The unsaid: punchline construction

The information one needs to understand a joke lies in the unsaid: stereotypes (factory owners), double meanings ('shrooms), sociocultural background (Ukrainian doctors have low salaries), and common sayings (profit from misfortune). The funny parts of jokes often lie in these unstated, shared presuppositions rather than in explicit text. For instance, in the 2018 School League opening competition in Irkutsk, a team of school children called “Bokhan” joked that a money wire transfer service had opened in Bokhan, a village about eighty miles north of Irkutsk. In their skit, when a clerk at the service asked a customer—a young girl who appeared to be about five years old—where she wanted to send money, she said, “To Ust Orda.” The crowd laughed, clapped, and cheered for over ten seconds. It was a fantastic joke in a local context, but it could never be made on television. People outside of the Irkutsk region would not know anything about either Bokhan or Ust Orda, both rural and predominantly ethnic Buryat areas in the Irkutsk region. The audience found the joke funny for three reasons. First, sending money from one poor rural area to another poor rural area seems a bit absurd. Second, Bokhan was a team made up of some very young children. So part of the joke concerned the naïveté of a child wanting to wire money to (Buryat) relatives in a neighboring village. The third reason the crowd laughed so much has to do with the fact that cute schoolchildren lower people’s entertainment thresholds. The team from Bokhan got laughter and applause, in fact, as soon as they walked out on stage and said, “Hello, we are from Bokhan.” The little girl acting as their spokesperson was young enough to still struggle with Russian sounds, lisping a bit, and it is funny to see a child take on the role of a serious stage performer.

After laughter died down, the kindergarten customer clarified, “I only have kopeks, though.” The clerk took the girl’s coins and tossed them across the stage, presumably towards Ust Orda. Ust Orda, however, is a place known for its Buryat shamanic sites. When passing sites like these, arshans (arshany, or “springs”), it is common to leave offerings of coins, small pieces of fabric, and cigarettes. So the girl may also have sought to use a money wire service to send a religious offering, which is funny because of the contrast between religious and commercial spheres implied.

Most of what made Bokhan’s joke funny, then, cannot be explained in terms of semantics (the meanings of utterances). Indexes matter more. Comedy relies on double-meanings, layered references, and an understanding of audience presuppositions. In order to interpret the meaning of the Ust Orda joke, a viewer had to understand: (1) the economic landscapes and physical locations of Bokhan and Ust Orda; (2) Shamanic traditions associated with the region; and (3) stereotypes about (provincial) Buryats. Audience members would have found the punchline even more enjoyable if they appreciated the performance as cute. A semantic analysis limits us to describing what words mean. A semiotic framework, in contrast, allows us to look at how words mean—what they index—in changing social and performance contexts, some of which are interlinked. C.S. Peirce’s semiotic framework provides a vocabulary for describing how symbols code such multiple meanings. Unlike Saussure’s two-part theory of sign systems, Peirce outlined a three-part model of meaning making. For Saussure, a symbol such as the hammer and sickle would be a signifier and its meaning the signified; the sign is binary. Peirce’s sign vehicle roughly corresponds to the signifier, the represented object to the signified (Enfield 2013, 44). But Peirce added an “interpretant” as well, which he defined as “the effect the Sign would produce in any mind upon which the circumstances should permit it to work out its full effect” (Peirce 1977, 110). The interpretant, then, is personal meaning. Peirce described several different kinds of interpretants in his writings, the immediate, the dynamic, and the final. All of these categorizations, though, cast the interpretant as an experience of signification for a sign perceiver.

