I met team Friend Zone in Rivne after a 436-mile, twelve-hour train ride from Odessa. Emily, Nastya, Yana, and Fokin had arrived a few days earlier and had already begun editing sessions with the Rivne League of Laughter editors. I caught up with them at Rivne’s Musical School before their second meeting with the editors. We waited outside the school's auditorium for the team’s turn, then we all went in. I sat in the audience while Friend Zone took their places. The three editors sat in the first row of seats, directly in front of the stage.

The team began with a cheesy pick-up line number. Then they presented some skits I’d seen them perform at other Odessa KVN competitions that season—at Odessa National University and at the Jewish Community Center. They’d written some new material, too. Their team dynamic had changed a bit with the addition of Fokin (Foks for short), a male in the usually all-female team. Including Fokin meant that they had more latitude to make jokes about male-female relationships, like those in their opening number. Friend Zone ran through miniatures about dieting, about what to do over the Victory Day holidays, about “airhead” news, about women's giant purses. In that one, Yana struggled to lift her heavy bag, tugging at it as if it were filled with bowling balls. Finally, she did a series of cartwheels off the stage, allowing the momentum of her body weight to fling the bag forward. Though short of hysterical, the gag came across as unexpected and clever.
The editors, though, cut almost all of Friend Zone’s material. After listening to their feedback, the team thanked the judges and we all headed back to the apartment the team was renting. They would spend the rest of the afternoon and evening writing new material for their second-to-last editing session the following morning. As we wound our way through Rivne’s dusty, sunny May streets, the girls vented their frustration: blakha! (oh fudge!). “How come the skit with the two girls is ‘too KVN’ and the one about the news is not?” asked Nastya. Emily turned to me and said, “We’re nervous. This is more difficult [than in Odessa]. We came with a really big script, and we left the first day with almost nothing.”

After picking up some food at a local grocery store, the team settled in for four hours of uninterrupted brainstorming. One of the first sets of jokes they decided to rewrite were the pick-up lines. These jokes, which begin with “are you by any chance...” / “are your parents by any chance...” (“ty sluchaino ne...” / “tvoi roditeli sluchaino ne...”) make up a recognizable joke genre in Russian-speaking areas. Here are some examples of “are you by any chance” jokes, to illustrate the format the students played with:

—Твои родители случайно не террористы?
—Are your parents by any chance terrorists?
—Нет...
—No
—Тогда откуда у них такая бомба?
—Then where did they get a bomb(shell) like you?

—Твои родители случайно не наркоманы?
—Are your parents by any chance drug addicts?
—Нет
—No
—Тогда почемуу меня от тебя такая эйфория?
 —Then why do you give me such euphoria?

—Твои родители случайно не менты?
—Are your parents by any chance cops?
—Да
—Yes
—Молчу
—I'll stop talking

Being pick-up lines, the jokes in this genre can sometimes edge towards the bawdy. However, the genre conventions of the student comedy competitions mandate family-friendly humor. Editors, who act both like newspaper editors for columnists and like coaches in sports competitions, routinely tell teams to cut out “black” material, which means anything considered to be “negative” in this game: death, alcohol, drugs, and, of course, sexual themes. The rationale for omitting such material is not, in fact, because talking about these subjects is taboo, or even that they would offend audience members. Instead, black jokes get the axe because they are rarely funny: they would be downers. Stand-up comedians in Russia and Ukraine, like those in the United States, do crack jokes on sexual themes. But topics like these tend to spoil the atmosphere of KVN competitions, where positivity, out-loud laughter, and the pursuit of emotional highs take priority. The Odessa team oriented towards the presupposed moral framework of KVN tradition as they evaluated potential jokes for their Rivne performance. The team members interactively navigated the genre clash between pick-up lines and the norms of the performance space, making judgements of “funny” and “not funny” based on their imagined audiences.

