“[Recordings’] essential material existence is in the reproducible notations, which are then radically dependent on the cultural system in which the notations are current...”
—Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature

When Ukrainians could not compete in KVN Top League they immediately created a new one to take its place. KVN-style comedy fills an important cultural and televisual niche, and fans come to know the rhythm of the season. After the 2014 Top League final, judge Valdis Pelss said, “I don't want to bring up problems, but a member of the jury must be objective. And I wanted to mention a problem. Until 2015 there will be no KVN. How are we going to winter this long month and a half?”

Like Pelss, people who watch KVN get used to following teams’ progress. There is drama, tension, improvement (and always laughter). Ukrainians can still watch KVN on YouTube. But for the first time, their teams are not represented in the hegemonic international forum. Russians and Ukrainians alike feel the omission.

People on both sides of the border also follow each other’s seasons on YouTube, vKontakte (a Russian social networking site similar to Facebook), and Telegram (a social media news and messaging platform). Ukrainian teams regularly post links in social media groups as Top League broadcasts become available on YouTube. During the 2017 Sochi festival, Ukrainian social media sites paid special attention to “Ukrainian” teams who attended. All sixteen teams came from Crimea and separatist-controlled areas in the east. They identified as Russian, not Ukrainian. An Odessa KVN community re-posted commentary from Amik’s website (kvn.ru) about all the (former) Ukrainian teams’ status in the tournament. Commentary for the team Yura, Forgive Me from Sevastopol serves as a typical example: “A joke about the Zenith Bridge. Weak, according to audience reaction. Unfortunately, the situation has not changed. Rating: 2 stars.” Updates about the (former) Ukrainian teams got posted on Ukrainian pages as scores went online on Amik’s website, much like live coverage of sports events.

The same Odessa vKontakte group re-posted a call for donations for a member of a Russian KVN team (Piatigorsk) who was fighting cancer in the spring of 2017. The original post, on Amik’s vKontakte page, said, “Let's show that taking care of every member of our big KVN family is not just a bunch of empty words.” Ukrainian KVNshiki do, then, still consider themselves part of the international KVN community. They just do not perform for that audience anymore.

On the whole, though, Ukrainian teams use platforms like vKontakte and Instagram to build interdiscursive relationships with other Ukrainian teams and fans. Memes and quizzes presuppose, largely, knowledge of League of Laughter, which shores up an imagined community of domestic KVNshiki. A weekly vKontakte quiz called “Guess the Liga Smeshnik” posted pictures of contestants when they were children and asks readers to guess which League of Laughter competitor it was. Other quizzes polled respondents on the best trainers, predictions about which teams would win the season, and which teams people thought got short shrift in scoring. Memes featuring favorite competitors circulated, too. Sometimes, the official League of Laughter vKontakte page posted pictures and asked readers to come up with funny captions. These drew on knowledge of games, judges, and individual characters within League of Laughter.

However, vKontakte, the preferred social networking platform of Ukrainian youth in 2017, got banned during my fieldwork because a Russian company owns it. There were concerns that Russians could use the site to collect location and other compromising information about Ukrainians.

I was with the Odessa team Friend Zone in Rivne, Ukraine when news of the vKontakte ban started to filter through. Fokin, one of the teammates, came in from the balcony of the apartment where the team was rehearsing and said, “Vova said he heard something about it, but nothing is for certain.” Yana immediately began downloading a Virtual Private Network (VPN) app on her iPhone. This would allow her to choose a foreign IP address and bypass content restrictions in Ukraine. “What's a VPN?” asked Nastya as Yana complained that her download was not installing. ”It's what's going to let me use vKontakte when you can’t!” Yana teased.

The next day, May 16, 2017, President Poroshenko did, in fact, order cell and internet providers to block access to vKontakte (sixteen million Ukrainian users), as well as the Russian search engine Yandex (eleven million Ukrainian users) and the mail.ru email domain (twenty-five million Ukrainian users). Students demonstrated, holding signs that said, “Don't change vKontakte.” And they also responded with humor. KVNshiki at the Odessa Mayor's Cup on May 21st used the stage to criticize the new policy and to gently mock its ineffectiveness. One team in Odessa, Ukraine replaced the saying that marks the beginning of KVN seasons, “We are starting KVN” (“My otkryvaem KVN”), with “We are starting VPN” (“My otkryvaem VPN”). Another team at the Mayor's Cup mimed stealthily sneaking up to the Russian border, placing first a toe, then an entire foot on the other side. As he leaned over the invisible boundary, a volley of vKontakte's familiar “new message” pings filled the auditorium. It was a raw subject that day, when thousands of young people had signed a petition asking the president to unblock vKontakte (by mid-June over 25,000 Ukrainians had signed). It was also topical, though. And because the joke mocked President Poroshenko’s official policy during a time of war, the edgy punchline caught the audience a little off-guard.

Just as Ukrainians keep up with Russian KVN on YouTube, many Russians watch League of Laughter on the internet, as well. When talking to Anton, the main editor of Irkutsk’s Baikal League in 2016, about my upcoming research in Odessa, he told me that some KVNshiki in Irkutsk considered League of Laughter to be better than KVN because it included so many improvisational tasks. “A lot of people here watch [League of Laughter] online.” A Russian website that publishes KVN commentary likewise suggested, “If you would like to watch funny KVN—go watch League of Laughter [instead].”117 Anton himself even watched other Ukrainian comedy programs, including Crack Up the Comic (Rassmeshi Komika). “It used to be on our Channel 2, but they took it off,” he said. “There is a lot of stuff on YouTube” (interview with author, December 18, 2016). 

Russians are not the imagined audiences for League of Laughter. But they are part of its public. Ukrainians are not participants in international leagues. But they remain part of the community. Every day the vKontakte group “I love KVN” posts some of the best skits from the past several years. On March 2, 2017 they posted one of Odessa Tales’ 2013 performances. The Ukrainians, if absent, have not been erased.