If we pull the Bokhan punchline through a three-element Peircean analysis, “to Ust Orda” acts as the sign vehicle, the represented object refers to the referential marker of Ust Orda as a place, and the interpretant is the ultimate “meaning,” the meaning in context, and the meaning held by each individual audience member. Some people in the audience probably had personally left coins at arshans and, if in a hurry, at least honked their car horns when passing the sites during long drives through rural areas in the Irkutsk region. There, no street signs guide nonlocal travelers, roads are often unpaved, and gas stations are rare. In Kuita, the Ust Orda region village where I lived in 2003, people would drive about an hour to a larger village that had a gas station, fill up gas cans, and return to Kuita with them jostling in their trunks. They honked at arshans on the way there and back and sometimes left cigarettes. People like this, who regularly prayed and left coins in sacred places, perhaps accompanied by family members, would have experienced the joke differently than those that understood only the first level of the joke, about the absurdity of wiring money from one area without banks or running water to another.

The interpretant captures these multiple, personal meanings, meanings that draw not only on widely circulating public information, but also individual biographies. Indexes that get widely traded on become public, which is why the team from Bokhan could predict that the audience would understand all the layers of their joke even if many had never spent much time in the Irkutsk region’s rural areas. Those that had, though, and those who linked those experiences to Buryat family traditions, had extra information with which to understand the joke. They and urban ethic Russians sitting next to them in the audience would have shared near-identical represented objects. But their interpretants of Bokhan’s punchline would have been very different.

The interpretant is where meanings overlap: dictionary definitions, indexicals, analogic associations, histories, and personal recollections. The interpretant is cumulative meaning, an ultimate significance generated by the sign vehicle and represented object. In a joke, the ultimate significance is what makes a line funny: the interpretant is the understanding (or not) of the punchline. This idea builds on Raskin’s conception of humor as the product of overlapping scripts. A semiotic approach looks more broadly, though, at confluences of meaning that result from a variety of symbolic resources. If we look again at the three syllables in Bokhan’s original punchline, “To Ust Orda” (“v Ust Ordu”), the represented object, or “what the sign is about,” in Parmentier’s terms (1994, 8), is a geographic place, perhaps a geographic place that people understand to be rural and predominantly Buryat. But the interpretant is the meaning that caused people to laugh when the little girl pronounced those syllables. The interpretant is the four-layered set of contrasts made immediately present to audience members: usual destinations for remittances vs. rural Siberia; usual recipients of wire transfers vs. a young girl’s grandparents; commercial banking vs. leaving religious offerings; serious stage performers vs. a lisping five-year-old.

Punchlines, if successful, reside in interpretants. In the joke, “The director of a Kaluga mushroom factory often fantasized that he was a Columbian drug lord,” “drug lord” (“narkobaron”) only operates as a punchline for people with the background knowledge required for a specific interpretant. Given the sign vehicles “Kaluga factory director” and “Columbian drug lord,” readers will come up with fairly similar represented objects. But the interpretant, the “effect the sign produces in the mind,” differs dramatically for American and Russian audiences because those populations know different stereotypes.

The punchlines of puns represent a special kind of overlapping. In the pun, “Never leave sulphuric acid in a metal beaker. That's an oxidant waiting to happen,” the word “oxidant” takes the following common represented objects: (1) an agent that causes substances to lose electrons (oxidize) and (2) “accident.” But the interpretant is the recognition that both of these meanings co- exist, comically. If hearers know that sulphuric acid will dissolve a metal beaker, causing a hazardous accident, they hold two represented objects in parallel as they formulate the phrase’s ultimate meaning, a humorous pun.More clearly than any other phenomena, puns, demonstrate why we need a three-pronged sign to understand comedy. Contrasts of some kind may surface throughout a conversation, as people talk about men and women, cars and bicycles, vegans and barbecue enthusiasts, but a joke is in the confluence of meaning; a joke—if you get it—is in the interpretant (Garey 2012, 33).
Some leading semiotics scholars, however, have recently pushed an understanding of the interpretant as a reaction that takes place after ultimate meaning has been absorbed (Enfield 2013; Kockelman 2007, 2010, 2013). For instance, if a red light signifies stop, in this reading, applying the brakes is the resulting interpretant (Enfield 2013, 18). For the chemistry joke above, presumably, the sign vehicle “oxidant” would produce the represented object ”pun,” and the interpretant would be laughter or a smile or an eye roll. In Bokhan’s joke the sign vehicle “to Ust Orda” would take the represented object “geographic place,” an the interpretant would be gleeful laughter. Such a model of the sign cuts out the analytic apparatus that explains how jokes manipulate multiple meanings, how they index public as well as private information, and how a number of contrasts merge to make some set of syllables (or a gesture, or a tune) funny. Interpretant-as-reaction does not leave space to analyze how signification occurs. In such conceptions, ultimate meaning gets determined in the represented object and the interpretant really doesn’t have anything to do with the sign vehicle's meaning. The reaction is an addendum that happens outside the temporal space of the sign. Similarly, for Saussure, the signifier would be “oxidant,” the signified “pun,” and laughter some ancillary thing unrelated to the determination of the sign vehicle’s meaning. Models of the sign posited by Kockelman and Enfield, thus, reproduce a Saussurean binary rather than taking advantage of the analytic power offered by Peirce’s model. Interpretant-as-reaction cannot explain the mechanisms of a pun. It also handles multiple objects, multiple interpretants, and processes of resignification less well than a triadic model (Garey 2012).

