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Red Laughter: On Refined Weapons of Soviet Jesters
- Social Research: An International Quarterly
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 79, Number 1, Spring 2012
- pp. 189-216
- 10.1353/sor.2012.0038
- Article
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Following closely the public debates about the nature and purpose of distinctively Soviet laughter and comedy in the 1920-1950s, this essay distills rationales used by producers of Stalinist culture for determining a socially acceptable discursive place for the comic in Soviet Russia. As the essay demonstrates, these debates reveal a complicated argumentative strategy devised by the Soviet political and cultural authorities in order to reclaim, appropriate and adapt for the needs of the socialist state previously ignored comic genres.