Victor Raskin was born in Russia and received his doctorate in Structural, Computational, and Mathematical Linguistics from Moscow State University in 1970, at the height of KVN’s early popularity. Drawing a boundary between his theories about jokes, then, and those of “the natives,” may seem a little artificial. In this section, though, I want to highlight what KVNshiki themselves see as the elements of humor. Their prescriptions tend to be more practical than academic: how to write a punchline rather than algorithms of funniness.

Even KVNshiki, of course, have diverse opinions about ideal jokes, skits, and performances. I base the discussion that follows on the perspectives of two editors, one Russian and one Ukrainian, who have thought deeply about humor and its creation. Both also help train student KVNshiki and Liga Smeshniki through lectures and editing sessions. The first editor is Aleksei Eks, originally from Ekaterinburg but now working as a humor writer in Moscow. Eks gives regular lectures about how to write material at KVN training events throughout Russia and has also written a number of articles on these subjects (Eks 2009, 2014, 2015). The second is Pavel Demchenko (from chapter four), the main editor for the Odessa League of Laughter and Odessa National University KVN league. Demchenko gives lectures to students competing in the leagues he runs, but shares a lot of his theories about humor creation during the leagues’ week-long pre-game editing sessions.

During a telephone interview, I asked Eks how he knew what he had written was a joke and not just some kind of sentence. He responded with a ready list. “There are three criteria for a joke,” he said. “Understandability, relevance, and novelty” (interview with author, October 28, 2018). These elements recall Aksel’rod’s “recognizable + unexpected” formula, but Eks’ criteria focus on topic selection (write about what people know) rather than the shape of a punchline (surprise the audience). About understandability, Eks said, “We have to make jokes about what people understand.” His second criterion, relevance, concerned the “now,” or current events. “If someone just puts on some kind of skit about Beauty and the Beast without any jokes about current events, that wouldn't be KVN. It wouldn’t be very funny. It would be some kind of theater.” In contrast, a skit about Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump as Beauty and the Beast strikes people as funny. “It’s something that can only be right now,” Eks said. The material was fresh (or was during the 2016 elections). Novelty, he continued, required coming up with something no one had ever done before. “Otherwise you’re just repeating one another, or teams are stealing from each other,” he said.

Eks compared this understandability, relevance, novelty recipe to American comedy, saying, “Well, you have Saturday Night Live, Comedy Central. They do roughly the same thing— occasionally.” The problem with American comedy, he argued, was one of relevance. American humor writers, especially in sitcom and film consortia, write not just for an American audience but for a global marketplace. This means that they often search for commonality in lowbrow themes. “Everyone has a backside,” Eks said, by way of example. “Backsides are relevant for everyone.” In Eks’ opinion, even humor for adults in America was “fairly childish” (interview with author, October 28, 2018). I wished I could disagree.

Pavel Demchenko echoed Eks’ ideas about the importance of relevance in jokes. Eks, though, who played in, writes for, and orients towards televised leagues, advised students to mine joke topics from mass media sources. At a training in Krasnoyarsk, Eks asked students to write down the last ten books they’d read, the last ten movies they’d watched, the last ten TV programs they’d watched, and the last ten songs they'd listened to.182 People who perform for television audiences, especially a KVN audience that stretches from the Crimea to Central Asia, often have to build relevant jokes from popular culture and international news. Demchenko, on the other hand, advised teams to connect with audiences by writing jokes that were “maximally about ordinary life.” He continued, “A joke, any joke, is like a prism of truth. That's the root of any joke.” Demchenko shared these thoughts, and others, during a two-hour master class on theories of humor in the lead up to Odessa National University's semifinal matches in 2017. Around a hundred students had assembled at the university on a Saturday morning. It was April, but most of us still shivered with our coats on in an unheated auditorium. Demchenko’s goal: help students write funny material, ideally within the week. He lectured, therefore, about the nuts-and-bolts of joke writing rather than giving a historical or philosophical overview.