In examples from Kockelman, interpretants can include (1) other utterances, (2) changes in attention, and (3) physical responses (such as ducking a punch in the mouth) (Kockelman 2007, 378; 2010, 2-7). However, any nonmental reaction, such as a shift in eye gaze made in response to an utterance, necessarily comes long after the absorption of a represented object’s meaning. Enfield defines meaning, in fact, as ”what we have when a sign gets someone to produce an interpretant, thus revealing an object of interpretation” (2013, 26). This approach treats all sign vehicles as bit actors in an interrogation, or, at least, as a second-pair part in traditions of conversation analysis. In the language of conversation analysis, a first-pair part might be Person A saying, “We're going to the movies.” Person B’s second-pair part, then, could either treat Person A’s statement as leave-taking, saying, “Cool, have a good time,” or cast it as a question, replying, “Great! I’d love to go!” Conversation analysts consider Person B’s response represent the meaning of Person A's statement; Person A treats it either as departure or invitation, and subsequent replies must take this emergent social reality into account.

Exchanges like these, true, do fashion the interactional meaning of utterances. Person A could accept Person B’s interpretation and follow up by telling Person B, “Alright, we’re leaving in half an hour.” Or they could contest it, saying, “Um, this is a date, and we'd planned to go alone.” Even when analyzing conversation transcripts, though, we could hardly claim that the meaning of “We’re going to the movies” amounted to an invitation, even if Person B produced an utterance that aligned with that presupposition. Whose meaning? And when? Person A may get Person B to produce an utterance, but what “I’d love to go!’ reveals is not necessarily Person B’s represented object (i.e., “I think this is an invitation”). Person B, Susie, may have known very well that Person A, her brother Tom, was not inviting her to come along. But she might have tried to horn in on the outing by characterizing his statement as an invitation.

Following Goffman (1956), I argue that social scientists can observe how interlocutors work together to create ratified social meanings like “announcing departure” or “issuing invitation.” However, while representations do constitute presupposible social realities, they are not congruent with personal meanings. Goffman, too, noted that reality-as-reacted-to did not necessarily mesh with reality-as-understood. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, he wrote, “Together the participants [in an interaction] contribute to a single overall definition of the situation which involves not so much a real agreement as to what exists but rather a real agreement as to whose claims concerning what issues will be temporarily honoured” (Goffman 1956, 4). Statements, responses, and reactions are stances. Stances are public. Interpretants are not. Rather than an interpretant, then, Susie's I'd love to go is a stance that may or may not line up with what Susie thought Tom’s utterance “meant.”

For social signs as for natural ones, the interpretant exists for an individual perceiver, not in aggregated, or even iterated, interactional data. For instance, green skies are only an index of tornado weather if someone both sees them and understands them as predictive—otherwise it's not a sign. Likewise, to Ust Orda is only funny if someone knows why wiring money from Bokhan to Ust Orda seems illogical—otherwise it's not a joke.

