Russian jokes

Russian jokes (Russian: анекдоты, romanized: anekdoty, lit. 'anecdotes') are short fictional stories or dialogs with a punch line, which commonly appear in Russian humor. Russian joke culture includes a series of categories with fixed settings and characters. Russian jokes treat topics found everywhere in the world, including sex, politics, spousal relations, or mothers-in-law. This article discusses Russian joke subjects that are particular to Russian or Soviet culture. A major subcategory is Russian political jokes, discussed in a separate article. Every category has numerous untranslatable jokes that rely on linguistic puns, wordplay, and the Russian language vocabulary of foul language. Below, (L) marks jokes whose humor value critically depends on intrinsic features of the Russian language.
Stierlitz is a fictional Soviet intelligence officer, portrayed by Vyacheslav Tikhonov in the Soviet TV series Seventeen Moments of Spring. In the jokes, Stierlitz interacts with various characters, most prominently his nemesis Müller portrayed by Leonid Bronevoy. Usually two-liners spoofing the solemn style of the original TV voice-overs, the plot is resolved in grotesque plays on words or in parodies of the trains of thought and narrow escapes of the "original" Stierlitz.
Poruchik (Lieutenant) Dmitry Rzhevsky of the jokes is a cavalry (Hussar) officer, a straightforward, unsophisticated, and innocently rude military type whose rank and standing nevertheless gain him entrance into high society. In the jokes, he is often seen interacting with the character Natasha Rostova from the novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, who would act as his opposite, showing the comedic contrast between Rzhevsky and Rostova's behavior. The name is borrowed from a character in a musical comedy, Hussar Ballad (1962), having little in common with the folklore hero. The 1967 film rendering of War and Peace contributed to the proliferation of the Rzhevsky jokes. Some researchers point out that many jokes of this kind are versions of 19th-century Russian army jokes, retold as a new series of jokes about Rzhevsky.
Rzhevsky is often depicted as having a casual, nonchalant attitude to love and sex:
Rzhevsky is also seen giving advice to other Russian gentlemen:
A series of jokes is based on a paradox of vulgarity within a high society setting:
While successful narration of quite a few Russian jokes heavily depends on using sexual vulgarities ("Russian mat"), Rzhevsky, with all his vulgarity, does not use heavy mat in traditional versions of his tales. One of his favorite words is "arse" (which is considered rather mild among Russian vulgarities), and there is a series of jokes where Rzhevsky answers "arse" to some innocent question (it is typical of Rzhevsky to blurt unromantic comments in the most romantic situations):
The essence of Rzhevsky's peculiarity is captured in the following meta-joke:
This theme culminates in the following joke, sometimes called "the ultimate Hussar joke":
Rabinovich is a typical Russian Jewish surname of a protagonist of Jewish jokes in Soviet Union.
The following example explains Vladimir Putin's remark about "Comrade Wolf", describing the policies of the United States, that many non-Russians found cryptic. In a reference to the US-led invasion of Iraq Putin said: "As they say, 'comrade wolf knows whom to eat.' He eats without listening and he is clearly not going to listen to anyone."
Vovochka is the Russian equivalent of "Little Johnny". He interacts with his school teacher, Maria Ivanovna (shortened to "Marivanna", a stereotypical female teacher's name). "Vovochka" is a diminutive form of "Vova", which in turn is a shortened version of "Vladimir", creating the "little boy" effect. His fellow students bear similarly diminutive names. This "little boy" name is used in contrast with Vovochka's wisecracking, adult, often obscene statements.
Vasily Ivanovich Chapayev, a Red Army hero of the Russian Civil War, in the rank of Division Commander, was featured in a 1934 biopic. The most common topics are the war with the monarchist White Army, Chapayev's futile attempts to enroll into the Frunze Military Academy, and the circumstances of Chapayev's death (officially, he was gunned down by the Whites and drowned while attempting to flee across the Ural River after a lost battle).
Chapayev is usually accompanied by his aide-de-camp Petka (Петька, "Pete"), as well as Anka the Machine-Gunner (Анка-пулемётчица), and political commissar Furmanov, all based on real people. (Being well known in Russian popular culture, Chapayev, Petka, and Anka were featured in a series of Russian adventure games released in the late 1990s and 2000s.)
