User:Szmenderowiecki/sandbox/Radio Yerevan jokes

In the Soviet Union and the former Communist Eastern bloc countries, a popular type of humour emerged in the 1950s and 1960s featuring the fictional broadcaster called the Armenian Radio (армянское радио) in USSR and Radio Yerevan elsewhere. These jokes are typically structured in a question-and-answer session with what would purportedly be the host of the actual Armenian Radio but which would often touch topics that would be sensitive for the Communist authorities or which would otherwise be liable for censorship.

Radio Yerevan jokes likely appeared from "Armenian riddles", a kind of absurdist Russian jokes that were particularly popular in the post-World War II years. By the late 1950s, these jokes increasingly became political in nature and were actively lampooning the realities of the Soviet people, such as the lack of civil liberties, shortages, poor quality of household items, as well as satirizing Communist propaganda clichés. However, many of the jokes referred to other aspects of life, particularly sexual matters, and in the Soviet Union, also to stereotypical representations of Armenians. Warsaw Pact countries evolved their own nuances of Radio Yerevan jokes, such as Czech versions often making puns of policemen and the answers of East German ones often starting with Im Prinzip ja/nein. New Armenian Radio jokes generally stopped appearing by late 1980s, but some are still occasionally created today.

Origins
Many types of question-and-answer jokes exist, and they are pretty much universal across cultures, such as lightbulb jokes. Some however, are more specific to one culture, such as elephant jokes that were an American fad in the 1960s. In the Soviet Union, a peculiar type of such jokes appeared that involved not the narrator but a fictional entity called the Armenian Radio. Despite the name, at the beginning, the Armenian Radio jokes were an ethnic Russian phenomenon. They are not really related to Armenian culture, nor do they have much in common with radio specifically. Shmelev et al. explain that the choice of the narrator was not coincidental and can be traced to "Armenian riddles" that existed since the early 20th century and featured weird questions followed by absurd answers. One of the more famous such riddles is about a herring:

"— What do we call a green long thing that hangs in the living room and squeaks? — ...? — A herring. — Why is it green? — It's my herring, I can paint it any colour I want. — Why does it hang in the living room? — It's my herring, I can hang it wherever I want. — Why does it squeak? — I wonder about it myself."

Armenian riddles, in their turn, likely were preceded by Russian jokes popular in early 20th century that featured an Armenian, or a Georgian, answering questions (that were often asked by the Armenian/Georgian himself) in a silly way. Emil Draitser generally concurs with the assessment, further adding that the Armenian riddles saw a revival in the immediate post-World War II years. First "Armenian Radio" jokes themselves appeared either in late 1950s or in the 1960s. The "radio" part was likely chosen because at the time of their appearance, radio was the most popular mass media outlet in the Soviet Union and also because radio stations often scheduled programs during which hosts answered questions purportedly mailed by radio listeners (though virtually everybody suspected the questions were written by hosts themselves so as to give ideologically appropriate answers to them). An alternative explanation relies on an apocryphal story suggesting that a host of an actual Radio Yerevan made a gaffe during a program when saying that "In a capitalist society, man exploits man, but in a Communist society it's the other way round."

The rise of Armenian Radio jokes in particular, or Communist jokes in general, could be attributed to more lenient attitudes towards manifestations of "anti-Soviet agitation". During Stalin's rule, doing that could land a jokester in a Gulag or prison; in early Khrushchev years, people were still sentenced to prison time for such offences, but by early 1960s all Communist states abandoned prosecution and arrests for such low-key dissent. At the same time, Communist propaganda, poor quality of life and (in Soviet satellite states) de facto lack of sovereignty made for ripe targets for satire. Another factor was that the Communist-approved mass media produced little of humour content, so much of the jokes circulating in public were not state-sanctioned and were created on the go by the people themselves.

Examples of jokes
Examples of Radio Yerevan jokes include:


 * Radio Yerevan was asked: "Is it true that there is freedom of speech in the USSR (in some versions, Russia), just like in the USA?"
 * Radio Yerevan answered: "In principle, yes. In the USA, you can stand in front of the White House and yell, "Down with Reagan!", and you will not be punished. Equally, you can also stand in the Red Square in Moscow and yell, "Down with Reagan!", and you will not be punished."


 * Radio Yerevan was asked: "Is it possible to build real socialism in Armenia?".
 * Radio Yerevan answers: "Yes, but it would be better to do it in Georgia".