Even if social scientists cannot know what people think, viewing the interpretant as private mental significance becomes important to theories of meaning-making in humor because jokes themselves lie in interpretants, intersections of meanings, timing, expectations, and understandings. Reactions, like laughter, come only later. Moreover, recognizing interpretants as individually-experienced allows us to explain how sign vehicles can signal different interpretants for people even when they apprehend the same represented objects. The effect a young Pioneer red necktie makes on the mind of a Soviet viewer may be one of both (1) childhood memories and (2) the tie’s changed indexicality in the twenty-first century. Importantly, these two interpretants co- occur in time—with each other and with the other two points of the semiotic triangle, the sign vehicle and the represented object (Garey 2012). Tripartite signs allow us to cleanly describe how, like pulling on one side of a fixed-volume triangle, changing the semiotic ground alters the contextual meaning of a sign (interpretant). For example, a Soviet WWII victory song might be sung quite seriously. But a few tweaks of costuming, emphasis, and comedic context render it parody. Similarly, a picture of Putin (sign vehicle) in the backdrop of a comedy sketch takes on very different meanings (interpretants) in Ukrainian and Russian contexts (semiotic ground), even though audiences in both Moscow and Kiev recognize the image as the president of Russia (represented object). Emphasizing how context serves as a filter between sign vehicles and interpretants, via represented objects, also allows for easier explanation of how the meanings of the same sign vehicles—Stalin, a red Young Pioneer necktie, Soviet-marked elocution patterns—change from decade to decade.

The unsayable: signs and censorship

Sign vehicles are polysemic, yielding multiple interpretants. Individuals themselves often apprehend all meanings of a given sign, but only react to one. A political pun made by the Odessa KVN team Chimney Sweeps in 1966 helps illustrate this point. The overall theme for 1966 competitions was “Telepathy Surrounds Us.” Odessa sang a song whose lyrics spoke of telepaths working, “some with telephones, some with automatics,” acting as operators on a global communications network: “They connect our friendly signals.” The word “telepath,” though, also meant KGB agent. The word “automatic” (avtomat) could mean any machine, but calls to mind, as in English, automatic weapons. Read this way, their song depicted not benevolent telepathic operators but KGB agents alternatively listening in on phone calls and gunning people down (Janco 2004, 36). Of course, the second meaning is deniable, which is why the broadcast feed was not cut (this had been done for bawdy jokes in the past). During the same show the Chimney Sweeps even mocked KGB disapproval of political humor. They said, “Laughter is a personal matter (lichnoe delo) for everyone. Let's make everyone a ‘personal matter’ and laugh.” Lichnoe delo translates both as personal matter and personal file. The second sentence, about making someone a “personal matter/file” reveals that “file” was an intended meaning. In this context, then, the personal file is a KGB file: “Let's make everyone a KGB file and keep laughing” (Janco 2004, 37-38). Strong stuff. The audience very likely did not react, for fear of reprisal. Both meanings, “personal matter” and “personal file,” coexisted. In this case, interpretant-as-reaction limits the field of signification rather than helping us understand the relationship between the phrase in the pun and its social meanings. The sign vehicle “personal file” referred to multiple represented objects. The punchline lay in the interpretant, in the simultaneous apprehension of both meanings.

In my experience in contemporary Russia and Ukraine, KVNshiki themselves censored topics rather than government bodies. Editors, and, in televised leagues, TV producers who seek ratings, want to draw viewers in, not offend them. If there is money to be made, through network advertising time or sponsorships, then the market regulates KVN content (as it does in the U.S.) In the vast majority of games, though, in universities, youth centers, and schools, only audience reaction matters. Ultimately, different audience expectations in Russia and Ukraine—and even in Odessa versus Kiev—lead to variations in the kinds of political jokes told. For instance, a team at the 2017 League of Laughter festival played ominous music as they observed that one of their female team members bore an uncanny resemblance to Putin (and she did). Putin is an unloved bogeyman at best in Ukraine, but representing him like that on Russian broadcast television would alienate people.

