Albert Akesel’rod, one of KVN's creators, came up with a simple formula for humor: “You can express this in dry mathematical language: the funny = recognizable + the unexpected” (Akselrod 1974, 86). Elementary math, perhaps, but skillfully combining these elements is no easy task. And while the equation works for punchlines, jokes usually require quite a lot more in terms of contextual setup. If I was sitting at an outdoor cafe, for instance, and a recognizable pigeon sat on my shoulder, quite unexpectedly, I might find it amusing but not funny. However, if a pigeon flew into a lecture hall, perched on a desk, and picked up a stray pencil, as if preparing to take notes, I’m sure I would giggle. It could be that a pigeon playing student breaches some kind of unexpectedness threshold. Adding the notion of contrast, however, might make it more plain why only the second scenario leads to laughter. The ordinary lives of pigeons and the ordinary lives of students clash comically.

In an attempt to concretize the effects of contrast in jokes, Victor Raskin developed the Script-Based Semantic Theory of Humor, which maintained that elements of situational oppositeness served as the foundation for every joke (Raskin 1985). He formally defined the theory as follows:

A text can be characterized as a single-joke-carrying text if both of the following conditions...are satisfied:

(i) The text is compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts
(ii) The two scripts with which the text is compatible are opposite... (1985, 99)

A script, in this sense, refers to the set of presuppositions listeners hold about situations, people, and behavior. For instance, the macro-script RESTAURANT includes sub-scripts pertaining to behavior within the restaurant, such as SIT DOWN, ORDER FOOD, PAY BILL (Atttardo 1994, 200). An example of an English joke with opposing scripts is, “Never go into the water after a heavy meal. You won't find it there.” The audience recognizes the first sentence as advice not to swim after eating. But the second sentence flips the script, punning on being “after” something. The disjuncture between the joke's two contrasting scripts, EATING A MEAL and LOOKING FOR A MEAL, generates humor. Jokes are funny, then, if they demonstrate script oppositeness in some way (Raskin 1985, 100). Since a joke is an overlap in scripts—an overlap in meaning potentials—in this conception of humor every punchline represents a kind of pun. The punchline is the moment when two possible meanings, two possible interpretations, or two imagined worlds intersect, either because new information changed the interpretation of a preceding text (“you won't find it there”) or a contrasting image was added (pigeon picks up a pencil, looks attentively at lecturing professor).

The concept of script oppositeness offers a structural framework on which to hang the oppositions that crop up in a joke, such as categories of people, real and unreal situations, or conflicts of institutional values (Raskin 1985, 100-112). However, such contrasts can often be drawn out as “images” or “stereotypes” just as easily as by semantic scripts, and often a little more plainly. Further, the information that might make up a semantic script for a restaurant scene, such as SIT DOWN, ORDER FOOD, PAY BILL, while important, is rarely all that a listener needs in order to understand most jokes about restaurants. The following Russian joke, for instance, would probably confuse an American audience:

—A man is choking! Is there a doctor in the house?
—Where would a doctor get money to eat in restaurants?

In Russia and Ukraine doctors are notoriously underpaid. Armed with that information, the punchline now makes sense. But pulling the joke through a chassis of semantic scripts contributes little to our understanding of where contrasts lie. The contrasting scripts in this joke could be described as ORDINARY PEOPLE EAT IN RESTAURANTS vs. DOCTORS ARE POORER THAN ORDINARY PEOPLE. This wedges the significant parts of the joke into unwieldy, unnatural categories, however. Instead, the information a joke presupposes could more accurately be described in terms of shared ground: what do people have to know in order to understand the joke? What contrasting images would Ukrainians identify?

Specifying this shared ground becomes crucial to explicating humor, as even simple jokes encode a lot of culturally-specific information. The following two short examples from the Russian KVN team DALS illustrate just how much information teams presuppose, often with very little text. Unfortunately, these examples do not sound very funny to English ears. I chose these two jokes not because they are hard to understand but because they, in fact, require less explanation than most (funny) KVN punchlines.160 Both jokes were also terribly successful in competition, triggering laughter, applause, and cheers, most likely because the team skillfully managed contrasts.

(1)  ”The director of a Kaluga mushroom factory often fantasized that he was a Columbian drug lord.”
(2)  From a speech by a former prisoner: “My children are helping me out today. [The son] is from my first marriage. And [the daughter] is from my second marriage. But I love them as if they were my own."

These jokes do not ring very funny in English because neither of Axel’rod’s criteria get met in English translation. The factory director joke is not relevant, for instance, because few people outside of the Soviet bloc recognize stereotypes about Kaluga or its factories. The contrast fails. And since the contrast never surfaces, we miss the punchline; it doesn't register as unexpected.

