Paul Goble
Staunton, April 1 – Present-day Russian humor, much of it featuring a naïve Russian and disseminated via social media, nominally involved people laughing at themselves rather than others but in fact is “systematically eroding the authority” of the powers that be by showing the absurdity of the Putin regime’s repressive actions, Aleksandr Arkhipova says.
The social anthropologist who has long focused on humor argues that “the collective ‘I’ – long considered apolitical, protective of its private life and skeptical about the interference of the authorities – has now become the object of its own self-irony” (istories.media/opinions/2026/04/01/oruzhie-slabikh-o-chem-govorit-segodnyashnii-yumor-rossiyan/).
While many Russian jokes may appear to be nothing more than “letting off steam,” Arkhipova says, they are “more than that” because they allow those who tell them and those who listen to them to “collectively reach a consensus on the nature of current events,” many of which it is now dangerous to discuss directly.
As a result, there “thus emerges a horizontal network of interpretations in which the powers are consistently portrayed as absurd, intrusive, and overbearing,” in which “hundreds of thousands of online views transform what might have begun as a private joke into a shared collective experience.”vent
According to Arkhipova, that is “precisely how a common understanding emerges, a shared knowledge that something is fundamentally amiss. Thus, the modern weapon of the weak is not direct resistance but rather the mass production of narratives on their relationship with authority.”
Such humor is part of a process that “while unable to destroy that authority outright systematically erodes its legitimacy” and thus plays a key role in the profess of setting the stage of that authority’s eventual demise.
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