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What to expect from Russia’s stand-up comics now seeking success in English

Source: Meduza

It’s tempting to want contemporary Russian stand-up comedy to reveal something about Putinism and its future. Studying Russia’s cultural output easily becomes a hunt for cracks in the system — for evidence that the whole nation is giggling about its naked emperor. In an article published in 2007, the late British sociologist Christie Davies argued that jokes in the Perestroika-era USSR “were the tip of an iceberg of discontent” and that joke-tellers’ behavior was “a good predictor” of the sudden collapse of communism in Europe. Davies wrote about “jokes” collected anecdotally and recorded in KGB files, not about the practiced routines of professional comics. 

This industry exists today in Russia, but the performers who openly tackle politics now find themselves in exile. It took years to harass and chase out these independent jokers. Comic Sasha Dolgopolov told me that many problems began with the government’s campaign to defend the “feelings” of religious people — one of the principles of Vladimir Putin’s newfound conservativism after returning to the presidency in 2012. Dolgopolov ran afoul of the police in Moscow in 2020 after performing a bland, if slightly colorfully worded, joke about the Virgin Mary.

Another incident with a more sweeping chilling effect on Russia’s comedy scene was the deportation of comedian Idrak Mirzalizade. In August 2021, he was jailed for 10 days and then banned from the country for life for telling a joke during a live-stream talk show where he flipped back on white Slavs the xenophobia many Central Asians face when trying to rent apartments in Russia. Mirzalizade later appealed and managed to reduce his expulsion — to a mere 14 years.

Russia’s comedians find themselves in a situation similar to its journalists: those who would flout the country’s growing restrictions on their trade must work abroad, struggling to maintain their home audience at a distance while wrestling to broaden their appeal in the West. To a certain extent, this is the logic behind Meduza’s dual-language design, and it’s also the reason many comics who fled Russia are now trying to establish themselves in English.

However, reinventing your act in another language can be tricky, especially with the identity politics at the heart of modern stand-up. For Russians in exile, stand-up comedy means lots of jokes about life as an immigrant. In other words, any performer working in English must contend to some degree with the likes of Yakov Smirnoff and the tropes of “in Soviet Russia…” humor.

In the fall of 2021 (a few months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine), Yevgeny Chebatkov managed the unusual feat of a 41-minute live show in Moscow, performed entirely in English. Chebatkov had studied in Canada and first started performing stand-up there. He didn’t leave Russia after February 2022 (in fact, he has a prominent role in the teaser trailer for the next Major Grom action film), but his English-language show from more than two years ago covers many of the topics that are now regular material from expat comics.

And it’s no wonder — because being Russian, at least in North America, can be pretty funny.

American society likes to reduce people to their racial identities, but Russians — especially the Russian accent — have a way of confounding Americans’ expectations here. Chebatkov tells a story about how his “scary” Russian accent “saved his life” during a visit to New York City by intimidating a young man who thought (before hearing him speak) that it would be safe to hassle him.

“He was like, ‘Where you from, bitch?’ but I’m not gonna tell you the skin color he has [sic]. You can imagine [for] yourself. Oh, you racists,” he tells the audience.

Comics like Chebatkov are clearly aware when they approach the boundaries of acceptable speech about something as sensitive as race, though this hardly guarantees the success of the transgressional jokes they risk. Mimicking a black man’s speech and then teasing the audience is not groundbreaking comedy, but Chebatkov’s routine is fresh when he keeps the story focused on himself.

You might also cringe when watching Kirill Voronin‘s crowd work in Tbilisi from May 2023, when he amicably but awkwardly engages what appears to have been a large group of Indian people in the audience. “So let me guess: this is the entire medical group that’s come here,” he says, riffing on the number of young Indian people studying medicine around the world. 

If you’re looking for a near-carbon copy of Smirnoff’s schtick with updated political references, you could do worse than Alexander Nezlobin, whose English-language shows in 2023 play on his accent, on Russian authoritarianism, and on the growing tensions between Moscow and Washington. He goes to the movie theater to buy a ticket for the children’s animated film “Pussy Boobs.” He warns the crowd that Google is selling their data to the Kremlin. And he jokes that the only way to “do stand-up” in Russia as an anti-war activist is to “sit down in a jail” — a play on the Russian phrase “to serve time in prison” (literally, “to sit in prison”).

Meduza’s podcast, The Naked Pravda, recently welcomed comics Alexander Dolgopolov and Denis the Stranger to discuss the transition to English. Both performers are now in Berlin, and the immigrant experience they bring to their material is less dopey than Yakov Smirnoff’s Soviet Man. Dolgopolov, who expressed admiration for Smirnoff, complains that the West isn’t the endless outdoor gay orgy that Russian TV propaganda promised. “My plan now is to sue Europe for being not queer enough,” Dolgopolov jokes.

Like everyone mentioned here, Denis the Stranger talks about his struggles with English, but his wiliness in these stories isn’t accidental. In his jokes, Denis never has that “What a country!” moment of bliss. Instead, he grinds on with Duolingo, dreaming of German citizenship, and he jokes that Russians must hire the PR spin doctors who whitewashed Austria’s national reputation after Adolf “the German” Hitler.

The Russian stand-up comics trying to make it in English are mostly, relatively young people. (The author of these words is in his 40s and insists that everyone mentioned here is indisputably young.) These folks should be around for decades more, witnessing Vladimir Putin’s death and the inevitable reckoning it will occasion back home in Russia. Depending on which way the winds blow, these comedians scattered across Europe and America might be Russia’s best hope of rescue, at least culturally, when they can finally joke about today’s president in the past tense.