English speakers hear a statement, not a joke. But the Russian audience rolled with laughter. Masliakov even pumped his fist in delight, turning to the jury to say, “By protocol I'm required to ask...,” but everyone knew DALS had won. No one needed the pronouncement from the jury.

DALS’ joke packed such power because it contained two simultaneous contrasts (four scripts): Kaluga factory director vs. Columbian drug lord and button mushrooms vs. hallucinogenic mushrooms. The first contrast plays on the image of a factory director in Kaluga, population 325,000. Industrial stereotypes from the Soviet era portray factory directors as responsible, yet plain and working class, and surrounded by snow and not a lot else. This is at odds with representations of Columbian drug lords as glamorous, rich, living in the tropics, and surrounded by scantily clad women. The second level of the joke revolves around ambiguity in the referent of the word “mushrooms,” which, as in English, can also mean hallucinogenic varieties. Overall, then, the listener begins to develop a picture of a shabbily dressed Russian man only to have it crash headlong into a completely incongruous lifestyle. Moreover, the four-layer contrast hit the audience fast. The whole joke lasted less than five seconds, and the punchline took only eight syllables to deliver. So there was a double punchline, delivered quickly, with maximum unexpectedness and a high degree of relatability.

The rhythm of the second joke translates a little more naturally into English. This joke, too, made use of two contrasts. The first was between our expectation that the children from the speaker's marriages were his biological children and the reality, that his wife had borne the children of other men while he was in prison. The second is the contrast between the man's quite open, even cheery disposition towards the fact that he'd been cuckolded and our expectation that no one would willingly reveal such information. It is the kind of joke that Russians call tonkii, which means light or subtle. No one talked crassly about extra-marital affairs, there was just a floating insinuation that forced a reinterpretation of the first lines (Ritchie 2004, 60).

Graham Ritchie set out a four-part model for such reinterpretation mechanisms. He argued that jokes like these have an initial set-up, a second set-up, a punchline, and moment when the punchline is interpreted. The former prisoner joke would thus look like this, schematized:

Set-up 1: My children are helping me out today.
Set-up 2: The son is from my first marriage, and the daughter is from my second.
Punchline: But I love them as if they were my own. (Implied: These are not my biological children.)
Interpretation: The man's wives bore the children of other men while he was in prison.

Even Ritchie, though, was dissatisfied with this model’s ability to predict actual humor. He therefore tried to systematize additional potentially funny parameters of a joke: obviousness, conflict, compatibility, contrast, and inappropriateness. Ritchie argued that even these categories, however, would need more elaboration before they could serve as a reliable humor calculus, one, perhaps, that could be automated for computer programs (2004, 61). Seeking precise determinations of the comic, he asked, “What kind of incongruity is funny...How surprising must a portion of text be to count as a punchline?” (2004, 67).

There seems to be little utility, though, in trying to operationalize degrees of obviousness or incongruity even in pragmatic terms, much less semantic ones. The surprise quotient of any joke will vary not just with the text itself, but with its interpretation by individual audience members. The Kaluga joke depicted significant incongruity, but only for audiences hip to post-Soviet indexicality. Too much context underpins punchlines for any science to pin down. Most of the jokes made in live, student-level KVN, for instance, rely not only on widely-presupposed cultural knowledge, as in the nationally-broadcast DALS jokes listed above, but also on local and interpersonal knowledge. Local teams make fun of each other, riff off of others’ skits, and assume an audience that remembers not only that season’s performances, but performances from teams that go back years. For this reason, people very often say that live KVN performances, even student performances, are funnier than the “pro” leagues on television. KVNshiki can build on a lot more presupposed information with local audiences than they can with television viewers across Russia’s eleven time zones (to say nothing of viewers in Central Asia and the Russian-speaking diaspora), and they thus have more opportunities to build multi-layered, multiply-contrasting jokes. Sometimes these jokes concern events all residents of a city will know, such as the outcome of local elections. Or they might poke fun at landmarks everyone in town recognizes. Irkutsk’s odd “Ice Palace” skating rink, for instance, looks like a truncated Aztec temple; its “renovation” resulted in a number of punchlines. Teams also commonly reference other competitors. For instance, in the 2018 Baikal League final match in Irkutsk, the emcee joked that there had been 5,000 jokes about Stanislav Gospersky (cited in chapter four) in the last ten years. National television viewers do not know who Stanislav Gospersky is, but he is a respected member of Irkutsk's KVN community.

KVN Top League champion Olga Kartunkova, from team Piatigorsk, called such inside jokes a challenge for teams transitioning from regional competitions to the (inter-)national Moscow stage. Discussing the semi-slang term “vnytrak,” from the Russian word vnutryi, or “inside,” she described it as, “When in the Stavropol league we can joke on internal themes, which only we understand, and we laugh about them.”163 What, though, makes vnytrak so much funnier than jokes on television? Why does a joke told by friends, about friends, cause people roll with laughter while slick comedy professionals rarely get chuckles from their audiences?

