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• 1 2022-11-27T08:52:36-08:00 Institutional Ruptures 8 plain 2022-12-26T10:02:48-08:00

  ”...the significance of an activity must be sought in terms of the whole organisation, which is more than the sum of its separable parts.”
  —Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution

  Odessa Tales’ 2014 absence highlights some of the prosaic ways in which people on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine border experience the conflict. Those in Odessa and Kiev do not fear shelling. No tanks roll by the Potemkin Steps. But air travel between the two countries is prohibited and information exchange unreliable at best. Both sides censor. Both sides block websites. And KVN fans miss Ukrainian teams for some of the same reasons it would cause a stir if English tennis players began boycotting all games outside of the UK. In many ways, KVN's roots are in Ukraine. Sergei Muratov, one game's creators, was from Kharkiv. Odessa, “the capital of humor,” was the first city outside Moscow to adopt KVN. Across KVN’s fifty-year history, Ukrainian teams have nearly always advanced to Top League. Odessa also launched some of the most renowned—and controversial—KVN teams of the Soviet era. The Odessa Chimney Sweeps notoriously cracked jokes at the KGB’s expense in 1967. In a move less daring but with more airtime, during perestroika the Odessa Gentlemen critiqued the government with a ferocity not seen before, or possibly since, on Russian TV. They were so popular that they toured the USSR throughout the late 1980s, going everywhere from Baku to Vladivostok. Once they even visited a sharashka, a closed, top-secret community of scientists. Ordinary people could not enter these spaces and, in general, the scientists themselves could not leave. When the Gentlemen showed up with their standard satire about the Communist Party, team member Igor Losinsky told me, “[The audience’s] jaws dropped. They were in shock. They had never heard anything like this” (interview with author, January 23, 2016). Most of the country, in fact, had never heard public jokes about Party failures or the “red button” that could summon atomic war. But the Gentlemen brought more than shock- value to the stage. They also joked about male-female relationships, work, and everyday life. It is just that everyday life in the USSR included censorship, Party propaganda, inadequate consumer goods, and the threat of nuclear holocaust. The team confronted these subjects head-on, with wit, and became the darlings of the entire country. When I told the director of Irkutsk's Ministry of Culture that I would be going to Odessa and meeting with members of the Gentlemen, he asked me to let them know that, “We remember them. We love them and we remember them, from those days” (interview with author, December 12, 2016).
  
  Thousands of miles have always separated Irkutsk and Odessa. I felt like an emissary in the winter of 2017, though, because now warfare divided the two cities, as well. Broadcasts of Russian television channels abruptly stopped in 2014. Ukrainians cannot access all Russian websites, and I found myself unable to even view some pages about the Ukrainian language from Russia. During a discussion about when information about the KVN festival in Sochi, Russia would be available online, a KVNshik from Odessa mentioned that he had, at times, lost access to the official KVN website (amik.ru).
  
  Odessa Tales chose not to return to Moscow in 2015, either. Instead, they played in the first season of a brand-new set of competitions based in Ukraine, League of Laughter (Liga Smekha). At least one KVN luminary took offense at the team’s decision, noting, “It’s doubly offensive that people who were very close to us in the past are competing elsewhere. One of them I’ve known, speaking frankly, longer than my own wife” (KVN v Ukraine 2015). An institution defined by laughter now negotiates wounds. Friends avoid each other, revealing the human side of political conflict. In only eighteen months, politics rent KVN’s half-century tradition. Naum Barulya, a Ukrainian who had worked as KVN’s main producer in Moscow for seven years before the war broke out, said, “We knew that no one would let us use those three letters [KVN] on this side of the border...And we knew that if we did not find a way to channel our youth’s talent the tradition would be lost. So we came up with League of Laughter” (interview with author, February 10, 2017).
  
