“In society as a whole, and in all its particular activities, the cultural tradition can be seen as a continual selection and reselection of ancestors. Particular lines will be drawn, often for as long as a century, and then suddenly with some new stage in growth these will be cancelled or weakened, and new lines drawn.”
—Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution

KVNshiki make and re-make KVN tradition everyday, as they stay up late to write jokes in each others’ rooms, as they pilfer classroom space at their universities to rehearse, and as they compete, locally and in other Ukrainian cities. Each of these quotidian actions re-frames the “doing-being-ordinary” of KVN in today’s Ukraine (cf. Sacks 1984). When they write material for competitions, students imagine their audiences. Often, those audiences are local students, so they discuss events in their towns, make digs at other teams, or tease the judges, former KVNshiki themselves. Those that do make it to televised League of Laughter competitions write for a larger audience—but still an exclusively Ukrainian one. This is in contrast to Top League teams, who build skits for international post-Soviet audiences in Russia, Central Asia, Chechnya, Armenia, Georgia, and Belarus. Their punchlines must rely on citations that people in those countries share: pop culture, language, and references to the Soviet past. These are precisely the lines along which Ukrainian teams have started to diverge from their Amik colleagues. League of Laughter competitors refer almost exclusively to Ukrainian musicians, actors, and celebrities. While performers primarily speak Russian, many teams code-switch between Russian and Ukrainian, and some from Western Ukraine speak exclusively Ukrainian. Language, if nothing else, cordons off the space of Ukrainian KVN as Ukraine-internal. Teams do make Soviet references. When they do, though, it is not with nostalgia, as is often the case in Russia (Oushakine 2007). Rather, the Soviet past gets invoked as a provincial bogeyman. Amik teams also often characterize their audiences as a united post-Soviet community.

During one skit, for instance, a Kazakh team referred to its Russian audience as “neighbors” and “relatives.” Discourse that shores up Soviet brotherhood promotes a Russian sphere of influence because post-Soviet space overlaps with the Eurasian Economic Union (which Russia controls). Arguably, the war in Ukraine began over the then-president Viktor Yanukovich’s choice, in November 2013, to scuttle a proposed trade agreement with the European Union in favor of ties to the Eurasian Economic Union. Ukrainian teams, then, do not refer to a post-Soviet imagined community in their skits (cf. Anderson 1983). In this section I examine the ways in which Ukrainian KVNchiki construct their audiences as domestic, represent the war, and address the Soviet past in rehearsals and editing sessions as well as performances. Through everyday practices, they erase and replace elements of KVN that are no longer relevant, like aspiring to televised league play in Moscow, or would be upsetting to recall, like the multi-thousand person annual KVN festival in Sochi, a giant party that Ukrainians now find it nearly impossible to attend.

Imagined audiences

This book's public, according to Michael Warner, is anyone who is reading it (Warner 2002, 413). A public is a community of people who consume, in some way, a cultural text. Rather than publics, I would like to discuss how Ukrainian KVNchiki imagine and orient towards their perceived audiences. A lot of Russian KVN fans do, in fact, watch League of Laughter on YouTube. Thus, League of Laughter’s public consists of Russians as well as Ukrainians. But Ukrainian KVNchiki do not represent their audience as international, as Amik leagues consistently do. They index national and local events, Ukrainian TV programs, and Ukrainian League of Laughter teams.

