Taking Penguins to the Movies: Ethnic Humor in Russia

Abstract

If humor provides a means of analyzing a culture, what better way of understanding today's Russia than by examining the jokes people are telling? As ethnic conflicts have become hot political issues, Russian jokes about ethnic groups have become more common and ethnic humor even more prevalent than political humor.In Taking Penguins to the Movies, Emil Draitser offers an insider's view of Russian society by presenting and analyzing Russian ethnic jokes that center on Jews, Georgians, Ukrainians, Chukchis, and other groups. Drawn from Russian joke books and the author's private collection, most of the 300 jokes and popular rhymes, ethnicity-related proverbs and sayings appear in English for the first time and have been chosen for their analytical interest and the extent to which they represent folk humor.Draitser uses humor as a means of understanding the attitudes and customs, beliefs and idiosyncrasies, and inter- and intra-group relationships of this multinational society. In analyzing the jokes, he seeks to determine what makes them funny, why certain groups are targeted, and even why a mediocre joke can be received with great enthusiasm. He traces the evolution of ethnic stereotyping, examines the circumstances under which such jokes arise, shows how they are used to project anxieties on out-groups, and suggests what they reveal about those who tell them. He also examines jokes shared by Russian Jews to show how a minority uses humor to sustain its morale.Even though Russia has seen a new proliferation of joke books with the lifting of censorship, Russian scholars have been slow to analyze their own people's humor. Taking Penguins to the Movies provides a glimpse of many ofthe sociological processes taking place in today's Russia and offers readers a few chuckles along the way.