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• 1 2022-11-26T13:32:11-08:00 Festivals 5 plain 2022-11-27T07:23:42-08:00

  I arrived in Odessa about a month before the February 2017 League of Laughter festival, joined a team, Friend Zone, as a sound operator, and attended with them. I went to the Sochi festival only two years later, in January 2019, where I shadowed two Irkutsk teams that I had met previously (IGU and team Buryats). League of Laughter modeled its week-long structure closely on the larger, two-week annual event in Sochi. While called festivals, the Sochi Festival (more officially, the "International Festival of KVN Teams") and the League of Laughter festival are not events designed for entertainment, like the big Coachella or Glastonbury music festivals, but are instead huge tournaments that are closed to the public. Here, hundreds of teams converge and compete for the chance to play in televised leagues. In Russia, this means one of four televised leagues. In Ukraine, teams can land a spot in only one main televised league. Regional league competitions, like those based in Odessa and Kiev, often are broadcast on local television channels, as well. But applications to those leagues are made separately from the head-to-head competition at the festival for coveted prime time slots.
  
  Close to five hundred teams, for instance, attend the Sochi festival (464 performed in 2019), and most teams incur significant expenses for flights and hotel reservations; they may have worked for years to earn sponsorships from their local leagues. Sochi is, thus, an important annual gathering for some of the best KVN teams in Russia and the near-ish abroad (a few teams from Israel, America, and Western Europe attended in 2019). Sochi is a KVN rite of passage. A group of Russian KVNshiki turned pop musicians even composed a song for KVN on the theme of the Sochi festival. Rodnopolis' song, "My First Festival," incorporates motifs from KVN's original theme song and waxes nostalgic about fellowship at the Sochi festival:
  
  Years have passed, we've been through leagues
  But we're here all the same
  Fate runs in a spiral
  Everyone here is closer than family
  You are all a part of me
  We are together—the Festival!
  
  Both festivals have two rounds and a final performance ("gala concert") during which judges decide which finalists will play in the countries' top leagues. In 2019 the Sochi first round lasted four days. Teams began performing three-minute skits at 11 a.m. and continued without interruption until around 10 p.m. Editors would leave to take short breaks, but otherwise stayed in the auditorium the entire time, watching, keeping time, and taking notes. Evening entertainment began each day after the performances, at around 11 p.m. For the first round, these events included at DJ battle, a Contest of Emcees, a Rap Evening, a rock concert, and What? Where When? (Chto? Gde? Kogda?), a team quiz game. KVN training and professional development lectures also took place in the afternoons.
  
  A lot of teams, especially those in serious preparation for the second round, skipped the DJ battle and spent their nights writing and rehearsing. And some people simply preferred to party more privately. Nearly everyone at the Sochi festivals stays in the same hotel, so it is quite easy to move from performance to rehearsal to bar to party and back, and many make this circuit. In an interview with IGU team Young People (Molodye Liudi) about Sochi, captain Sergei told me, "Some people go [to Sochi] just for the tusovka (party). His teammate Yuri said that evenings in Sochi were always a lot of fun. They usually involved a lot of drinking, he added. "But it's all very cultured" ("no ochen' kultur'niy"), Daniil assured me. Yuri countered doubtfully, "Hmmmm, yeah. But fun, at any rate."
  
  The League of Laughter festival works much the same way. The first round, though, only ran two days. League organizers left one day for editing sessions between the first and second rounds, one day for the second round, two days for rehearsals before the Gala Concert, and one day for dress rehearsals and the Gala Concert itself. Below, I provide ethnographic snapshots from both festivals, side-by-side, to illustrate how hard teams work, but also how much fun they have, and why these events prove so central not only to the respective KVN and League of Laughter competitive seasons, but to the social networks that team comedy has created. 
  
  Sochi drawing of teams (zherebёvka), January 13, 2019, 9:00 p.m.
  
  While not the festival's official opening ceremony, which would happen at 11:30 p.m., the "drawing of teams," or announcement of the order in which teams would be performing, felt like the kickoff. A live brass band played the KVN theme song. People around me in the thousand-person auditorium sang the lyrics joyfully, clapping. There weren't enough seats for everyone, so some sat on the concrete stairs lining the aisles. All three Top League editors, Dmitry Shpenkov, Mikhail Marfin, and Evgeny Donskikh, spoke about the organization of the upcoming festival. Shpenkov said little, except to introduce Marfin. Marfin began by recalling, "Twenty-nine years ago, in 1990, I ran the first festival. There were thirteen teams. Out of those, twelve performed in the Gala Concert. And out of those eight ended up in the season. Of Top League. As there weren't any others. This year things will go a little bit differently." Donskikh concluded remarks from the editors with, "KVN is, KVN lives, KVN will continue to live!"

   Sochi rehearsals and editing session, January 13-14th, 2019, 10:00 p.m.-2:00 a.m.
  
  I did not go to the official opening ceremony, which featured champagne and speeches by Top League champions Raisy, from Irkutsk, because I met up with the team from IGU, who had re-branded themselves as Bravo, James (for simplicity I will just refer to them here as IGU). I watched them as they rehearsed in the large, gymnasium-like space in the festival hotel where dozens of other teams also ran through their material. 

  The team was all business. Ioffe himself did not perform, instead watching the team and generally keeping them on track. "Well, [once again] in order?" he said after the first hour. The team seemed to know most of their lines, struggling only in a few places. They worked more on stage placement, especially during a fight scene. They went through all of their numbers painstakingly, checking music, tracking down props, and calling in extras from other Irkutsk teams. At about midnight Sergei told me that they had an unofficial editing session planned with Top League editor Dmitry Shpenkov. IGU got this opportunity because they had played in Premier League the previous year and were a favorite to compete again in a Televised league. 