This is in contrast to intertextual practices in Amik leagues. An example from the 2015 Top League season illustrates how performers presuppose knowledge about past Top League performers. The Krasnoyarsk KVN team “Bad Company” (Plokhaia Kompaniia), which did not make it to the final round in the 2014 Top League competition, began their octofinal skit in 2015 with a complaint. The team captain, Mikhail, said, “The competition last year was unfair.” His teammate then replied, “But Mik, there are editors…” implying that people carefully count the scores. Mikhail cut in, saying “I’m talking about DALS.” DALS was a talented team from Belgorod who had beat them in the previous season. This joke was funny, true. But it also served a social function. By invoking KVN lore, the joke interpellated its viewers as a circle equipped to share in the skit’s presuppositions. Anyone who watched the 2014 competition would remember DALS’s unconventional breakout showing. Unlike most teams that make it to the televised leagues, their performances included zero elements of “show.” They could not sing. Their skits included no elaborate dance numbers, no beautiful woman, and no high-production videos. Their costumes were, generally, jeans and blazers. They brought no stage scenery. In fact, rather than a full team, DALS was just a duo: a goofy-looking tall guy and a mustachioed short guy. They took second place in 2014’s Top League on a shoestring budget because they wrote exceptionally funny jokes. Fans, to include Aleksander Masliakov, appreciated their bare-bones humor. A Georgian team also praised DALS during one of their 2015 performances, displaying a sign during their opening act that said, “Viva DALS!” (“DALS, v pered!”). Teams often riff off of one another’s skits, sometimes as tribute, sometimes as mockery.

Siberian teams index Top League performances in their skits, too. In the 2016 Krasnoyarsk central league final, for instance, the team So-and-So (Tak-to) dressed up in DALS’s trademark blazers. Irkutsk teams borrow from the televised leagues, as well, as they define what to means to be a knowledgeable KVNchik. On November 8, 2017, Irkutsk teams celebrated KVN’s birthday (officially, International KVN Day). Around seventy young people gathered at a local restaurant for a KVN quiz and razmynki contest. The included questions about both local and televised leagues. KVNchiki competed to name the teams associated with certain theme songs (otbivki), to name the Top League teams that had told certain jokes, and to complete partial jokes with the correct punchline. The quiz required encyclopedic knowledge of the last five years of KVN. The group that I sat with knew about half the questions. Even when groups did not know the answers, they were at least conversant with recent Top League skits. “Oh, exactly! That’s the one about the mayor, Kamyziaki,” said one of students in the group I was sitting with. “Yes!” the others exclaimed, and hurried to pencil in their response. Team Kamyziaki had sung the song they had to guess in a Top League quarterfinal match four years earlier, but everyone at the table, none older than twenty-one, immediately recognized the reference.

Few Ukrainian KVN teams reference Amik’s televised leagues in their performances, now. Their imagined audience is in Ukraine. Even if Ukrainians watch Top League on YouTube (and they do), they do not represent their audiences as a public that watches the Russia-based competitions. It would seem inappropriate, somehow, to presuppose knowledge of banned Russian television programs. Instead, League of Laughter teams reference the performances of other League of Laughter teams and poke fun of League of Laughter judges. For instance, when a team who made it to the League of Laughter finals in 2016 did not advance past the second round of the League of Laughter festival in 2017, fans were shocked. League of Laughter’s producers knew that audiences would appreciate some small inclusion of the team, Lukas, in the first televised contest of the year. During the broadcast they aired a videotaped song from Lukas, lamenting their early defeat:

We wanted to make it into the season
We came to the festival in Odessa
We wrote jokes about everything
And nothing
When we got into the second round
We were really happy
We hoped and we believed
But did not advance
Forget her, forget her
The season disappears, like smoke

