Paul Goble
Staunton, Mar. 18 – Russian opposition leader in emigration Garry Kasparov has posted on social media a joke he says Russians are now telling about Donald Trump, and independent anthropologist Aleksandra Arkhipova says it revives a Soviet trope and reflects the feelings of many in Russia that the US president is acting in Putin’s interests.
In Kasparov’s telling, the joke goes as follows:
Trump, in the afterlife, is given permission to return to Earth for one hour. He walks into a bar in New York and asks the bartender how things are going in America. The amazed bartender replies:
-- Wow, sir, thanks to you, we now have a fantastic empire! Greenland, Panama and Canada are all ours!
-- Great! - Trump rejoices. - What about Europe?
-- Oh, Europe couldn't resist either! — says the bartender.
-- How wonderful, — sighs Trump. — Well, I have to go back. How much do I owe you?
The bartender replies:
-- A ruble fifty.
As Arkhipova explains, this is an updated version of Soviet jokes such as one in which US President Jimmy Carter couldn’t tell Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev what an American super computer predicted for the future of Moscow because he couldn’t read Chinese or when Radio Armenia reported that in 2035, US media would report about collective farmers in Oklahoma (t.me/anthro_fun/3356 reposted at echofm.online/opinions/den-kogda-sovetskie-anekdoty-stali-vnov-populyarny).
“This is how joke plots evolve,” she continues. “They surface when people feel that such succinct and witty stories are a great commentary on what is happening and not just about any situaitn but about an absurd one. The feeling that Trump is acting in Putin’s interests is so strong for some people that a joke becomes a great way to express these feelings.”
As a result, jokes from the past “rise from the ashes as if they were new.”
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