JOST A MON

Between August 1979 and December 1989, through the darkest years of the Ceauşescu tyranny in that benighted land of Romania, an engineer spent his time collecting and annotating jokes. His analysis, Ten Years of Black Humour in Romania, published after the fall of Communism, is one of the most significant social studies performed behind the Iron Curtain, and provides intimate details of the creation of humour, its propagation, its coverage, and the official response to it.

One usually associates an inflexible outlook towards humour with totalitarian regimes: after all, no amount of self-importance can withstand ridicule, and one thing the denizens under Communism did well was to mock their masters. Western sociologists made much of this passive-aggressive resistance to Communism, and attributed its fall to the courage of the humourists. This is a thesis fraught with problems, and the book Hammer and Tickle by Ben Lewis exhaustively covers it. The story of Calin Bogdan Stefanescu, the engineer-turned-sociologist, appears in the book, and provides for those of us  who enjoy cross-disciplinary approaches to human questions an excellent case study.

What Stefanescu did may appear suicidal to those of us who lived more or less free lives outside Communism: he took notes in public of every joke he heard, where and when he heard it, who uttered it (socioeconomic class and age). Working in Bucharest's public transport administration, he was able to travel widely, eavesdropping on conversations in Party conferences and at work and in the city, fishing out his notebook at the slightest pretext. Many times he only heard parts of the joke, and he had to reconstruct its build up or punch-line; he tried hard to maintain the tone of the narrator. He estimated that he heard a new joke every 4.71 days across his horizon of observation. In his book, he provided more than 950 jokes, catalogued by themes - the Party, the standard of living, the secret service, culture, industry, the opposition...Most jokes would survive only a few days. Some of them were truly extraordinary, he said, and he could not allow them to fade away. More importantly, he said, he wanted to be able to face his children who might one day ask him what he did during the dark days of Communism. He could justify himself if they were to demand of him why he didn't protest and take to the streets against the dictatorship. The book became his outcry.

Jokes editorialised every facet of life in Romania. Fuel price hikes? Visits by foreign dignitaries? Abortion banned? Food shortages? In just one year, the number of new jokes jumped four-fold, many caused by state sponsored propaganda that Romanians required fewer calories than other peoples, which led to the terrible food rationalisation programmes of the early 1980s.

Most jokes were told by the intelligentsia (67% of the jokes) aged between 30 and 40 (54% of jokes). Usually a joke was created and set free almost immediately after news of a particular sort reached the teller. Stefanescu was able to plot the propagation of jokes over time and determine their speed. He was able to show that the importance of themes changed over time, and the corresponding jokes themselves changed in their intensity and tenor. In the early 80s, most jokes were about the standard of living; Ceauşescu jokes remained pretty much constant in their rate of creation. Between 1986 and 1989, the population felt a change in the air, that things could possibly be improving, and the Ceauşescu jokes leapt in number, and the opposition became correspondingly important. Ben Lewis uses this fact to convince himself that Communist jokes were not the last resort of a cowed population, a distraction from the struggle. Instead, the jokes were quantitatively and qualitatively intensifying as the people's struggle grew: they were inspired and generated as part of the struggle. As Stefanescu's table shows (below), the themes important to the struggle became dominant, while others, less important, began to ease off as the glorious year of freedom, 1989, approached.

To conclude, here are some examples of Romanian humour.

Did you hear that since the spring living standards in Romania have doubled? Before we were cold and hungry - now we're only hungry.

Romanians who did not die from cold during the past winter and those who didn't die of starvation during the past summer are to be hanged soon on suspicion of membership in the Resistance movement.

What will the Palace of the People (a grandiose monstrosity built under Ceauşescu while the population starved) be called when its finished? A Mausoleum.

Photographs of Ceauşescus used to appear on the cover of every Romanian publication. This prompted: Why are there no pornographic magazines in Romania? Because the first page would be too horrible.

And lastly: Did you know why Romania will survive the end of the world? Because it is fifty years behind everyone else.