SUMMARY:

Among its various activities, the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University holds a weekly Colloquia Series, in which invited speakers present formal papers on themes chosen for that year. In spring 2021, the topic of the series was “Authoritarian Laughter: From a Joke to a Revolution.” In April, Dr. Aleksandra Arkhipova from Moscow presented her new research on the phenomenon of Jewish jokes (anekdoty) in Soviet popular culture. The Q&A session from the event is published in this issue of Ab Imperio. The colloquium participants asked the speaker what was the function of Jewish jokes in Soviet society, what made them so popular, and what distinguished them from Georgian, Armenian and other ethnically marked humor.