  The problem was not that the letters “KVN” became unpopular or maligned in Ukraine. It was that they are trademarked. Aleksander Masliakov, Top League Moscow's emcee for fifty years, bought the KVN enterprise after the break-up of the USSR and created the company Amik. Amik owns the rights to all four televised leagues—Top, Premier, First, and International—and administers the eight “central leagues” that feed into them: Krasnoyarsk, Krasnodar, Moscow, Kazan, Voronezh, Khabarovsk, Chelyabinsk, and Kursk. Any team that can pay the $170 participation deposit, airfare, and hotel costs for a week or two at the Sochi KVN festival has a shot of making it to a televised league. As Tatiana, an Irkutsk businesswoman who played in the 2015 and 2019 Top League seasons told me, “KVN is one of the only ways someone from Irkutsk can get on television. Without killing someone.” Every year, one hundred amateur performers from places like Yakutia and Kaliningrad jump from the provinces to (usually fleeting) stardom. However, teams that make it to the finals can count on income from touring comedy shows, at a minimum. Playing on the obvious links between KVN wins and money, Eldar, the Kyrgyz team captain of the 2016 Top League champions, joked about this during the final with his young daughter (guest team member for the day). Looking at the gold medals hung on the Christmas tree on stage, she asked, ”Papa, is there any chocolate in those medals for me?” He replied, “Oh, daughter, in those medals there is chocolate for you, and a fur coat for mama, and work for these guys, and even a husband for your aunt Sitora!" Indeed, only one year after winning the 2015 Top League final, a team from Kamyziak (population 16,000) had spin-off TV contracts in Moscow. The Sochi festival serves as the gateway to all of those opportunities.
  
  Ukrainians, of course, would have to cross back-and-forth across the border several times if they advanced to the quarter- or semifinals of a central league. Few teams would want to. I asked Igor Lastochkin, a three-time competitor in Top League from Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine whether a Ukrainian team, if they were fantastically talented and had financial sponsors, would be allowed on Russia’s Channel One. He paused and said, “What can Ukrainian teams even joke about right now?” (interview with author, February 9, 2017).
  
  The conflict has reshaped the geography of KVN participation. As the maps below illustrate, in 2013 twenty-four Ukrainian teams attended the Sochi festival, including five from the now- disputed territories in Ukraine (one from Crimea and four from Donetsk). In 2017 no unambiguously Ukrainian teams competed; that is, none claiming Ukrainian citizenship. However twelve teams from Russia-occupied territories did go—five from Crimea, six from Donetsk, and one from Lugansk. A team from Simferapol’, in Crimea, even advanced to televised leagues in both 2019 and 2020. I had heard rumors that a Ukrainian team from Odessa had traveled to Sochi in 2017, so I asked a member of the team, called “Nicole Kidman,” if this was true. “No,” he said. “We did not go over there.” The rumor made me wonder, though, if any team had signed up. It would take about two days on the train to get there, but, over winter holidays, in a train car full of friends, I thought a team might chance it. When I asked Naum Barulya about it he said, unequivocally, “No. None of ours went. Some went from there. From the other side” (interview with author, February 10, 2017). I met another Lugansk team, one from what Barulya would call our side, at the annual League of Laughter festival in Odessa in February 2017. They ended their performance in the second round with these words, ”Odessa, thank you for the warm welcome. For you—Team Lugansk. Lugansk—Ukraine." The team captain then gave his chest a victory thump and extended his arm out towards the audience, who cheered, whistled, applauded, and nodded their heads.
  
  Three conditions serve to sequester Ukrainian KVN: the interpersonal effects of enmity, economic sanctions, and trademark restrictions. The first factor, enmity, reflects how the war has bled into friendships. Several Ukrainians I have talked to said they are not even on speaking terms with relatives in Russia. That said, there are Ukrainian citizens working in Russia and Russian citizens working in Ukraine. One comic from Odessa, Dmitry Romanov, works for the television station TNT in Moscow and does stand-up comedy there, as well. I also met a college student in Odessa who was planning a series of stand-up performances in Moscow in April 2017. KVN differs from stand-up in its political indexicality because KVN teams represent cities and regions. Stand- up performers may compete for a one-time purse, but they don’t do so as avatars for their homelands. In KVN, Astana plays against Moscow. Murmansk plays against St. Petersburg. Baku plays against Tblisi. Ukraine playing against Russia, in the current climate, feels less than cheerful.
  