Lukas’s video included shots of the hotel conference hall where more than five hundred young people spent a week as they performed and watched the festival. That particular allusion was for the festival participants, most of them partners in Lukas’s defeat in that auditorium. The lyrics as a whole, though, construct the League of Laughter viewership as Ukrainian, first of all, and as one that understands the significance of the League of Laughter festival in Odessa. If they had not watched before, the show’s host explained, “League of Laughter is the humor network for all of Ukraine.” The first broadcast of the year also included behind the scenes interviews with the festival’s young participants. Now in its third season, League of Laughter already has a significant fan base, and one that would wonder at Lukas’s conspicuous absence this season. Just as teams from Krasnoyarsk and Georgia premised their 2015 skits on knowledge of DALS’s success, the show’s producers presumed that most viewers would know who team Lukas was and that they took third place the previous year. Jokes told during the season’s opening performance also shored up the internal League of Laughter community. The Bible Team from Kamenskoe, whose jokes all revolved around religious topics, poked gentle fun at the judging panel. They continued, “In League of Laughter, there are trainers for everyone. We don’t know if it is coincidence or not, but the wages of sin are death for everyone, as well. Knowledge of teams’ successes (and failures) were presupposed as early as the semifinals of the very first season. In the 2015 second semifinal, a team from Lutsk quipped, “How do you say ‘loser’ in Lutsk?” They then rattled off the teams they hoped to defeat that season. “Well, the Generals. And Castle Liubert, Manhattan, Lukas.”

Pop cultural references in League of Laughter also center on Ukrainian artists. For instance, in the 2015 semifinals each team invited a celebrity to compete with them. Their guests included three Ukrainian singers (Nastya Kamenskykh, Pavlo Zibrov, and Vitaly Kozlovsky), two actors (Yevgeniy Koshevoy and Olga Freimut), and a KVNchik (Garik Bircha). They are well known within Ukraine, but get little air time outside of it. The unabashedly nationalistic themes of those semifinal matches catered to a Ukrainian audience, as well. The theme of the first semifinal was, “The history of Kiev.” The theme of the second match was “Literary authors born in Ukraine.” Skits and musical numbers had to address those topics. KVN Top League themes seem milquetoast in comparison. Themes in 2015 included “friendship,” “faster” and “earth and sky.” Skits in Top League are not supposed to cause offense. Russians watching League of Laughter in 2015 may well have taken offense. If watching, though, they were interpellated as eavesdroppers rather than an intended audience. That said, themes in League of Laughter’s third season quarterfinals struck a more neutral note, as competitors wrote skits about “civilizations” and “inventors.”

While the televised League of Laughter competitions reach the widest audiences, they are not the most important aspects of team comedy in Ukraine. League of Laughter culls almost all of its participants from student KVN leagues. Odessa alone hosts four KVN leagues: the Odessa National University League, the Odessa National Polytechnic University League, the Mayor’s Cup, the School League, and the KVN League of Beit Grand, the Jewish Cultural Center in Odessa. Students in these leagues play with KVN’s scoring system and without battles. They often enter the stage to the KVN theme song, written in 1986. The form of these games maintain continuity with KVN tradition. To be funny, though, jokes have to be, as Andrei Chivurin argued, “relevant and unexpected.” Everyone can relate to a joke about a stereotypical elderly man in the grocery store. These kinds of jokes are often funnier than, say, another joke about Mikhail Saakashvili, one-time governor of Odessa. Some of the students playing in Odessa leagues are themselves refugees from the disputed territories in Donetsk and Lugansk. The war is immediate and relevant for them. Just as students write about partners, jobs, and parents, they write about the war. In one representative, if not terribly politically correct joke, a team member from Kiev announced an overweight teammate’s entrance on stage with, “Look, look. Crimea returned to us on foot!”

Editors of local leagues have a lot of power to regulate content. Teams perform their skits for editors ahead of time. The editors coach them on what to include, what to take out, and how to improve their jokes. “Your punchlines need to come a little more quickly,” Pavel, the Odessa Tales team member mentioned above, told a group of sophomores. “Everything needs to be more distinct (chetko)”. Most university leagues are run by former KVNchiki, like Pavel, who have recently graduated. In Odessa these leagues rarely have sponsors. Thus, restrictions on content fall solely to the editors, who make their decisions along the lines of funny and not funny rather than appropriate and inappropriate. The KVN League of the Jewish Cultural Center in Odessa, though, operates differently. The Center has clear rules about what participants can discuss. “We do not touch political themes here,” said Andrei, the main editor of the Center’s KVN league during a pre-season meeting in February 2017. “Political news—sure, go ahead. But not unpleasant situations.” KVN, in this league, is supposed to leave audiences feeling cheerful, not encourage them to dwell on conflicts in Ukraine and Israel. In a March 2017 octofinal match, though, one of the teams violated this advice. They presented some material that the editors had not approved in rehearsals—and it was about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. After the competition, when the teams assembled for feedback, the league director told them. “Guys, you cannot joke about things like that. It isn’t even that I don’t want you to. It is that we have sponsors. If our sponsors saw a recording of tonight’s performances, it’s possible that we would not even have a league.”