Other metrics of appropriateness vary from audience to audience, as well. During an editing session at the 2019 Sochi Festival, for instance, Moscow-based editors struck down a number the Irkutsk team IGU has successfully performed in their hometown Baikal League. In the skit a man got into a violent fistfight to defend the honor of his date, who’d been cat-called by another man. After the exhausted, panting man walked back to his girl, she rolled her eyes and said, “Even so it'll cost you 2,000 rubles.” In Irkutsk the offhand punchline about prostitution faced no pushback. But Top League editor Dmitry Shpenkov told them, “That won't make it onto the stage.” Televised league editors would cut a number like that. Shpenkov continued, “I understand, you're from Irkutsk...” and trailed off. His implication seemed to be, “I know that in Siberia you can say whatever you want, but not on national TV.”

Skits ultimately succeed if the audience likes them. If a joke makes people laugh out loud, if it lifts their spirits instead of making them cringe, it works. Editors, rather than trying to censor prohibited material, direct teams to write material that will play out well in front of particular audiences. Specifically on the topic of prostitution, Pavel told a group of over one hundred Odessa university students gathered for a lecture on theories of humor, “Teams come up to me and ask, ‘Can we joke about prostitution?’ You can. But how? Of course you can't say, ‘prostitutes are louts,’ there's no point to that.” For Pavel, at least, a joke’s value depended, in part, on its message. If teams wanted to write skits about unhappy topics, for example, teenage mothers who drink and smoke in parks—a skit idea that he praised—they should present it either as a social critique or suggest alternatives. He continued, “Teams from Lithuania come and say, ‘Everything is bad, our city is bad, everything is terrible.’ Teams from Riga come and say, ‘Everything is bad, we have a bad mayor.’ Those kinds of jokes. How can you laugh about that—how? If you offer a solution to those problems, then I'll laugh.”

Mikhail Marfin, Top League editor from 1991-2004, then again beginning in 2019, similarly told a group of students at a training seminar in Krasnoyarsk to think about their audience when writing jokes. Material that cracks up friends won't affect strangers the same way. He said,

You can't tell an auditorium of 500 people what you would tell an audience of 100. For example, I can, right now in front of you, say the word ”ass” (“zadnitsa”). But imagine that I went out on stage at the Palace of Soviets—you understand, in the theater at the Kremlin—and said that? Not a chance. I will not say that. Because here, it wouldn't really jar you. But in an auditorium of 6,000 seats in the Kremlin—people would think I was crazy.

Incidentally, and probably only because the KVN Festival of Moscow and Moscow Region Leagues does not have an editing process (one hundred and twenty-five teams competed in 2019), a young man from the Russian Republic of Bashkortostan, 900 miles west of Moscow, began his team’s performance by walking out on stage, spreading his arms wide, and saying, “Sex!” No one laughed. He continued, “I just wanted to say that. They won't let me in Bashkortostan.” Bashkortostani editors, though, likely told the team the same thing Moscow editors would: there was no joke.

Jokes about sex do make it on stage, though, even in Top League, if they're funny and, ideally, positive. Skits about sex within marriages tend to meet more success than those about infidelity and mistresses. For instance, a 2015 Top League musical number from team Kamiziaki introduced frank images of sexuality, but also included a three-layered punchline that did, in the end, support conservative ideas of family values. The song fragment used the tune of a 2012 pop song by Tornike Kvitatiani and Vladi Blaiberg, “Let Us Pray for Our Parents” (“Pomolimsia za roditelei”) to create a musical pun, one immediately apprehended by an audience that knew the lyrics to the original song. The short couplet ran:

Ia otdel’no zhit’ stal ochen rano
I began living by myself early

Voobshche shagi s svoei zhenoi
In any case, with my wife

Molodoi zhenoi
With my young wife

No paroiu, ochen' tyanet-ka moment
But now and then, in a very tender moment

Kogda u nas beda s voidoi
When we had misfortune with the water

S goriacheiu vodoi
With the hot water

[pause]

Pomoemsia u roditelei...
Taking a shower at the parents’ house...