  For some of the same reasons, Russia did not send an entry to the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest, held in Kiev. Russian MP Vitaly Milonov said, “The reality is that we will be unwelcome guests in a country seized by fanatics, who dream of destroying all the good between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples.” Ukrainian MP Olga Chervakova responded by claiming that Russians already boycott “many things”: “In the UN Security Council, Russia has been boycotting common sense, in Crimea and the Donbas, Russia has been boycotting international agreements, while at home [with anti-EU sanctions] it’s boycotting Swiss cheese.”
  
  
  Domestic Russian artists have felt a chill, too, if they have spoken out against their government’s actions in Crimea. One of the judges from the 2013 Top League season, the much- loved rock 1970s musician Andrei Makarevich, found himself functionally banned from performing concerts after making critical comments. He said, “If the guy who makes the concert is not so brave, and usually they are not because they want to live and feed their children, then the concert is stopped.” Twenty-eight of Makarevich’s concerts were cancelled between the spring of 2013 and fall of 2014, under the guise of “double-booking” or “repair work.” Before the conflict it would have seemed inconceivable that people would pelt such a popular star with tomatoes and call him a “friend of the junta” for performing in Eastern Ukraine. Before the conflict, war with Ukraine was so far off the radar that another judge, the Director General of Russia's Channel One TV station, even kidded with Dnepr KVNshik Igor Lastyochkin about Ukrainians stirring up trouble.
  
  Russia, of course, is not alone in issuing sanctions. Ukraine has banned the work of fourteen Russian actors and musicians because the individuals pose a “threat to national security.” Their crime? Supporting Russia's annexation of Crimea. Thus, the second hurdle to Ukraine's participation in the wider KVN world involves the mutual blockade of products, people, money, and information across the Russia-Ukraine border. Russian goods only enter the country via Belarus. Air passengers must stop in an intermediate country if they want to travel between the two countries. Ukrainian TV stations do not air Russian programs, including KVN, anymore. Merely getting to Russia has become much more expensive for Ukrainians. And, in the off chance that Ukrainian KVNshiki played on television, their friends back home could only watch them on YouTube.
  
  The third problem is Amik’s trademark of “KVN.” Ukrainians cannot create their own television show with that name. Universities, primary schools, and community centers throughout Ukraine still host KVN leagues. But putting it on TV would violate royalty and copyright protections. Whether de jure or de facto, the road to television in Moscow is closed to Ukrainian KVNshiki right now. This is why the main producer and main director for Amik, who were both Ukrainians, left Moscow in 2014, came to Kiev, and founded the League of Laughter. Odessa Tales, the last Ukrainian team to compete in Russia, ended their season early, in April 2014. Only one year later, in January 2015, Odessa hosted the first League of Laughter festival. In 2017, 172 teams registered for the festival. They came not only from cities in Ukraine but from Israel, Georgia, Moldova, and Belarus. One brave Russian team even attended. Of these, fifty-five teams advanced to the second round of competition. Twenty-five competed in the final, gala competition, broadcast on Ukraine's national 1+1 television station. Fourteen then moved on to the regular season, where they competed from double-octofinals to a final stand-off between two teams.
  
  Just as Sochi launches the televised KVN season, the League of Laughter festival in Odessa marks the start of Ukraine's comedy season. Ukraine’s festival is smaller, admittedly, hosting under 200 teams in 2017 versus Sochi's 444. But it is also much easier for the average Ukrainian student to attend than Sochi was. First, there is no participation fee. Sochi costs $170 per team. Second, teams can easily and relatively cheaply take trains from their hometowns to Odessa. Third, the conference organizers went out of their way to get discounts for their young participants. “It should not be expensive for them to come,” Barulya said.96 In 2014 he approached the director of the OK Odessa Hotel, which hosts the festival, and promised to fill all of the rooms for a week in the winter off-season if they would make some changes for the competitors. First, a bed in a two-bed room could not cost more than $7 per night. Second, the food prepared by the hotel kitchen had to be filling but affordable. OK Odessa complied, reserving the hotel exclusively for contest participants, changing their menu, and letting League of Laughter’s security team control all access to the hotel. He also struck a deal with a nearby restaurant that hosts the festival’s evening events, activities like song contests, joke contests, and trivia games (much like at Sochi). Barulya asked the venue to take “elite cocktails” off the menu. Thus, participants could choose from beer, wine, vodka, and whiskey. Some people did, of course, make special requests of the bartenders. But, for the most part, students drank $1 drafts of Stella Artois. Knowing that students will not tip, Barulya always gives the waitstaff some extra money up front (interview with author, February 10, 2017).
  
