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Culture | Back Story
First, they come for the comedians
But, try as strongmen might, the jokes always get away
Sep 22nd 2025|4 min read
Josef Stalin loses his pipe and informs his security chief. Later he finds it behind the sofa. “That’s impossible,” says the henchman (黨羽), “three people have confessed to stealing it!” Lots of jokes were told about the Soviet generalissimo, proliferating long after he died. For instance: Stalin’s ghost visits Vladimir Putin. “Kill your opponents and paint the Kremlin blue,” he advises. “Why blue?” asks Putin. The ghost smiles. “I knew you wouldn’t query the first part.”
While the tyrant lived, it was reckless to tell such jokes in public or to anyone who might report them. Even hearing them could be calamitous. “Who built the White Sea canal?” runs a gag about a monstrous infrastructure project. “The right bank was dug by the joke-tellers—the left by those who heard them.”
“Every joke”, wrote George Orwell, “is a tiny revolution.” To silence the comedians, some autocrats use torturers and the gulag; in today’s Egypt and other stifled places, the penalties for ridicule can be prison and exile. In America the relatively mild tools include menacing regulators, as Jimmy Kimmel, a talk-show host, has learned. Yet whatever the comics’ fate, the jokes themselves get away.
Authoritarians are inherently funny. Humour thrives on pretence and delusion—and the strongman is always pretending. He poses as a saviour but is actually a brute; he purports to be omnipotent but is as flawed as other mortals, or more. If he has an ideology, it is deficient too. Prickly and narcissistic, strongmen can rarely take jokes, which makes them risky but funnier. The Nazis banned “The Great Dictator” (pictured), in which Charlie Chaplin sent up Adolf Hitler, but the Führer reputedly watched it twice. Saddam Hussein tried to murder the cast of a satirical film.
Political jokes, meanwhile, are the ideal weapon of the weak. Even without the internet, they travel at warp speed, traversing a country before the censors have their pens out. (According to a report cited in a BBC documentary, the KGB found a joke could cross Moscow in a matter of hours.) Crucially, a good gag is collusive, recruiting listeners to the teller’s side—or rather, making clear which side they are already on. They can’t help finding it funny, and it is funny because, at bottom, it is true. This bond can be a launch pad for politics, as it was for Beppe Grillo in Italy and Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine.
Naturally, autocrats fret about people knowing that other people are thinking like them. According to the maximalist logic of repression, the fact that laughter is intimate, spontaneous and ephemeral heightens its appeal as a target: if rulers can suppress wit, they can control everything. But they can’t. As Ben Lewis recounts in “Hammer & Tickle”, a book about humour under communism, trying to squish a joke tends to spread it instead.
When the laughter police give up this unequal fight, it is sign of liberalisation, voluntary or otherwise. At the fag-end of the Soviet Union, even Mikhail Gorbachev, its last leader, wisecracked about discontent and shortages. (“The working classes consume plenty of cognac—through their chosen representatives.”) A big comedy festival in Riyadh, beginning on September 26th, is supposed to advertise Saudi Arabia’s new freedoms. Hmmm: Tim Dillon, an American stand-up due to attend, says he was disinvited over a riff the organisers didn’t like.
Canny authoritarians see the benefits of letting the gags flow. “If they are telling jokes about me,” Leonid Brezhnev is said to have remarked, “it means they love me,” and he wasn’t altogether wrong. Scabrous as it may be, satire always contains a trace of homage; after all, nobodies are never satirised. Humour can be a safety-valve for dissent and a homeopathic dose of plurality. It can also offer raw intel on the national mood, relaying hard truths and bad news as medieval jesters sometimes did to kings.
But the wiliest strongmen, including some populists today, commandeer the audience. In an age when the struggle for power is a battle for attention, they are the carnival-barkers of the public square, dealing as much in one-liners and theatrical taunts as in policy. As politics is repackaged as entertainment, crackdowns—on comics and others—become part of the show, the threat to free expression blurred by the spectacle.