Demchenko listed three main principles for choosing joke topics, then turned to a more technical discussion of joke set-up and structure. In addition to being about ordinary life, the second feature of a good joke, for Demchenko, was that they were above all cheerful. “I want you to understand,” he told the students, “That it doesn't matter what kinds of jokes you write, but they have to be cheerful." Like Eks, Pavel’s third recommendation concerned novelty. He said, “You have to create a unique performance, you have to, perhaps, find something unique in yourself, something no one has seen before. How? I don't know. But you must.”
One of the most important parts of Demchenko’s lecture, though, concerned how to arrange jokes for maximum effect. He outlined a four-part scheme for blocs of jokes. The first joke should explain the situation at hand, he said. The second joke reaffirms the situation. The third joke should introduce a turn—a new, unexpected element. The fourth and final joke in a series should offer resolution.

After I heard this sequencing pattern, I started to notice it in performances everywhere. Its power, in terms of timing and manipulation of audience presuppositions, can be illustrated with two joke blocs from the 2019 Sochi festival. The first is from the team Hello, We’ve Arrived (Zdraste, priekhali) from Russia's Krasnodar Region. In this skit, a young man named Valera came out on stage and confronted his girlfriend with a pistol. Their exchange ran as follows:

Valera
Tak vot!
So!

Tak vot ty menya, promeniala
So that's how you're going to give me up

Girlfriend
Pover—
Believ—

Valera
Molchat!
Quiet!

Ty chto, zabila radi kogo ia perestal krys?
What, have you forgotten for whose sake I stopped the rats?              Joke 1: Situation

Girlfriend
Val—
Val—

Valera
Molchat!
Quiet!

Ty chto, zabila radi kogo ia na vsekh tantsakh zapisalsia?                           Joke 2: Affirms the situation
What, have you forgotten for whose sake I signed up for all those dance classes?           

Girlfriend
Valera—
Valera—

Valera
Molchat!
Quiet!

Ty chto, zabila s kem u tebia byl perviy raz?
What, have you forgotten who was your first?

((2 seconds of silence))

((softly)) Skazhi chto-nibudt
((softly)) Say something

Girlfriend
Valera—
Valera—

Valera
Molchat!
Quiet!                                Joke 3: Turn, unexpected element

((laughter in the audience))

Nu, ya smykaiu
Well, I'll shut up                  Joke 4: Resolution

The first two jokes in this skit set up a fairly logical scenario: a boyfriend reminds his girlfriend of all that he has done for her. The turn comes in the next joke, when Valera asks his girlfriend if she remembers her first partner. Instead of appealing to Valera, as she did after his first two questions, she says nothing. After Valera prompts her to say something, the girlfriend starts to address him again—only to be cut off. The joke lies in the fact that Valera, most likely, was not her first. He interrupts her, though, when she says his name, as if “Valera” was her answer to his previous question. People in the Sochi audience laughed heartily if quietly at the risqué yet quite good joke. It would not have worked, though, if the first two jokes had not primed the audience to expect a certain kind of response. The third joke confounded expectations.

The second example also comes from the 2019 Sochi festival, from the Novosibirsk team I’m Offended (Ya Obidelas’). In the scene below, a boyfriend initially speaks to his girlfriend through a door, trying to convince her to leave with him. The girlfriend is putting on a KVN skit with another girl and does not want to leave. In the first two jokes, the humor comes mainly from the boyfriend’s repeated pleas that Yana come with him and Yana’s creative attempts to avoid him. The third joke, puts the boyfriend’s refrain of “get your stuff, let's go” in an entirely different, surprising context. “Oh, you have KVN?” the boyfriend asks. He continues, “An incident in ’37—get your stuff, let’s go." The punchline, which got fifteen seconds of applause, refers to the height of Stalin’s purges in 1937-1938. It was a particularly dangerous time to crack jokes. Those in the audience would be well acquainted with the ominous connotations of “get your stuff, let’s go,” if uttered by an NKVD186 agent who appeared at the door late at night. The resolution of this skit came with the boyfriend asking Yana to hurry up and finish the performance.

Boyfriend
Yana, sobiraisia, poekhali
Yana, get your stuff, let's go

dolga tebia zhdat?
should I wait long?

net
no

odevaeshsia chto delaesh, Yan'?
are you getting dressed or what, Yana?