  As Barulya put it, his job is to take care of food, housing, and performance space arrangements so that participants can play without worrying about logistics. “We don't want them to think, ‘Oh, where am I going to find food in Odessa? How do I get to the restaurant?’” Andrei Chivurin’s task, on the other hand, is to teach the students how to play. Chivurin was born in Kharkhiv, Ukraine in 1964. From 1990 to 1996 he played in Top League and the now-defunct Top League Ukraine, then became the editor (redaktor) for Amik’s Top League in 1996. He is just short of a legend among KVNshiki. In addition to his success in Top League and long experience coaching Top League teams, Chivurin co-authored the only contemporary primer on playing KVN, What is KVN? (Marfin and Chivurin 1996). He is now the main editor of League of Laughter.
  
  An editor, in the world of KVN and League of Laughter, is someone who offers feedback to team on the content of their skits. “That joke about sex? No, no, no! That's not funny,” Chivurin told an Israeli team during editing sessions (redaktura) before the second round of League of Laughter performances in 2017. “Do you have any other material?” he asked another team. ”The thing is, we already have a team with stuff about Trump. So if you are going to make jokes about Trump, too, they have to be absolute bombshells (prosto bomba).” Two other editors sat in the conference room with Chivurin during the editing sessions. But Chivurin did almost all of the talking. “Liga Smeshniki,” as League of Laughter participants call themselves, look to him—as KVN grandfather and League of Laughter founder—for advice as they create new team humor traditions in Ukraine.
  
  In the first and second rounds of the League of Laughter festival, the game is, however, identical to KVN. In these preliminary competitions teams get three minutes to perform a short number. The three league editors make notes and decide who will go on to the second round, and from there to the televised level. Once the final fourteen teams get selected, however, League of Laughter's format begins to diverge from KVN. In KVN each judge holds up a score card after teams perform, as in the Olympics. KVN competitions usually consist of three games (a combination of skits and joke contests), and the team with the highest score at the end wins. League of Laughter teams do not get scores from the judges. Instead, they get one point for each judge that stands up after they perform. If four of the seven judges stand, they get four points. If six judges stand, they get six points. The twist is, each of the seven judges selects two teams to train throughout the season. These trainers help the teams write material, rehearse with them, coach them, and perform with them. Trainers cannot stand for their own team. But they also may choose not to stand for a team that might beat their's—even if they performed brilliantly. After all, they want their own teams to advance. Chivurin told me, “This adds more intrigue (intriga). The format is more interactive, since the jury plays as well. So this opens up new kinds of possibilities. Possibly, unsportsmanlike ones. There's an opportunity for petty revenge (melkiy mest'). A judge can say, ‘You didn't stand for my team, so I won't stand for yours’” (interview with author, February 11, 2017).
  
  Aside from the scoring system, the other main difference between KVN and League of Laughter is the range of improvisational “battles” that take place when teams tie. Ties happen more frequently in League of Laughter than KVN because teams get a single whole-number score for each game (e.g. 4, 5, or 6) rather than an average of seven judges’ scores, as in KVN (e.g. 4.8). A battle called “Alphabet” proved popular in the 2016 season. Here, two teams must co-create a dialogue based on a scenario (“a new police officer stops an old militiaman”). Competitors do not get any time to confer or prepare. Each side takes turns giving lines, immediately, and the first letter of each response must follow Ukrainian alphabetical order. In this example from a 2016 semifinal match, ”of course” (“konechno”) follows ”yogurt” (“iogurt”) in the Cyrillic alphabet:
  
  Й:
  
  [young man holds out hand to female competitor]
  
  Йогурт—будешь?
  Iogurt—budesh'?
  Yogurt—would you like some?

