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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

I was born in the USSR and speak Russian. I generally get Russian humor and some Russian jokes are quite funny. However I share the author’s opinion here: finding the humor in these jokes is rough. I watched the first video where the jokes are being told and honestly event the funniest of these are barely funny. You have to really place yourself into the situation where these people are considered larger than life and treated with all manner of deference and respect. To see them doing things like cursing like a trucker, to realize that they are fallible in some way, etc. can be made humorous but a lot of these jokes seem to fall under the category of “you had to have been there”.

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I am French. This is the exact problem I have with some movies my Polish friends told me to watch.

They were from the 70-80's and were making fun of the situation at that time (how to game the communists, the system, or the absurdity of said system).

I did not find them funny at all because I did not have the context. To me they were depressing.

I wonder how contemporary young Polish people see them today (when they watch them at all).

Czech here. Lived through last ten years of Communism. These films were repeated ad nauseam like a propaganda assuring us that the system is great because we can game it. Hated it then, hate it now.

Romanian here, mostly the same age as yours, humour greatly helped us during the last years of Ceausescu's regime, when things were becoming really rough (power cuts in the middle of winter, food rationing etc.). I'll leave one of the (dark) jokes in here just for the sake of history:

> There's a funeral procession on the street just outside Bulă's house (Bulă was the eponymous hero of almost all our jokes back then) and Bulă and his mother could hear the grieving lady crying from outside:

> "Where do you go, my beloved husband? Why do you have to go where it's eternally dark and cold?"

> Bulă, to his mother: "Mom, quick, lock the doors! They're bringing that guy over here to stay with us!"

It still cracks me up to this day thinking about that joke, even though the cold (especially the cold) was a very difficult thing to negotiate as a kid.

We also used to have jokes with a Russian scientist, an American scientist and a Romanian (didn't really matter if he was a scientist or not), in the end the Romanian was always getting the better of the other two (that sort of joke is alluded to in the text, with the Russian scientist doing something bad to a snake in Los Alamos).

These jokes are often not funny to non Eastern Europeans, but jokes from one ex-communist are often easy to understand in other ones.

The Martyr Made podcast guy also remarks that when he tells people a Polish joke he heard, Westerners are completely unamused while Easterners do find it funny.

Here's the joke: https://martyrmade.com/19-the-anti-humans/ (skip to 12:17) You can pretty much replace Poland with Romania, and many others and it works just as well.

Russian too, yep thats not funny, but you should know one of the most must-do things for US (gov payed) historian today - eventually write story about freaky-bloody Stalin, Gulag and Beria who eats children. For the sake of Freedom and Wellfare of course. Don't forget that von Neumann was truly genious at least because he wanted to wipe that Hell from the Earth (Yep they never told you that) Somewhat expressive and subjective comment, though not worse than the style of linked piece of mind.

But they did for the most part eat children, which is often confirmed by their own investigations of each other, there's the one for Beria where he coerced dozens of women to have sex with him, including many minors.

It's questionable how much that really was von Neumann's actual opinion. It was stated during the peak of McCarthyism, and he had a lot of personal contacts with people who had been impacted by it.

Always very vocally being the most anti-communist person in the room might have been just a defensive strategy.

IDK about Hungary, but Czechoslovakia executed almost 200 people for political crimes within a relatively short timespan of true Stalinism (1948-1953). Hundreds more were shot at the border trying to escape, or killed in concentration camps mining and processing uranium ore without any protective gear etc. Thousands survived the camps with health undermined.

Many of those were members of the intelligentsia. An average escapee with an academic title was likely to know at least a few victims by name.

It wasn't hard to hate the perpetrators genuinely.

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