It's Just a Joke, Comrade: 100 Years of Russian Satire
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 10 October 2017
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Russian Revolution unleashed a brand of humour that continues to this day. In this two-part series, comedian and Russophile Viv Groskop explores a century of revolutionary comedy and asks how it continues to shape the national psyche.
The series will rediscover comedy of the Revolution: Bolshevik satire, early Communist cartoons and jokes about Lenin, as writers, satirists and comedians recall the jokes and cartoons shared by their parents and grandparents.
Viv will investigate the birth of the 'anekdot' and trace the development of dark humour through the purges. She will look at how dissident humour in the late 1950s influenced comedy in London and New York, and meet contemporary comedians to gain an understanding of the shape and sound of the comedy circuit in Russia today.
Producer: Georgia Catt
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box. |
| 0:05.0 | The controversial maximum security prison impossible to escape from. |
| 0:09.0 | And one of the duties of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.0 | The IRA inmates who found a way. of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.5 | The IRA inmates who found a way. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path |
| 0:19.5 | through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history. |
| 0:25.0 | The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them. |
| 0:28.5 | Escape from the maze, listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:34.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:40.0 | There's no one I can think of in the world I live in that's beyond satire. |
| 0:47.0 | I'm fortunate I suppose that I have the freedom to mock and to laugh unrestricted, |
| 0:52.0 | and my sense of humour has been shaped by that. |
| 0:55.0 | But the people in today's seriously interesting story |
| 0:59.0 | are looking back a century, |
| 1:01.0 | to a humour shaped by a completely different regime, a sense of humor built on trust. |
| 1:07.0 | Making political jokes in any state that is authoritarian is quite a dangerous activity and it is a bonding ritual to do it. |
| 1:19.1 | The October Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in Russian history. |
| 1:24.0 | Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power |
| 1:27.0 | setting up a communist regime that would last most of the 20th century. |
| 1:31.0 | There was humour during the revolution and there was humour in |
| 1:35.0 | the 1920s and until about 1928 there was actually officially sanctioned state |
... |
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