  К:

  Конечно—нет.
  Konechno—net.
  Of course—not.
  
  [female competitor licks his hand]

  Л: Лизнула. Она лизнула меня на ладонь.
  Liznula. Ona liznula menya na ladon’.
  Licked me. She licked me on the palm.

  [laughter from the audience]
  
  In other battles, competitors had to give amusing answers to trivia questions; come up with a monologue based on random objects on a table; and act out a skit while sliding down a mini-stage tilted to a forty-five degree angle. “We have a lot of experimental formats,” Chivurin told me. “This is not ordinary KVN—though nothing against KVN. We are only just starting our tradition. We have different styles. Our format has a lot of risk. We aren’t afraid of that.” Improvisation is risky on TV because it can go wrong. A competitor might blank entirely. That did happen in League of Laughter in the 2016 season, as one team searched for a logical story to tell about a chess board, a bottle of vodka, and an atomizer: ”Well...actually. Um, let’s think about...how to solve this difficult puzzle.” Chivurin maintained that audiences appreciated true improv, though. “When they can see that it’s real, that you're not trying to trick them, it is interesting” (interview with author, February 11, 2017). He may be right. The dialogue above would seem odd at best if it was scripted. But there is drama in watching funny, intelligent people work out problems on the fly. There is intrigue.
  
  For reasons of copyright if no other, League of Laughter had to come up with some marked differences from KVN. An identical game under a new name would still incur legal issues. Aleksander Masliakov's son, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Masliakov, said in 2015, “I don’t like [League of Laughter]. Honestly, it is because in one form or another it is KVN, and everything is from KVN...”
  
  League of Laughter may have given Chivurin an excuse to re-create some improvisational elements televised KVN lost after the 1990s precisely because they were risky. From its beginnings in the 1960s, the “clever” part of the Club of the Cheerful and Clever came from improv. Two games in particular featured in every KVN competition for thirty years: razminka (“warm-ups”) and the Captain’s Contest. In razminka judges, other competitors, or members of the audience would pose questions, read parts of poems, or ask riddles. Teams got high scores for amusing responses. In the Contest of Captains two team captains would spar with riddles or trade jokes. At the end of the 1990s, though, Russia's Channel One became less tolerant of dead airtime, off-the-cuff jokes that fell flat, and performers who fumbled for words. Biathlon (which requires competitors to read off two pre-prepared jokes) replaced razminka and the Contest of Captains in televised KVN. This is one of the reasons Mikhail, a sociologist who played in Irkutsk university leagues in 1971, felt that KVN had become less and less interesting over time. “There was more censorship after shows stopped being live-broadcast [in the late 1960s],” he said. ”The program moved from improvisation to show [estrada]. In the 1990s it became funny again, but then moved back to just a show [estrada]” (interview with author, October 10, 2016). The ability to think on your feet, not just act out a script, is what makes KVN different from simple sketch comedy. In the eyes of many, improvisation is central to KVN tradition. For this reason, local, non-televised leagues often still stage improvisational games. There, people perform largely for friends and family and no one is worried about TV ratings. In Irkutsk, for example, university, primary school, and local leagues include razminka. When talking to the main editor of Irkutsk's Baikal League about my upcoming research in Odessa, he told me that some KVNshiki in Irkutsk considered League of Laughter to be better than KVN, partly because it included so many improvisational tasks. “A lot of people here watch [League of Laughter] online,” (interview with author, December 18, 2016). A Russian website that publishes KVN commentary also suggested, ”If you would like to watch funny KVN— go watch League of Laughter [instead].”
  
  Putting improv on TV, as it was when Chivurin himself played in Top League, may be a way to revive KVN as a game of wits rather than a “show.” As he wrote, with Mikhail Marfin, in What is KVN?, “If the game is not rigidly tied to a television program, then it may be possible to find a place for improvisation” (Marfin and Chivurin 1996, 99). With Amik exiled from Ukraine, KVN in Ukraine suddenly became entirely decoupled from a television program. Chivurin has a free hand to experiment with League of Laughter; he has the ability to celebrate KVN’s roots. Perhaps, then, KVN did not absent Ukrainian television screens. Perhaps it was revived.