  They didn't know when Shpenkov and two other regional editors would be ready to see them, though. They queued up behind other teams, waiting. And they were tired. The guys lolled around on a sofa outside the main auditorium, chilly, hungry, and ready to get the editing session over with. 

  The editors finally called them in at 1:15 a.m. The team greeted the editors and then performed their Introduction skit from start to finish. Afterwards, Shpenkov, and almost only Shpenkov, gave them comments. He looked down at his notes and said, "So far you don't have any material." He then criticized each of their numbers in turn: "no, not interesting;" "meeting the parents—I don't like this setup;" "that won't work on stage."

  The team took the criticism in stride. They still had two days to re-write material before their first round performance. Some of them went back to their hotel rooms and some headed to the Diner, the notoriously sticky-floored cafe and nighttime party spot in the festival hotel. The editors called in the next team.

  I should stress that the editors didn't have to do the editing session and didn't get paid. Shpenkov does edit for Top League, but the session described here was not one of his Top League duties. The three editors in the room volunteered their time to help some teams, in the middle of the night. This is part of the ethos of KVN, and of professionals who care about supporting the next generation of teams with potential.
  
  League of Laughter rehearsals, February 4, 2017, 2:00-5:00 p.m.
  
  I met team Friend Zone before the festival began to rehearse. They were shooting a video for their performance at a small student theater in Odessa. They needed a green screen, though. And they needed to press out all the wrinkles. So they spent about an hour ironing it, awkwardly, on the floor of the theater. Then they had to hang it, which required removing posters from the theater's walls. Then there was lighting to be arranged. Then their lines had to be run through multiple times. In short, we didn't rehearse our festival skit at all. They did shoot their video on the green screen, though, and we all agreed to meet up later that evening at the League of Laughter festival hotel, the OK Odessa, for the opening ceremony.
  League of Laughter opening ceremony, February 4, 2017, 7:00 p.m.
  
  In the the speech that opened the 2017 festival main editor Andrei Chivurin said, "Well, first of all, I would like to congratulate everyone on fifty-five years of KVN. We never lost anything from the past, from KVN (My nikogda ne poteriali byvshie KVNovskie). Happy birthday." From the beginning of the most important League of Laughter event of the year, Chivurin linked League of Laughter to KVN tradition, interpellating participants as KVNshiki as well as Liga Smeshniki. We can imagine how this could be otherwise. Ukraine banned all Soviet symbols in public discourse in May 2015. Affiliation with Russia is, obviously, unpopular. So there could have been moves to erase all vestiges of KVN, a game created by the Soviets and now dominated by Russians. Chivurin advocated the opposite, no doubt out of genuine affection for the game.
  In some ways, though, calling the assembled participants KVNshiki was just a statement of the obvious. While KVN in Russia exists both in student leagues and on television, there is a division between these sectors in Ukraine. Student leagues across Ukraine are still called KVN. There is no money to be made, there are no television shows, and thus no copyright breaches. Only the televised leagues in Ukraine are called League of Laughter. Therefore, the vast majority of the festival's participants play KVN all year and League of Laughter only once, at the February festival. The team "Two Times Two" ("Dvazhdy Dva") from Nizhyn, a town north of Kiev, spoofed this tension in their first round act. They introduced themselves by re-voicing a catchphrase from the KVN theme song, one that Aleksander Masliakov often uses to announce the new KVN season: "We're starting KVN" ("My nachinaem KVN"). The four young men stood on the stage, a bit visibly nervous, and said, "This is our first time in League of Laughter. And so, apologies, we're starting KVN."
  
  Only people who really love KVN like to sit and watch novice first round teams for eleven hours a day. I happen to be one of those people, and am not alone. Auditoria in the festival hotels for both the Sochi and League of Laughter hotels were usually full. People did drift in and out, some coming only to support select teams then rushing off to rehearse themselves. I can't list here all the teams from first and second rounds at the Sochi and League of Laughter festivals, nor re-cap the best jokes. Relevant excerpts from the festivals, especially from my time with Friend Zone and from editing sessions, will be cited in later sections of the dissertation. Below, I've simply given an overview of the schedules for the Sochi and League of Laughter festivals to give a sense of the rhythm of the events.
  
  • Sochi first round, January 14-17, 2019
  • Sochi editing sessions, January 18, 2019
  —I only watched editing sessions for Irkutsk teams.
  • Sochi second round, January 19-20, 2019
  • Sochi Gala Concert, January 24, 2019
  
  • League of Laughter first round, February 5-6, 2017
  • League of Laughter editing sessions, February 7, 2017
  —I observed editing sessions with all the teams.
  • League of Laughter second round, February 8, 2017
  • League of Laughter Gala Concert, February 11, 2017
  
  Other festivals
  
  Other competitions also get called festivals. The League of Moscow and the Moscow Suburbs, for instance, holds eight games over a four-day period to determine which teams will play in the central Moscow league and which ones in Moscow region student leagues. This is called the Festival of the Leagues of Moscow and the Moscow Suburbs (Festival Lig Moskvy i Podmoskov'e). Every summer, too, the Musical KiViN Festival (Golosiashchiy KiViN) takes place among the twenty or so strongest KVN teams internationally. This is a one-day, single competition.