This joke created an image of a young couple living alone, then hit the audience with a punchline that introduced two humorous scenarios. The first is the revelation that the young man was actually living with his wife’s parents, not “on his own,” and the second concerns the realities of trying to have conjugal relations at your in-laws’ house. It was risqué enough to be funny, familiar to an audience used to cramped living quarters, and yet still socially acceptable since the couple was, after all, married. The final line, too, is a slant pun. The chorus in the original song begins “Let us pray for our parents”—in Russian, ”PoMOLIMsia za roditelei.” Team Kamiziaki subtracted only the “l” in “pomolimsia” it to make “PoMOEMsia u roditelei,” literally “washing ourselves at the parent’s,” or “taking a shower at the parent’s house” in more natural English.

Rather than playing with puns to fool the censors, then, as Soviet competitors had to, teams work to make topics like sex, prostitution, death, religion, and government surveillance funny. The team from Tambov who successfully built a sketch about an assassination, mentioned in chapter four, pulled it off because they added absurd elements, like a giant ambulatory pigeon. The skit was entirely visual, as well, featuring no dialogue at all. Crass comments from a hitman may have dampened the humor quotient, but a pigeon bellydancing to Bollywood tunes, moonwalking to Michael Jackson, and strutting around to the James Bond theme almost can’t fail to delight.

In local level KVN, the limit condition for jokes making it onto stage—and, remember, teams can always choose to ignore editors’ advice—is anticipated audience reaction. Censorship comes from the teams themselves. It is no fun to present material you’ve worked on for months and be met with hundreds or thousands of stony-faced people in the crowd. No team wants to get low scores from the judges, either. Thus, most teams at least try to write jokes that listeners will think are funny. Or they act like Bashkortorstan and say “sex” just for kicks, to audience eye-rolls. Either way, local concerns and biases motivate topic selection in both Russia and Ukraine. For instance, shortly after a Communist Party candidate beat the favored United Russia Party contender in the 2015 gubernatorial elections, Irkutsk State University students highlighted the event with a skit. During a T-shirt fashion show, a young man walked out in a United Russia T-shirt (United Russia is the party of Vladimir Putin). “This is the T-shirt of United Russia,” the emcee said. “It's already been in style for thirteen years. But in Irkutsk, trends have changed.” The young model then lifted up his United Russia shirt to reveal the hammer and sickle on a dramatic red background.

Local themes draw the most laughs in Odessa, too. Shortly after the vKontakte ban, a KVN team in the Odessa 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 off-guard. In a world of top-down, government censorship, a joke like that would be cut. Instead, the joke earned very long but somber applause from the Odessa audience, a group that appreciated the risk involved in signaling affiliation, even of the most commonplace kind, with Russia.

These facets of topic selection in KVN are important because they contradict the picture of KVN presented in the 2017 NATO report StratCom Laughs. The authors thought of KVN as something like McDonald’s, a company with a headquarters and franchises that follow its dictates. Instead, KVN is like soccer: a community game with pro leagues whose competitions get broadcast on TV. This misunderstanding led the StratCom Laughs authors to conclude that an individual team’s performances were not only “tools of strategic political communication,” or information warfare, but specifically that teams served as mouthpieces for President Putin (Denisa-Liepniece 2017). KVN jokes just don’t get written or regulated that way. After seeing headlines like “NATO declared KVN a Threat to the Western World,” student comedians in Russia, Central Asia, and Ukraine responded with—what else?—laughter, ridicule, and a bevy of jokes, memes, and online “confessions.” A young man from St. Petersburg posted on Instagram, “Well, they have exposed us...we are agents. Yes, agents of humor. And we are going to destroy Western civilization with our sense of humor. It's always been like that, and it will always be like that.” The hashtags #KVNagents and #theyvediscoveredus (#агентыКВН and #насраскрыли) circulated on social media for weeks.