A number of jokes involve characters from the short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about the private detective Sherlock Holmes and his friend Doctor Watson. The jokes appeared and became popular soon after The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson film series was broadcast on Soviet TV in the late 1970s to mid-1980s, starring Vasily Livanov as Sherlock Holmes and Vitaly Solomin as Watson. Lines from these films are usually included in the jokes («Элементарно, Ватсон!» – "Elementary, my dear Watson!"). The narrator of the joke usually tries to mimic Livanov's husky voice. The standard plot of these jokes is a short dialog where Watson naïvely wonders about something, and Holmes finds a "logical" explanation to the phenomenon in question. Occasionally the jokes also include other characters – Mrs Hudson, the landlady of Holmes's residence on Baker Street; or Sir Henry and his butler Barrymore from The Hound of the Baskervilles; or the detective's nemesis Professor Moriarty.
Some older jokes involve Fantômas, a fictional criminal and master of disguise from the French detective series, a character once widely popular in the USSR. His arch-enemy is Inspector Juve, charged with catching him. Fantômas' talent for disguise is usually the focus of the joke, allowing for jokes featuring all sorts of other characters:
Bogatyrs are heroes of Russian folk tales: impossibly strong and brave warriors, but often portrayed in jokes as arrogant, cunning and cruel. The three bogatyrs are usually Ilya Muromets, Alyosha Popovich, Dobrynya Nikitich or a combination thereof; the jokes often include other folk characters (such as Baba Yaga, Koschei or Gorynych) and enemies of Rus (most often the Golden Horde), usually defeated by the end of the joke. As with most other jokes, most of these are not meant for children despite folk characters associated with kids' fairy tales.
A large number of Russian jokes begin with the words "The Armenian Radio was asked a question..." The answer from the Armenian Radio always turns out to be unexpected and discouraging.
Jokes set in the animal kingdom also feature characters rooted in old Slavic fairy tales, where animals are portrayed as sapient beings with a stereotypical behavior, such as the violent Wolf; the sneaky Fox; the cocky, cowardly Hare; the strong, simple-minded Bear; the multi-dimensional Hedgehog; and the Lion, king of the animal kingdom. In the Russian language all objects, animate and inanimate, have a (grammatical) gender – masculine, feminine, or neuter. The reader should assume that the Wolf, the Bear, the Hare, the Lion, and the Hedgehog are males, whereas the Fox (Vixen) is a female:
Animals in Russian jokes are and were very well aware of politics in the realm of humans:
Animal jokes are often fables, i.e. their punchline is (or eventually becomes) a kind of a maxim.
This joke is suggested to be an origin of the popular Russian saying "try to prove you are not a camel" in the sense "try to prove something to someone who doesn't want to listen", used in relation to violations of the presumption of innocence by Russian law enforcement agencies, or when someone has to fight the bureaucracy to get official papers proving that one has lost a leg or is even alive. The Hare and the joke itself were used to illustrate the hassles of a Soviet lishenets in a 1929 issue of a satirical magazine Chudak. Mikhail Melnichenko, in an article about Soviet political jokes, cites a 1926 private collection, which renders the joke in a more gruesome form, where the Hare is scared of the rumor that all camels are taken hostages by Cheka and shot (a reference to the Red Terror). Later Melnichenko in his book Coветский анекдот. Указатель сюжетов reports an earlier version, a record of a censored sketch of the comic duo Bim Bom. A similar parable was told by a 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi Jalal ad-Din Rumi, in which a person was scared to be taken for a donkey and skinned. Ben Lewis in his "Hammer & Tickle" cites yet another version: a flock of sheep seek refuge in Finland because Beria ordered an arrest of all elephants (an allusion to the sweeping national operations of the NKVD) and they have no chance to explain the difference to Beria. Lewis traces it to "a Persian poet in 12th-century Arabia, where it involves a fox running away from a royal ordinance that in theory applies only to donkeys."
