Garey, A. A.;
(2025)
Leagues of Laughter: War, comedy and the Soviet legacy in Russia and Ukraine.
[Book].
UCL Press: London.
Preview |
Text
Leagues-of-Laughter.pdf Download (2MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Leagues of Laughter traces how a Soviet-created youth game changed as students’ nation states collapsed, competed and went to war. The game, called KVN (Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh, or Club of the Cheerful and Clever), spread to universities across the USSR in the 1960s. It is scored by a panel of judges, like figure skating, but is played in school and university leagues, much like football. KVN rocketed to mass popularity, oddly, due to Soviet censorship. Young people could not protest in essays, speeches or fiction, but the referents of live jokes are hard to prove. KVN became a forum for Aesopian free speech. Soviet pedagogues promoted the game as a wholesome, intellectual youth activity, leading to a preponderance of ordinary schoolchildren gaining at least some experience writing jokes. Even after the fall of the USSR, millions of young people across the former Soviet bloc continued playing KVN in schools, universities and semi-pro leagues. Drawing on fieldwork in Russia and Ukraine between 2015 and 2019, Garey compares KVN traditions in two post-Soviet nation states at war. A series of interconnected, cross-border stories spanning 60 years illustrates how laughter and oppression entwined in the long cultural context of the war in Ukraine.
| Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| Title: | Leagues of Laughter: War, comedy and the Soviet legacy in Russia and Ukraine |
| ISBN-13: | 9781800088818 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/111.9781800088818 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800088818 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © Author, 2025 Any third-party material in this book is not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence. Details of the copyright ownership and permitted use of third-party material is given in the image (or extract) credit lines. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright owner. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. This licence allows you to share and adapt the work for non-commercial use providing attribution is made to the author and publisher (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work) and any changes are indicated. Attribution should include the following information: Garey, A. A. 2025. 230. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800088818 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ |
| Keywords: | Russia, Ukraine, comedy, youth, war, semiotics, tradition, censorship, Soviet Union, ethnography |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10211005 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