Close examination of the interactional stances the team members took reveals the ways in which their approval and disapproval of jokes reinforced normative KVN values, where joyfulness always trumps humor. Here, I analyze two categories of the team's evaluations:

(1) evaluative comments, such as “that one’s weak,” “no,” “don't go there,” and “that’s funny”
(2) uptake of material, signaled either by topic continuation, silence, or topic shift

A more subtle interactional dynamic can be seen in these data, as well. For most of the forty- five minute segment where the team members were talking about pick-up line jokes, of which parts of four representative minutes are transcribed, Foks told jokes and the girls on the team issued judgements. The girls chipped in, but Foks was a more experienced KVN competitor and four years older than the college sophomores. When Foks told jokes that got a little too sexual, the girls, sometimes in chorus, issued mock-shocked disapprovals. But when one of the female team members said something unchaste, such as, “Are you by any chance a brick house? I would lay one of my bricks in you,” the girls giggled together and Foks tended to say nothing, often just moving on to the next potential joke set-up. While none of the sexual jokes were considered for their performance, by anyone, they were deployed to create interactional humor—even silliness—in the space of the rehearsal.

Evaluative commentary

Only a handful of the hundreds of proposed pick-up line jokes got included in the team’s eventual skit. Often, someone explicitly said that they did not like a joke, either because it was mediocre, because it was overly sexual, or because, as in the first excerpt below, the joke was gross (referring to bodily waste).

Foks
A tvoi roditeli sluchaino ne assenizatory?
Are your parents by any chance sanitation workers?

Nastya
[Nu—]
[Well—]

Foks
[Togda otkuda]
[Then where]

Togda otkuda u nikh takoe govn@@o
Then where did they get such shi@@t?

Emily
FOK-IN
FOK-IN

Fuu ia by 'shas skazala
Ugh is what I'd say now

When extremely negative reactions emerged, there was usually no explanation offered for why the joke was inappropriate. Voicing reproach, even by just repeating Foks’ full name loudly, was enough to signal a disapproving stance. Stances may be verbal or nonverbal, referential or nonreferential, but in all cases comment on some aspect of interaction, either immediate or mass-mediated. According to the relationship outlined in Du Bois’ stance triangle (below), Emily (subject 1) evaluated Foks’ punchline (object), thereby taking up a position towards tacit standards of humor.

Emily did not have to explain her disapproval, and, unlike in other places in the transcript (lines 152-155), Foks did not defend his joke. Foks revealed that he, too, knew that his joke edged over the line of the appropriate, both thematically and because he cursed, and that’s why he laughed as he pronounced the word “shit." In fact, Foks aligned with Emily’s opinion of the joke, at least regarding its suitability in competition. His laugh revealed that he told the joke because of its interactional effects on the girls, and, more importantly, for his own amusement.

The fact that Emily’s reaction was so strong, though, reveals something about the participation framework of KVN jokes (Goffman 1974). KVN audiences expect clean, “cheerful” humor. KVNshiki write jokes with an aim to creating a positive atmosphere in the performance space. Performers therefore keep harsh satire to a minimum. The putdowns that often typify stand- up routines and Saturday Night Live, while sometimes funny, tend to be downers. KVN emphasizes, instead, feelings of elation and joyfulness (vesel’e). Emily reinforces this vision of KVN, marking the sanitation joke as no good. This is genre-enforcing work that must be done; it isn't a given that the joke has no humor value—especially since Foks laughed. Not everyone, after all, thinks bathroom humor isn't funny; the movie Dumb and Dumber grossed $247 million, and a number of its scenes featured bodily fluids (Weinrub 2005). Emily, however, put forth a more cultured image of humor.

Emily later dismissed a joke that Foks, Yana, and Nastya brainstormed as mediocre (“so-so”). Here, her evaluation appeared to be on the grounds of humor alone, though it is possible that Yana’s punchline suggestion, “I’d sleep with you” would have also been too blatantly sexual for the competition (line 2). Several of the girls laughed together at Yana’s joke, though, because the mild “sleep with” pun operates with the same dual indexicality in Russian as it does in English. 

Foks
ty sluchaino ne pliushevaia igrushka
are you by any chance a plush toy?

Yana
ia by s toboi by spal
I’d sleep with you

(Multiple)
((giggles))

Nastya
ia by tebia obnial?
I would hug you?

Emily
nu takoe
it’s so-so

Yana’s punchline, nonetheless, elicited laughter. But the team members evaluated the funniness of jokes in their immediate interaction and jokes meant for a KVN auditorium differently. At times, too, they brainstormed some material that they seemed to know would never make it on stage because they found it funny amongst themselves. Often these were jokes of a sexual nature. In a suggestive joke Emily told, “Are you by any chance a satellite? My meteorite would draw up next to you," once again the girls laughed, but even Emily herself wrote off the joke as useless.

