Laughing at Stalin w/ Jon Waterlow

The Road to Now

Benjamin Sawyer

Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2021

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bob and Ben speak with Jon Waterlow about his book It's Only a Joke Comrade! Humor, Trust and Everyday Life Under Stalin and the role humor plays in helping humans make sense of the world in even the darkest times. Jon also shares his take on humor's role in politics under Stalin and today, the process he went through to uncover these jokes, and how the artistic technique of crosshatching helps us understand what it was like to live under the Stalinist system. He also discusses his decision to forego publishing his book with an academic publisher and why he decided to leave a bright future in the academy to purse fulfillment elsewhere.

Dr. Jonathan Waterlow received his Doctorate in History from the University of Oxford and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at St. Anthony's College (Oxford) and the University of Toronto. He is also the cohost of the Voices in the Dark podcast, which is available anywhere you get The Road to Now.

This episode is a rebroadcast of The Road to Now #107 and was edited by Gary Fletcher.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This podcast is in the loop, the Legion of Osiris Podcasts.
0:03.9	Osiris is creating a community that connects people like you with live experiences and
0:08.3	podcasts about artists and topics you love.
0:11.6	Get in the loop at Osirispod.com.
0:20.2	I'm Ben Sawyer, and this is The Road to Now.
0:23.6	Today we are sharing an episode that originally aired in 2018.
0:28.6	It's a conversation with Jonathan Waterloo about his book, It's Only a Joke Comrade,
0:32.6	Humor, Trust in Everyday Life under Stalin.
0:35.6	It's a really fascinating look at what life was like through the lens of humor.
0:42.2	One of the reasons I wanted to share this again was, for those of you guys who listened to
0:46.7	my conversation with Sean Guillory, one of the things I said that I felt like we failed
0:51.3	to really convey to the public, by we, I mean, Soviet historians, and
0:57.5	those who study Russia, is this idea that people in the Soviet Union who were living at this time,
1:03.7	they were no different than us. There were people who, same blood in their veins, same sentiments,
1:10.1	I mean, they're human beings. And learning how they
1:14.0	experience that, I think, is crucial because if we don't understand that, then we fail to believe
1:20.5	that that's a possible trajectory for us. I'm not saying that we are on the verge of anything
1:25.4	like this. I'm simply saying that when we separate ourselves from people in the past, we forget about
1:32.4	the shared experience.
1:34.1	And I think being aware that anything that's ever happened to human beings could happen to
1:38.8	us is essential and an important part of being a historian.
1:43.8	Jonathan Waterloo does a great job in
	...

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