Humor’s aesthetic, emotional qualities surpass context, relevance, and unexpectedness. Funniness remains ineffable. Specifying the elements of a joke, thus, differs from defining the structure of a haiku. If a poem has seventeen syllables that are divided into three lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively, it is a haiku. But even expressions that meet Raskin’s criteria for a joke might not achieve funniness. Racist jokes and dead baby jokes are still jokes, after all, but not everyone who understands the punchlines—intersections of contrast, relevance, and unexpectedness—finds them funny. A representative dead baby joke, for instance, runs like the following: “What gets louder as it gets smaller? A baby in a trash compactor.” Personally, I don't find jokes like these funny at all. Many people do. Both those that laugh and those that do not perceive the same degree of script oppositeness, but they do not have the same reaction. Something similar arises for the butts of jokes, both verbal and practical. If digs are more cruel than endearing, humiliation will outweigh humor for a joke’s living punchline. These facts point up the biggest shortcoming of the script oppositeness theory of humor: how do we analytically handle jokes that are not funny? In an edited volume inspired by his own work, Victor Raskin wrote, “Most active humor researchers are SSTH-aware and cite it whenever convenient. For most, it is a matter of politeness rather than of intellectual necessity, and they hardly ever need to go beyond SSTH” (2017, 224). The concept of script oppositeness allows us to locate humorous hinges in jokes (where are the contrasts?) and provides a framework for understanding complexity (how many contrasts are there?). But we do need to go beyond SSTH, both to understand why a joke is funny and to describe how a joke signifies funny images.

Getting at why jokes are funny, I argue, requires two additional elements: enjoyment and complexity. The first, enjoyment, is a factor in any joke that someone considers funny. For example, the argument between the Moscow team Middle-Aged Humor and Odessa League of Laughter editor Demchenko from chapter five can be framed as a difference of enjoyment. Pavel told the team, “that's not a joke” because the idea of Russians shooting Ukrainians was abhorrent to him, not because he failed to perceive script oppositeness. The images the joke evoked proved unpleasant for Demchenko, a Ukrainian sensitive to the impact of casualties on the Ukrainian side of the border.

The second feature, complexity, is a characteristic of the funniest jokes. As DALS’ Kaluga factory director joke illustrates, the best punchlines key contrast along more than one axis. DALS’’ joke, brief as it was, made people laugh out loud for fully half a minute because it snuck two opposing images—factory director vs. drug lord and button mushrooms vs. narcotics—into a single sentence. Either would have been funny on its own, and the combination hit the brain like a shot of vodka. A similarly short joke, “Never go into the water after a heavy meal, you won't find it there,” might make someone smile, it might make some people groan at the pun, but it would make very few people laugh out loud, at all, much less for an extended period of time. Performers who deliver multiple simultaneous punchlines get the most laughter. DALS excelled at this on a national stage. But local performers very often build triple or quadruple punchlines, as well, depending on their skill and how well they and the audience members know each other. Your friend’s jokes sound funnier not just because you like them, but because you know them. Your friends can presuppose much more shared information with you than any professional performer can with a television audience. People you know, thus, find it much easier to make make multi-layered jokes.

I would like to walk through one of DALS’ entire numbers, a miniature (miniatura) from a 2014 Top League octofinals performance, to demonstrate how complexity and enjoyment function in ordinary KVN skits.164 Outside of biathlon jokes, which are one or two sentences by design, Most KVN jokes cannot stand alone without the miniatures and skits that provide their set-ups. Both performers and audience members, though, understand punchlines as the products of jokes rather than narratives. Some fans even include statistics about the number of jokes each team tells in online, usually unofficial reviews of games on personal blogs and YouTube channels. One individual, for instance, posted a video detailing not only how many jokes has been told in each segment of the 2018 Top League second semifinals, but also the ratios of “successful” jokes to total jokes, by team. Thus, while the team “Na te” (Nate) told thirty jokes during their seven-minute introductory skit, only twenty of these “hit” (zashli), or were successful. The team Wrestlers, in contrast, told only 29 jokes, but twenty-two of them hit. If all these jokes were distributed uniformly, it would mean teams told a joke roughly every fifteen seconds—which is a demanding creative task. When teams are able to incorporate a lot of jokes (ideally successful ones) into their skits, KVNshiki consider the performance to have a high density (plotnost’) of humor. Statistical analyses by viewers are a way of systematizing this density. While the miniature presented below was only forty-five seconds long, Filip and Timur included four jokes, for a laugh roughly every eleven seconds. Filip introduced the skit by saying,