Neither the brick house joke above nor Emily’s satellite one followed terribly strong logic, however. Even if sexual themes had been acceptable for their performance, the jokes simply weren’t very good (good, that is, if a well-formed joke is understood to create a cohesive image or storyline in the minds of listeners). Neither “I’d lay one of my bricks in you” nor “my meteorite would draw up next to you” act as very close analogues to sexual activity. (Do meteors sidle up to satellites?) But this is one of the reasons these jokes made the students laugh. They were silly, semi-intentional parodies of the pick up line genre that delighted the team in the space of rehearsals. These types of interactions, then, often reveal dual evaluations. Members may have laughed at an inappropriate joke, signaling approval and appreciation, but adopted negative stances towards including such material in the performance. Just like Demchenko’s dual stances cited above, these participants took first-order stances towards the jokes in the space of interaction, but signaled second-order stances toward a superordinate moral framework—in this case, the regime of values affirmed in KVN.

Uptake of material

Not all of the proposed jokes, though, elicited explicit commentary. Instead, the team members marked approval and disapproval via uptake, or how they reacted to and referenced an utterance in their replies. In the examples below, jokes deemed unsuccessful simply got little uptake. They were either ignored or dismissed in a few syllables: “well yeah,” “don't." Emily's failure to acknowledge her own satellite joke is telling. Both Nastya and Yana had offered continuations on the “are you by any chance a satellite” set-up that Emily floated. The topic, it seemed had potential—unlike Foks’ Geiger counter line, which the girls shot down immediately. But both Yana’s and Nastya’s contributions were met with silence rather than either praise or continuation, effectively eliminating them from contention. Emily herself issued a punchline in line 16, and Nastya laughed. But instead of refining the idea, Emily instead cursed the fact that they’d only come up with one joke so far, about the Titanic of a guy’s heart crashing on the iceberg of his crush. Even in her estimation, the satellite joke had not counted. As with Fokin’s sanitation worker joke and the brick house come-on, the punchline Emily voiced only served to amuse the team.

Foks
ty sluchaino ne schetchik Geigera
are you by any chance a Geiger counter?

Emily
nu da
well yeah

Nastya
ne n:ado
don't

((yawn))

Foks
ty sluchaino ne
are you by any chance

ty sluchaino ne
are you by any chance

Emily
ty sluchaino ne kosmicheskii sputnik ((yawn))
are you by any chance a satellite? ((yawn))

Nastya
ia ob tebya—
I around you—

Yana
ty dazhe ne dostiagaema
you're not even reachable

[3 lines omitted]

Emily
vot blin'
well darn

°nu vot krome etogo serdtsa°
°well except for that heart°

Rather than simple statements about whether jokes were funny or not, the evaluations Friend Zone made reflected ideologies about humor and its social role. All four team members presupposed norms not only about the kinds of jokes audiences would appreciate, but about the kinds of jokes they should tell during KVN competitions. Their actions in this rehearsal reflected the beliefs they held. While all topics are fair game during stand-up shows, including sex, brutal criticism of political leaders, and complaints about family life (or potholes, the job market, the rise of cell phones, discrimination, etc.), negativity ruins the mood KVN competitors work to create. Everyone wants to win, true, and winners are those that tell funny jokes. It isn’t enough, though, for a joke to be funny. It must also be joyful, and ideally intellectual (or at least not crass).

By reinforcing this vision of comedy, even if only for KVN auditoria, Friend Zone also endorsed ideologies about the good and the right. They, like thousands of teams across Ukraine and hundreds of thousands in Russia and Central Asia, don’t nix negative topics because they are censored or violate rules (KVN has no rules). They do this because they enjoy participating in a game whose goal is generating, as Katia said, “highs.” At any time a team could choose to do otherwise, and occasionally they do, as Connected Odessa did with their jokes about death. The audience did not laugh and the judges gave the team low scores. KVNshiki thus operate within social structures not of their own making, responding to the regulatory pressures of audiences, judges, and editors. Importantly, though, they get to choose their jokes, their representations of reality, and their orientations towards sex, drugs, violence, and crude references. These choices serve as moral stances, not just matters of taste.

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