KVN tradition gets constituted a bit differently, then, at the Center. Andrei told participants that material on Jewish themes was more than welcome; the audience would appreciate it. Non-Jewish teams acknowledged that they were out of their depth in making these kinds of jokes. They tended to make tongue-in-cheek references to not eating pork, for instance. “There! A joke on a Jewish theme!” one even exclaimed during the March 2017 octofinals. The emcee at that match made a running gag about the Jewish holiday Purim, which fell on the same day as the octofinals. After reading a long, fairly dry text about the history of the holiday, he joked, “We’re going to take an intermission now, but some of you should stay. I am going to read more about Purim. Jews, for you, it’s required!”

The Center constituted its audience as a maximal in-crowd: not just Ukrainian, not just residents of Odessa, but Jewish residents of Odessa. Or, as guests of the Center, friends of the Jewish residents of Odessa. The suggestion to write about Jewish topics was a gesture towards community-creation, but not all participants or audience members were truly in on the jokes. Ukrainian language use can often have the same effect. In Western Ukraine, Ukrainian is the norm. Odessa residents, though, primarily speak Russian, even though Ukrainian is now the only official language in Ukraine. Nearly all official documents and written communication is in Ukrainian. This caused some Odessa residents I encountered some difficulties. For instance, a woman working at a service counter needed help filling out an application form. She turned to her co-worker, in Russian, to ask the names of months in Ukrainian:

“Listopad—is that October?”
“No, listopad is November,” he replied.
“How do you say October, then?”
“Zhovten’”

Another representative example came from a time I went to fill out a housing registration form at Odessa National University. Tatiana, the university administrator who had helped arrange my Ukrainian visa, introduced me to the dormitory staff in Russian. The woman handling payment said, half in Russian, half in Ukrainian, “Don't speak to me in Russian! We’re in Ukraine, speak Ukrainian!” She said this jokingly, but then proceeded to speak to me exclusively in Ukrainian. Tatiana left me to negotiate the housing paperwork with the three women there on my own. This went fine until they hit a snag on the form. No one knew how to spell ”four-hundred” in Ukrainian. They tried out several variations but no one was really sure. They decided to phone someone in the philology department, who answered promptly, and they jotted down the figure. Until very recently, it seems, no one in the office needed to know how to spell numbers in Ukrainian. The interaction struck me, too, because the women called a friend when an American (or perhaps even a younger Ukrainian) would have just Googled the answer.

Thus, if the state thinks everyone should speak Ukrainian, not everyone does. A team from the Western Ukrainian town of Lviv, which is near the Polish border, even ribbed its Odessa audience at the League of Laughter festival for not speaking Ukrainian, beginning their act with the quip, “You might be wondering why a team from Lviv is speaking Russian. Well, we just thought that you in Odessa probably wouldn’t understand Polish.” Many League of Laughter teams, even and especially those that compete on the televised level, speak Russian. A team from Lutsk ended their skit in both languages during 2015, with a touch of irony. As much as they might have liked to live in a “single, big, united” Ukraine, cross-border fighting disproves it. Viewers were left to wonder if they were sincere when they said it did not matter what language someone speaks:

In Russian:
Не важно, играешь ты в Лиге Смеха
Ne vazhno, igraesh' ty v Lige Smekha
It's not important whether you play in League of Laughter