[4 lines omitted]

Yan', sobiraisia, poekhali
Yana, get your stuff, let's go                              Joke 1: Situation

davai uzhe
come on, already

(Yana disappears behind a curtain as the boyfriend enters. The boyfriend lifts up the curtain to reveal Yana.)

sobirasia, ia govoriu, poekhali
get your stuff, I said, let's go                            Joke 2: Affirms the situation

Yana
ty s uma soshel?
are you crazy?

u nas seichas vystuplenie
we're doing a performance

[three lines omitted]

ia nikuda ne poedu
I'm not going anywhere

u nas festival’ KVN
we have a KVN festival

Boyfriend
a KVN u vas est'?
oh, you have KVN?

Yana
da
yes

Boyfriend
sluchaei v ’37-om godu
an incident in ’37

</VOX> vy chto tam delaete? </VOX>
</VOX> what are you doing? </VOX>

Yana
shutki shutim
we’re making jokes

Boyfriend
sobiraisia, poekhali
get your stuff, let's go                        Joke 3: Turn, unexpected element

Below is a video clip of the team's performance of this sketch a few months later, at the Premier League Octofinals in Moscow.

During his lecture, Demchenko explained his four-part scheme with diagrams on the board and examples of jokes made by local Odessa teams. “You might have a lot of these initial jokes,” he said, referring to those that set up and affirm an initial situation. With this formula, Demchenko pushed Odessa KVNshiki to write not just individual jokes, which is hard enough, but to think about the most effective arrangement of jokes in any given skit.

Funny people all over the world intuit aspects of joke timing. Members of the Krasnodar and Novosibirsk teams citied above likely never heard a lecture like Demchenko’s—they simply wrote a skit they themselves found funny. A lot of good writers, usually those that write a lot and read a lot, avoid “be” verbs and nominalizations without explicit instruction. But writing guides help bring these elements of language use to the top of writers’ awareness, helping nearly everyone that applies these principles to write more clearly. Eks’ and Demchenko’s recommendations work the same way, imparting conceptual tools of a trade accessible to the masses.

Theories and meta-theories

After I asked Eks some questions about the relationship of KVN to older forms of skit-making, like kapustniki and agitbrigades, he turned instead to a much older Russian theorist of comedy. “I really insist that the origins of KVN are carnival culture,” he said. He elaborated,

Because—well, we have this big book, written by the Soviet scholar Bakhtin...Well, we all studied it in the Philology Department, in the Department of Philology and Journalism. We covered it all, and it was really interesting. And the carnival culture there, it is all about KVN. 

Eks studied Bakhtin as an undergraduate journalism student and also holds a master’s degree in sociology. Bakhtin had said carnival consisted of at least one of the following: ritual spectacles, comic compositions, and crude language (Baktin 2009, 243). KVN is, certainly, a ritual spectacle, and one made up almost entirely of parody and joke texts. I asked Eks, though, what elements of carnival he saw in KVN. He told me that laughter was a “gentle form of aggression” and a “very cultured form of aggression.” He continued, “If I have some kind of problem—I don't like something, something is bothering me—if I present it in a funny way, I laugh. And then I soften my thinking about it.” This laughter does not, of course, solve the problem itself. But bringing issues to light, as the Odessa Gentlemen did with their “salute to the censors,” can seem a triumph in itself —and comedic aggression a pleasure in itself. Those who find their voices silenced in most contexts get to speak out. KVN, thus, can represent a kind of inversion, as those in subordinate positions get a word in against the government (cf. Bakhtin 1984 [1965]).

Eks said he discusses carnival with his student KVNshiki to let them know that they are part of a very old tradition of comedy, one that extends back to medieval Europe. More importantly, though, he shares, and practices, an ideology of humor as craft. This belief, that good jokes come not from individual brilliance but from training, is crucial to the continuance of KVN as an activity. I would argue, too, that it's key to KVN’s obvious success. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of young people across the Soviet bloc habitually write jokes, and American young people do not. The difference is not ability, but education.