There are hundreds of KVN leagues and thousands of KVN competitors in Ukraine, as well as in other post-Soviet states and Israel. So casting the game as Kremlin-centered both misses the mark and dismisses the efforts of student comedians who owe nothing to Putin. One former competitor and KVN coach in Odessa told me, “I didn’t even read anything but the headline [about the NATO report]. It's silliness. What, am I also a weapon of the Kremlin?” When Ukrainian competitors joke about regaining Crimea, economic hardship, and war orphans, they are using humor to discuss politics, everyday life, and the ways those spheres intersect in broadly unpleasant ways. Russians do the same, though they satirize different daily struggles. For instance, a Russian team joked, “Usually a girl won’t sleep with you because she doesn’t know you well enough. That works great for an FSB agent. He’d refuse anyway—he knows you too well.”

Political humor in local Russian leagues seems limited only by audience reaction rather than fear of government censure. If the letters KGB truly were unsayable in Soviet-era KVN, referenced slyly in even the most courageous of jokes, its successor, the FSB (Federal’naia Sluzhba Bezopastnosti, or Federal Security Service) makes a semi-regular occurrence in KVN jokes. During a KVN training session near Moscow in 2018, for instance, a member of one team joked, “My mom works for the city government and my dad’s in the FSB. So when I say I know everything, I mean everything.”176 In another skit, by the Krasnoyark team Prospekt Mira, a pair of police officers patrolling a park on bicycles started to dress down two youths who were littering, ringing the little bells on their bikes as they approached. In the middle of their scolding, a man in a suit and sunglasses cycled smoothly across the stage with his hands crossed across his chest instead of on the handlebars. One officer turned to the other, a bit upset, and said, “Well, FSB are obviously ace!”177 These jokes alluded to somewhat secretive government power but didn’t represent is as harmful, as did the Odessa Chimneysweeps’ “telepaths” pun.

A university team from Irkutsk also put on a very successful miniature about surveillance at the 2016 Irkutsk State University KVN League tryouts. The skit, called, “FSB radio,” featured two men in headphones flipping through channels in the evening. “Let's see what's going on at the Ivanov’s,” one said. The two agents, it turned out, were listening in on conversations in people’s houses. The audience smiled and laughed, but neither uproariously nor with shocked expressions. After the tryouts, I asked one of the young men from the team, “Is it a bit risky to joke about the FSB?” He told me, “No, we can say whatever we want. I’m not afraid of anything." At the same time, though, the team never told that joke on the public stage. It stayed in the tryouts performance, for an audience of other student KVNshiki. Perhaps either they or the league editors thought the broader Irkutsk demographic wouldn’t perceive the joke as cheery.

KVNshiki, then, negotiate joke formulation with editors, and, in non-televised leagues, control what material audiences see, in the end, entirely. Regulatory strictures often even rely on the preferences of individual editors. Teams either orient towards these strictures or ignore them. A student team from Belgorod recently did exactly this during the 2019 festival in Moscow. The team, Radioactive People (Radioactivnye Liudy), closed their performance with the words, “A lot of people say, ‘End your numbers more logically.’ But we aren’t going to write jokes just a bit and little-by-little. Even though we enjoy that.” They thus ended their performance illogically, in a way that amused them and, it seems, only a few audience members. I can hear myself laughing, incidentally, on my audio recording of the performance; I found the unexpectedness of their final phrases funny. Perhaps the team did encode a punchline into their seeming nonsense, if only a rhythmic and nonreferential one. Radioactive People performed something non-standard, something no televised league editor would allow, and it is an open question whether their gamble paid off. The team got to choose their content, though, just as their Soviet predecessors did.