In Ukrainian:
Чи в Лігі Сміху
Chi v Ligi Smikhu
Or in League of Laughter

In Russian:
Важно что, то мы живем в одной, большой, единой стране
Vazhno chto, to my zhivem v odnoi, bol'shoi, edinoi strane
What's important is that we live in one, big, united country

Speaking Ukrainian is presented as normative in League of Laughter, even if not everyone in the audience has mastered it. In practice, it is normative but marked. Russian signaled a neutral political stance in Odessa. Ukrainian indexed a marked affiliation with the Ukrainian state. Nonetheless, when teams spoke Ukrainian, or judges responded in Ukrainian, the assumption was that they would be understood—or should be. On one two-man Odessa team, one teammate, Yuri, spoke Russian and the other, Andrei, spoke Ukrainian. This underlying contrast drove their skits. The other main image the team, called “Walked/Rode (Poshlo/Poekhalo),” played with is the fact that Yuri, a “sit-down comic,” has been in a wheelchair since a 2015 car accident.

Naum Barulya said, “It’s all the same to me, whether teams speak Russian or Ukrainian. I understand both. But when we hear a team speaking beautiful, contemporary Ukrainian, not Ukrainian from 200 years ago, it changes the way they think about the language” (interview with author February 10, 2017). League of Laughter is a game whose KVN mentors grew up in a Russian-dominated activity whose competitive centers where located in Russia. During editing sessions for regional League of Laughter games in Rivne, for instance, in Western Ukraine, most teams spoke Ukrainian, but all three of the editors replied to them in Russian. Everyone understood each other. Everyone spoke their language of preference. The state is still fairly young, independent from the USSR for less than thirty years. The leagues mirror Ukraine as a whole as it finds its linguistic feet.

Representations of war

Outside of the Jewish Community Center KVN league and the league for primary school students, the conflict with Russia is common, unsurprising fodder for jokes in Odessan KVN. Top League references tend towards the oblique, but do occur. For instance, in a 2015 Top League match, a team from Kyrgyzstan proposed a revision to the Russian reality show Swimming with Dolphins. “We have a show that all of Russia is guaranteed to watch,” he said. “It's called Swimming with Sharks. And we already have a list of stars to put on it.” The joke refers to fourteen Russians whose work Ukraine had recently banned. The joke could be made on Russian television because it was a gentle inversion. Suggesting a list of Ukrainians that could swim with sharks would sound overly harsh. Wishing Ukrainians harm strikes no one as funny. But by playing the character of a bumbling, provincial Kyrgyz fool, he strategically misunderstood “the enemy,” and advised the director of Russia's Channel One, who sat on the match's jury, to put Russians in the shark tank. Another joke from the Moscow team “Armenians” depicted an Armenian immigrant's love for Russia, portrayed by a curvy blonde. The Armenian waxed romantic, but added, “You know Russia, you look a lot different in your pictures.” Turning away shyly, Russia confessed that she’d put on a little weight since 2014. Some actual Crimea residents, a Simferopol’ team (Poluostrov), told an edgier joke in a 2019 competition. This competition was not televised, though it was held in a major Moscow league. Simferopol’ stands a good chance at competing in Top League in the future, however, so the joke could end up on TV yet. Their spring 2019 joke ran:

Narrator:     Crimea gets drunk and calls his ex.

Crimea:        (on phone) Hello? Ottoman Empire?
                      Whatcha doin’?
                      What do you mean you broke up?

Just as for teams in Ukraine, the war emerges as real and relevant for Simferopol’ residents. Actual fighting is far from Irkutsk doorsteps, so few teams write jokes about the conflict. Ukrainians and Crimeans represent the war, and its aftermath—complete with poverty, corruption, and displacement—differently. A team from Donetsk competed at the 2017 League of Laughter festival, for example, even though its members all lived in different cities (Odessa, Kiev, Kharkiv). They ended their first round skit by thanking the League of Laughter festival “for the opportunity to get together again.”

