HAMMER AND TICKLE

The Communist Joke Book

The story of a political system that was laughed out of existence.
90 mins

What would happen if they introduced Communism to Saudi Arabia? – Nothing at first but soon there would be a shortage of sand.

This is the first ever film about Communist jokes, the most extraordinary cultural legacies of eighty years of socio-political experimentation in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Under the oppressive Communist regimes of the Soviet Union and its satellites, ordinary people told thousands of jokes about the society they lived in and the political system they suffered under. Denied free speech, and confronted daily with the gap between political propaganda and everyday reality, jokes became the language of truth in the world of Communism. They were a way for ordinary people to resist the regime – but the Communist regimes also used to jokes, to diffuse opposition. Jokes were thus the real battleground between state and people under Communism.

Using this unique folkloric archive, this funny and insightful feature-length documentary tells the real history of Communism through the jokes. On the way it tells the stories of what happened to the joke-tellers, some of whom ended up in the Gulags, while others became stars of the stage and screen. This Monty-Python-esque history of Communism recreates the jokes using sketches, tricked archive and special animations. There are interviews with the legends of Communism and legendary Communist joke-tellers including Solidarity Leader and former Polish president Lech Walesa, the hardline Polish leader General Jaruselski, German actor Peter Sodann, , German satirist and author Ernst Roehl, East German newspaper editor and Politburo member Guenter Schabowski, and Britain’s own Professor of jokes, Christie Davies.

The film unearthes never-seen-before archive – of the jokes that President Reagan told at Press Conferences, of the only anti-Communist comedy show ever broadcast on a Communist state television channel, and of the jokes and cartoons that the Czechs graffiti-ed on their town square when the Russians invaded in 1968.

Uncovering extraordinary stories never before told on television, director Ben Lewis met the man who collected jokes for Ronald Reagan, the Polish prankster who gave away toilet paper to deprived fellow citizens, and the Romanian amateur statistician who collected and analysed Communist jokes scientifically to reveal the part they played in the downfall of the system.

Introduction to Hammer and Tickle

Adam and Eve joke cartoon

Sketch about Leonid Brezhnev

The devils arrive as refugee in heaven cartoon

Have a laugh at the cheese chop joke!

Ronald Reagan’s tells Communist jokes

Prisoners’ sketch

Everything was Bourgeois & sheep joke

Stamp cartoon, spy sketch

Communist Economics Cartoon

Landing at Moscow Airport, 1970s …

Queue Jokes and the Statistical Analysis of Romanian Communist Jokes

Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev are on a train, and the train suddenly stops …

Performance by conceptual artist Doug Fishbone at the publication party for ‘Hammer and Tickle’, 29.5.08.

Doug Fishbone is a London-based artist renowned for his combination of the forms of stand-up comedy, the lecture and contemporary art.

http://www.re-title.com/artists/Doug-Fishbone.asp

….Fortunately, there was one other way of finding out what was going in Gorbachev’s mind at the time. The Gorbachev Foundation contains an enormous archive of papers from his era at the Kremlin. Today it is closed to researchers, but early in the nineties it was briefly opened to certain people. By a route which I cannot disclose, I was put in touch with a man whose identity I cannot reveal, but who gained access to these files. “The story of those documents is quite crazy,” he told me over the phone, “When the Soviet Union collapsed, some of Gorbachev’s associates, while being evicted from the Kremlin, took a large number of copies of secret documents with them.

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My driver parked his Lada outside one of the concertinas of twenty-storey apartment blocks that ring Moscow. They were built in the 1970s but remain in good condition; their cursory prefab construction has its own aesthetic. Wall sections with windows have a decorative grid of red tiles under the sill and the lego-like grid is tempered by thick squiggles of grey sealant that are visible between the sections. It was here I was to meet a former KGB Colonel, who early in his career was on the frontline of a new softly-softly strategy against the jokes.

“They had to stop arresting people for telling jokes about Khrushchev,” Colonel Prelin told me dismissively,”Otherwise they would have had to lock up the whole country.”

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I was on a train to Poland, leaning my head against the cold window pane and daydreaming.

I imagined I was taking part in a British television quiz show, Mastermind. I think it was some time in the mid seventies. At any rate, I was aged about 14 and wearing my school uniform – dark grey trousers, black DMs (not regulation school wear but you could get away with it) black blazer with a little fish on the lapel indicating I was a scholar (which meant my parents got a small discount on the astronomical school fees), and for some reason a cap, although I don’t remember wearing that very often. It was like one of those common nightmares that adults endure in which they have to sit their O-level exams again.

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The Treptower Park War Memorial is the finest Soviet monument of them all. It’s located in the suburbs of Berlin in the middle of a large park, so it remains off the tourist trail. Knowledge of it guarantees you entry to the select club of Connoisseurs of Communism.

You enter between two towering constructivist triangles of pink marble, ressembling frozen curtains, at the base of which kneel a pair of sculptures of Russian soldiers, double life-size. In front of you is an area the size of a football pitch, bisected by pathways. Tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers, who died in the battle for Berlin in Spring 1945, are buried here in mass graves, each topped with a neat lawn. A cycle of magnificent marble reliefs describing the Soviet version of World War II line the edges. At the other end of this rectangular space, in the distance, a giant statue of a Russian soldier, twelve metres high, rises up. He is cradling a baby in his arms and stamping a large swastika underfoot. This is a sledgehammer of a sculpture with an obvious message, and yet –in an effect the Soviets never anticipated – the scale of this sentimental boast generates a wave of disbelief in the onlooker. Pop artists understood and used this principle years later: a small tube of toothpaste or a box of matches means very little, but when it’s twenty times life size, it becomes a critique of consumer culture. That’s why first-time visitors to this landmark can feel not only their eyes opening wide in astonishment, but the corners of their mouth turning up in an irrepressible smile of cynicism.

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Although I never married a Communist, I often woke up next to one. She had the most beautiful hair in Central Europe – thick, curly, inky black. She wasn’t turned on by my fascination with Communist humour, but I found her antiquated political sympathies highly alluring.

Ariane grew up in a small and boring town way down the bottom of East Germany. In those days it had a population of a quarter of a million. Since the fall of the Wall, it’s shrunk to a hundred thousand. They built a new railway line from Leipzig to Munich, she told me, which bypassed her place of birth – “They just decided we were no longer on the map.”This small detail in the transport policy of the united Germany became a potent symbol to her of the way the West German state had ruthlessly eradicated the DDR. The slow dismantling of the East German parliament building in Berlin, with its cheapo copper-coloured reflective glass and asbestos-ridden core, was more evidence of the same.

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