Filip

a nachinaia s etogo momenta
starting now,

my budem pokazyvat' miniatury
we're going to be showing miniatures.165

esli miniatura smeshnaia
if a miniature is funny,

vy eto poimete
you will know                         Joke 1

The joke was simple, but received six full seconds of applause. The audience whistled. Why, though, did people find this quip so funny? Once again, the joke relied on a four-way contrast. The first contrast opposed the world of a narrated speech event and that of the performance space. The dependent clause in line 3, “If a miniature is funny,” prepares the audience to hear a concrete resulting action, such as “we will win the competition” or “Aleksandr Masliakov will smile.” Instead, the team finished their sentence with a clash of narrative frame. They switched from an imagined world of narrative, speculation about a subjunctive future, to the internal experiences of the audience members themselves, “If it's funny, you'll know.” Filip also played with the common Russian image of the fool, contrasting his deadpan delivery of a banal truism with his persona as purveyor of intellectual humor. This was the overall enjoyable impression evoked by the punchline. A joke like this is difficult to explain in terms of semantic scripts, though. It makes more sense to parse complexity of theme, image, and expectation.

The next jokes follow a more standard set-up and punchline format, and received positive but subdued responses from the audience. The first punchline, in line 16, reveals that a man who has come to donate blood is actually just injured (“I didn’t plan to donate”). The final punchline in the miniature puns on the Russian version of “make the best of a bad situation,” which is “extract maximum profit from what happens.” Profit usually is not meant so literally in this saying, and this mismatch serves as the crux of the joke—a man who has been stabbed tries to donate blood and sell the knife to benefit from his misfortune.

Filip
v punkte priema krovi
at the blood donation center

Timur
aaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaa

Filip
zdravstvuite
hello

Timur
eto vy krov’ prinimaete?
are you the ones who accept blood?

Filip
da, my
yes, that's us

Timur 
vozmite moiu
here, take mine                                  Joke 2

((Timur hands Filip a bucket))

Filip
molodoi chelovek
young man

no u nas vse sterlil'no
everything here is sterile

zachem vy krov’ v vedre prinesli?
why did you bring blood in a bucket?

Timur 
no ia
well I—

chestno govoria
honestly

ne planiroval sdavat'
I hadn't planned to donate                                   Joke 3

[7 lines omitted, Timur and Filip discuss what to do with the blood]

a ne podskazhite
could you by any chance tell me

gde mozhno prodat' nozh
where can you sell a knife?

Filip
vam zachem
what for?

Timur
prosto ia khochu izvlech maksimum vygody iz slozhivsheisiaia situatsii
I just want to extract maximum profit from the current situation                                        Joke 4



The last three jokes in this miniature, in lines 10, 16, and 26, relied on intermediate contrasts between expected behavior at a donation center and Timur's bizarre blood-lugging, before culminating in a final pun. They used lesser-impact jokes, about offering blood in a bucket and about donating after injury, to condition the audience for their punchline in line 26, which forced listeners to re-interpret the entire scenario through the lens of a common Russian saying.

DALS excelled at plays with audience expectations. Remarkably simple jokes, textually speaking, induced people to laugh until tears came to their eyes. In the following razminka joke, for instance, judge Leonid Yakupovich, host of Russia's version of Wheel of Fortune, posed the question, “What is original about your team?” In 2014, DALS was the first team to play in Top League with only two people as opposed to the standard six- to fifteen-person squads. DALS’ bravery as a duo was their most obviously unique characteristic. Thus, the audience expected them to mention something about their unorthodox, perhaps competitively handicapped, team in their response. Filip, though, quickly approached the microphone and said in reply, “We are Aquariuses” (“My vodoleia”). The quip was unexpected, a bit absurd, and played on an intentional contrast between the team’s unlikely make-up and the otherwise uninteresting fact that both Filip and Timur were Aquariuses. There were cheers and applause from the audience, and Yakupovich laughed for six seconds, eventually banging his fist on the table in mirth. He coughed a bit as he struggled to gain enough composure to ask the next team his question.

The idea of contrasts, if not semantic scripts, best explains why “We are Aquariuses” acts as a joke. Deftly, Filip set the unexpected against the expected, added a dash of absurdity, and did it with comedic timing fast enough to catch the audience off-guard. While semantics can reveal much about the reasons certain strings of text create what those in the KVN community call funny (smeshno), there is much that referential analysis cannot capture. It cannot discuss indexicality, and it cannot describe non-textual jokes, jokes made with images, pantomime, and musical indexicality, at all. The unsaid often plays a much bigger role in humor than any words spoken. The most complex jokes include a host of such nonreferential elements, and these are best analyzed in terms of semiotics instead of semantics.