, and another implying that a different one should be. Despite Bibnev’s claims, humor is not objective. If it was everyone would write the same jokes and there would seem little point in competing.
  
  Interdiscursive commentary
  
  The first octofinals match of the KVN league of the Odessa Jewish Community Center, the Vzlët League, took place on a mild, dusty March evening. I walked to the Center in fading daylight, hatless, like the other pedestrians, and it seemed as though Odessa had finally thrown off its bone-chilling coastal winter. I smiled in appreciation of the weather and in anticipation of the game, which was in many competitors’ favorite league. They liked the Center’s modern theater, its great audiovisual support, and, most of all, they liked its small band of KVN regulars. Unlike the larger Odessa League of Laughter or Mayor’s Cup competitions, which a lot of ordinary Odessans attend for entertainment, just as they would the theater, Vzlët games attracted an audience of KVNshiki. Teams wrote for a small, in-crowd public.

  About an hour into the competitions a young man named Nikita took the stage with his partner, Ksenia as members of the team Light at the End of April. One of their numbers was a miniature based on Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. The audience laughed occasionally as Nikita and Ksenia ran through their version of the fairytale:

  Ksenia
  Babushka, babushka, pochemu u tebya takie strannye ushi?
  Grandmother, grandmother, what strange ears you have!
  
  Nikita
  Normal'nye u menia ushi, chto ty nachinaesh?
  My ears are perfectly normal, what are you trying to start?
  
  Ksenia
  Babushka, babushka, pochemu u tebya takie strannye zuby?
  Grandmother, grandmother, what strange teeth you have!
  
  Nikita
  Ia by khotela na tvoi zuby vosemdesiat’ let posmotret'!
  I’d like to see your teeth when you're eighty years old!
  
  Then Ksenia diverged from the tale, asking, “Grandmother, grandmother, why haven’t you ever won the Vzlët League championship?” Nikita responded with six words that sent the audience into absolute fits: “Because grandfather didn’t want that!” (“Potomu chto dedushka etogo ne khotel!”) People around me whooped with laughter, clapping for over thirty seconds. Nikita raised his microphone to continue on with the skit, but a new round of cheers cut him off. Thirty seconds might not sound like a terribly long time, but it is much, much longer than people tend to clap during performances. A short subtitled clip from this skit, linked below, is worth watching for the audience reaction. Students wiped their eyes as they laughed. I didn’t get it.

  
  About a week later I asked Nikita why the joke was funny. He said, “Yeah, only people in the Vzlët audience understand that joke. If I said it at ONU no one would understand...It’s because last year I played in the final and Sergei Aleksandrovich Ostashko gave me a three. And because of that three our team lost the game. By one point” (interview with author, March 23, 2017). Sergei Ostashko, introduced in chapter two, was one of the renowned Odessa Gentlemen. He judges nearly every Vzlët competition, and the March 2017 octofinals was no exception. Nikita even turned and mock-glared at him as he issued his “grandfather” punchline. In the space of a second, at most, Vzlët fans grasped the contrast between the grandmother on stage and the grandfather on the judging panel, remembered a game that had happened seven months earlier, and began laughing.

  The power of a semiotic framework is that it can explain jokes like this, which rely on indexes instead of words. In comparison to strictly semantic theories of humor, the language of semiotics—presupposition, entailment, sign vehicles, objects, and interpretants— allows us to (1) precisely describe meaning-making in jokes; (2) explain why some people recognize jokes but don’t think they're funny (e.g. racist jokes); and (3) discuss nonreferential indexes. Like the other Vzlët audience members, I knew that Nikita's “grandfather” sign vehicle matched up with the represented object Ostashko / judge / Odessa Gentleman. But I didn’t think the joke was funny because I didn’t share the right interpretant. When they work, punchlines reside there, in the ultimate significance a sign holds for an individual perceiver. Nikita communicated more with four words, “grandfather didn’t want that” (“dedushka etogo ne khotel”), than he could have with an entire monologue about the previous year’s competition. In environments of censorship people have to find ways of saying without saying. But elision can also set up the surprises on which jokes depend. This is the unexpectedness of a punchline, like Nikita’s, or the satisfaction in a pun. In the end, semiotics help us understand humor because jokes often rely as much on the unsaid as the said.