During the second round of the League of Laughter festival, a Lugansk team similarly highlighted their town’s contested status. Separatists have controlled the territory since 2014. They team observed, “We've been coming to the League of Laughter festival for three years. And we haven't made it into the season. I get the feeling that no one wants Lugansk.” His teammate responded, “Ah, no. That is the wrong impression.” Too many people, of course, want Lugansk. Team Lukas, mentioned above, went on to dramatize the friction many now feel with family members in Russia. “A lot of Ukrainians probably have relatives in Russia. And our team thinks every family has had this kind of conversation on Skype.” After agreeing not to talk about politics—they immediately began talking about politics. “What did you do last summer?” asked the Ukrainian. “Well we vacationed over at our place. Crimea,” replied his Russian relative. The two started shouting, the Ukrainian insulted Putin, and it ended with them singing their respective national anthems. 



Ukrainian teams discuss the conflict. Russian teams do so rarely. In the symbolic battlefield for still-disputed territories like Donetsk and Lugansk, Ukrainians win by default. But they have been bleeding territory in the military theater since 2014. Team Lugansk claiming, “Lugansk— Ukraine” gets a rousing response from audiences. It is a hollow victory, though, when rebels run the government.

Soviet references

In the first 2015 Top League quarterfinals round, after playing part of a song by Bulat Okudzhava (a Soviet-era bard originally from Georgia), a Georgian team member said, “We’re very glad that our compatriot wrote these golden words. But he is not just our compatriot, but our shared compatriot.” He thus stressed a pan-Soviet community that exists despite nation state divisions. That a Georgian team said this is significant since it went to war with Russia in 2008. Okudzhava, a widely-loved, mildly subversive, and at any rate non-state performer is an ideal symbolic catalyst for recalling shared Soviet experience, but not the Soviet regime. Just as newspapers allowed people from different villages to suddenly imagine themselves as part of a nation, Top League KVN, as an international yet Soviet-rooted institution, creates a virtual, mass mediated post-Soviet community of imaginers. In League of Laughter, in contrast, KVNshiki put Soviet references to different purposes. They cite Soviet films, especially children's cartoons, because everyone in the audience shares knowledge of them. When skits depict the Soviet past itself, it is with mild mockery rather than nostalgia. During the 2017 League of Laughter festival, for example, a team from Vinnytsia wrote a sketch about team of Soviet engineers who try to remedy the sex gap (rather than missile gap) between the U.S. and USSR. They gather around a table, poring over blueprints. When someone knocks at the door they say, “Not now, Petrovich. We’re busy with sex.” The sketch mocks a provincial Soviet attitude towards sexuality, one that, the team implies, no longer meshes with Ukrainian reality.

The team Minipunks also poked fun at their parents’ generation. They brought some middle- aged actors on stage, introducing them as “Minipunks born in the 1950s.” In their skit, someone tries to find sausages in a Soviet store where the Beatle's “Yesterday” is playing.

Customer:    Hello, do you have sausages?
Merchant:    This is a Soviet store. We have a fantastic selection of sausages.
Customer:    Do you have Doktorskaya sausages?
Merchant:     No.
Customer:    Do you have salami?
Merchant:    No.
Customer:   Do you have smoked sausages?
Merchant:    Also no.
Customer:   You said you had a fantastic selection of sausages!
Merchant:   What, picking out sausages while listening to the Beatles isn't fantastic?



There is an element of nostalgic indulgence in this skit. Parents and grandparents in the audience can reminisce about small victories, in the 1960s and 1970s, obtaining bootleg Beatles albums. Overall, though, the Minipunks cast the Soviet past as a joke. KVN’s Top League is an international forum, where representation of Self (e.g. Kyrgyz) and Other (Russian) is always done with reference to a (post-) Soviet frame. That is what unites Top League teams. Ukrainian KVNshiki are carving out a different discursive space. When the Soviet past makes an appearance, it is as the past, not as a framework—political, ideological, or moral—that organizes the present.