It’s intolerable to live in a country where there’s no sense of humour, but it’s even more intolerable to live in a country where you need a sense of humour.
Bertolt Brecht^[1]

When over forty scholars have teamed up to produce The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor, their collective effort needs to be taken in all seriousness. The core mechanism of different models and specific contexts discussed in this compendium is framed in terms of the Incongruity Theory approach that “shifts the perspective from the emotional angle of derision, envy and malice to a cognitive view of humor and its analysis.”^[2] The ability to identify a gap between our abilities to observe reality and describe it is the first step toward a better analysis. The identification of this incongruity brings a release and hence laughter (thus bridging the incongruity theory with release/relief theories):

“It is the incongruity, usually a consequence of the resort to the dispreferred interpretation, that rouses the surprise and recognition of novelty on the part of the hearer. The defeat of expectations is set up by the linguistic ambiguity and the incongruity is resolved by recourse to the rules that underlie the ambiguity. If the scripts set up are noticeably unalike, the recognition of the incongruity and its linguistic origin is usually sufficient for the acknowledgement that the pun has been successfully received as a humorous text.” ^[3]

This cognitive mechanism underlies the thematic forum structured as a discussion of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s essay “Soviet History as Black Comedy.” To those who find her proposition as something coming out of the blue, it should be reminded that Ab Imperio has already articulated the problem of Soviet history having coalesced into a self-referential narrative structure. Centered on Soviet subjectivity theory and rhetorical devices such as “speaking Bolshevik,” “the people’s war,” “triumph and tragedy,” and the like, mostly borrowed from the Russian-speaking intelligentsia of the Thaw period, this narrative structure contains ready answers to any questions that are recognized as legitimate and rejects any inquiry that violates its poetics.^[4] Which side did the USSR fight on in World War II between September 1, 1939, and June 22, 1941? What role did race and racism play in the Soviet social imagination and administrative practices? Could the predominately illiterate pre-1956 Soviet society really be ideologically indoctrinated and how ideological was the revolution of the illiterate masses?
These and similar questions arise from novel scholarship that is obliged to find answers in the already existing historiographical canon lest it will not be incorporated into it. So, it seems only appropriate that the first crack in the wall erected over the past three decades is produced by none other than the matriarch of the field, Sheila Fitzpatrick. She chuckles at the obvious incongruity between the explanatory edifice, to which she herself has contributed, and the realities of Soviet history. Specifically, there is a striking contrast between the heterogeneity and multifacetedness of Sovietness and the orderly coherence and monocausality of its representation in the established canon of Soviet history. It is its reductionism of the multitude of subjectivities to the normative Soviet subjectivity and of the multilingualism of self-expression to speaking Bolshevik – which essentially means speaking Russian in this Kremlin-centered model – that produces the effect of the field’s Russocentrism. Sharing the historical metanarrative of “triumph and tragedy” with Putinism, some scholars working in the field have had a hard time disentangling from this strategic Russocentrism since February 2022. In this respect too, Fitzpatrick’s spontaneous laughter has an emancipating and therapeutic effect.
Taken as a diagnosis, her invitation to laugh along means an invitation to critically think along on the ways to produce new narratives of Soviet history. Several historians and literary scholars have accepted this invitation and offered their thoughts about resolving the fundamental incongruity in the field that can benefit from distancing from its object of study through a healthy dose of irony and self-irony.