The story of Bim-Bom, a circus-clown duo, is an ominous parable. Performing in Moscow in 1918, they made jokes about the Bolsheviks that the secret policemen in attendance disliked. The goons rushed the stage to arrest them. Thinking the chase was part of the act, the crowd hooted with laughter.■
文化｜幕後故事
首先，他們來抓喜劇演員
但無論強人如何用力，笑話總能逃脫
2025年9月22日｜閱讀時間4分鐘
約瑟夫‧史達林丟了他的菸斗，並通知他的安全主管。後來他在沙發後找到了它。那名黨羽驚訝地說：「這不可能，已經有三個人承認偷了它！」關於這位蘇聯獨裁者的笑話層出不窮，甚至在他死後仍廣為流傳。例如：史達林的幽靈造訪弗拉基米爾‧普丁，建議道：「殺掉你的對手，然後把克里姆林宮漆成藍色。」普丁問：「為什麼是藍色？」幽靈微笑說：「我就知道你不會質疑第一部分。」
當暴君在世時，公開講這類笑話或向可能告密的人說，都極為冒險。甚至只是聽到也可能招致災禍。有一個關於殘酷基建工程——白海運河的笑話是這樣的：「誰建造了白海運河？右岸是講笑話的人挖的，左岸是聽笑話的人挖的。」
喬治‧歐威爾曾寫道：「每一個笑話，都是一場小小的革命。」為了讓喜劇演員閉嘴，有些獨裁者使用刑求與勞改營；在今日的埃及與其他受壓抑的地方，對諷刺的懲罰可能是監禁或流亡。在美國，手段相對溫和——例如脅迫性的監管，正如脫口秀主持人吉米‧金莫（Jimmy Kimmel）所體會到的那樣。無論喜劇演員的下場如何，笑話本身總能逃脫。
獨裁者天生具有可笑性。幽默植根於虛偽與妄想——而強人永遠在假裝。他假扮救世主，實則是暴君；他假裝全能，實際上卻與凡人一樣有缺陷，甚至更糟。若他有意識形態，那通常也是不堪一擊的。敏感而自戀的獨裁者鮮少能承受嘲諷——這使他們既危險又更具笑料。納粹禁止播放卓別林諷刺阿道夫‧希特勒的電影《大獨裁者》（見圖），但據說元首本人偷偷看了兩遍。薩達姆‧海珊甚至試圖暗殺一部諷刺電影的演員。
政治笑話則是弱者的理想武器。即使沒有網際網路，它們也能以極快速度傳播——往往在審查者動筆前便遍布全國。（根據英國廣播公司一部紀錄片引用的報告，蘇聯國安委員會發現，一個笑話可在數小時內傳遍莫斯科。）最關鍵的是，好笑話具有共謀性：它使聽眾自然而然站在講者那一邊——或更準確地說，讓人明白他們原本就屬於那一邊。因為那是真的，所以他們忍不住發笑。這種情感連結甚至能成為政治的跳板，正如義大利的貝佩‧葛里洛（Beppe Grillo）與烏克蘭的弗拉基米爾‧澤倫斯基（Volodymyr Zelensky）所示。
自然地，獨裁者會擔心人民知道其他人也有同樣的想法。依據極權鎮壓的邏輯，笑聲的親密、自發與短暫特質反而讓它成為更具吸引力的打擊目標：若統治者能壓制幽默，他們便能掌控一切——但他們做不到。班‧路易斯在其著作《鐵鎚與咯咯笑》（Hammer & Tickle）中記錄道，試圖扼殺笑話往往只會讓它傳得更廣。
當「笑聲警察」放棄這場不對等的鬥爭時，往往象徵著自由化的到來——無論是自願還是被迫。在蘇聯垂死之際，最後一任領導人米哈伊爾‧戈巴契夫也開始開自己與體制的玩笑：「工人階級消費了大量干邑——透過他們的代表。」沙烏地阿拉伯將於9月26日舉辦大型喜劇節，宣傳所謂的新自由。然而，美國脫口秀演員提姆‧狄倫（Tim Dillon）表示，他因一句令主辦方不悅的段子而被取消邀請——令人玩味。
精明的獨裁者則懂得讓笑話流通的好處。據說列昂尼德‧布里茲涅夫曾說：「如果他們講我的笑話，代表他們愛我。」這話也不全錯。再辛辣的諷刺，也帶有一絲敬意——畢竟，無名之輩從不被諷刺。幽默可作為反抗的安全閥，也是多元的一劑微量疫苗。它同時能傳遞民意，讓統治者得知如實的壞消息，正如中古時代的宮廷弄臣向國王傳達真話那樣。
然而，最狡猾的強人——包括當今一些民粹領袖——會奪取觀眾的注意力。在這個權力鬥爭與注意力爭奪合而為一的時代，他們成為公共廣場上的叫賣藝人，操弄的既是政策，也是笑話與嘲諷。當政治被包裝成娛樂，對喜劇演員與其他人的鎮壓本身也變成表演的一部分，自由受威脅的真相被秀場的煙火模糊了。
馬戲團小丑雙人組「比姆與邦」（Bim-Bom）的故事是一則不祥的寓言。1918年他們在莫斯科演出，開了布爾什維克的玩笑，惹惱了在場的祕密警察。特務衝上舞台準備逮人，觀眾卻以為那是表演的一部分，哄堂大笑。■
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