Aside from mammals, a rather common non-human is the "Golden Fish", who asks the catcher to release her in exchange for three wishes. The first Russian instance of this appeared in Alexander Pushkin's The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish. In jokes, the Fisherman may be replaced by a representative of a nationality or ethnicity, and the third wish usually makes the punch line of the joke.
A similar type of joke involves a wish-granting Genie, the main difference being that in the case of the Golden Fish the Fisherman suffers from his own stupidity or greed, while the Genie is known for ingeniously twisting an interpretation of the wish to frustrate the grantee.
These often revolve around the supposition that the vast majority of Russian and Soviet militsioners (policemen, now called politzia) accept bribes. Also, they are not considered to be very bright.
Imperial Russia had been multi-ethnic for many centuries, and this situation continued throughout the Soviet period, and continues still. Throughout history, several ethnic stereotypes have developed, often in common with those views by other ethnicities (usually except for the ethnicity in question, but not always).
Chukchi (singular Chukcha), the native people of Chukotka, the most remote northeast corner of Russia, are a common minority targeted for generic ethnic jokes in Russia. They are depicted as primitive, uncivilized, and simple-minded, but clever in their own way. A propensity for saying odnako (Russian for "however", depending on context) is a staple of Chukcha jokes. The straight man part of Chukcha jokes is often a Russian geologist.
Chukchi do not miss their chance to offer a retort.
Chukchi, due to their innocence, often see the inner truth of situations.
Ukrainians are depicted as rustic, stingy, and inordinately fond of salted salo (pork back fat); their accent, which is imitated, is perceived as funny.
Ukrainians are perceived as having a grudge against Russians (derided as Moskali by Ukrainians).
Georgians are usually depicted as stupid, greedy, hot-blooded, or addicted to sex and sometimes all four. A very loud and theatrical Georgian accent, including grammatical errors considered typical of Georgians, and occasional Georgian words are considered funny to imitate in Russian and often becomes a joke in itself.
In some jokes, Georgians are portrayed as rich, because in Soviet times they were also perceived as profiting from black market businesses. There is a humorous expression deriving from the custom in police reports of referring to them as "persons of Caucasian ethnicity" (Russian: лицо кавказской национальности). Since the Russian word for "person" in the formal sense, (Russian: лицо), is the same as the word for "face", this allows a play on words about "faces of Caucasian ethnicity". In Russia itself, most people see "persons of Caucasian ethnicity" mostly at marketplaces selling fruits and flowers. Later on, many old jokes about rich Georgians were being recast in terms of "New Russians".
Estonians and Finns are depicted as humorless, stubborn, taciturn, and slow. The Estonian accent, especially its sing-song tune and the lack of genders in grammar, forms part of the humor. The Estonian common usage of long vowels and consonants both in speech and orthography (e.g. words such as Tallinn, Saaremaa) also led to the stereotype of being slow in speech, thinking, and action. In the everyday life, a person may be derisively called a "hot-headed Estonian fellow" (or in similar spirit, a "hot-tempered Finnish bloke", a phrase popularized by the 1995 Russian comedy Peculiarities of the National Hunt) to emphasize tardiness or lack of temperament. Indeed, Estonians play a similar role in Soviet humor to that of Finns in Scandinavian jokes.
Finnish political scientist Ilmari Susiluoto, also an author of three books on Russian humor, writes that Finns and Russians understand each other's humor. "Being included in a Russian anecdote is a privilege that Danes or Dutchmen have not attained. These nations are too boring and unvaried to rise into the consciousness of a large country. But the funny and slightly silly, stubborn Finns, the Chukhnas do."
Finns share with Chukchi their ability to withstand cold.
Jewish humor is a highly developed subset of Russian humor, largely based on the self-image of Russian Jews. The Jewish self-deprecating anecdotes are not the same as anti-Semitic jokes. Instead, whether told by Jews or non-Jewish Russians, these jokes show cynicism, self-irony, and wit that is characteristic of Jewish humor both in Russia and elsewhere in the world (see Jewish humor). The jokes are usually told with a characteristic Jewish accent (stretching out syllables, parodying the uvular trill of "R", etc.) and some peculiarities of sentence structure calqued into Russian from Yiddish. Many of these jokes are set in Odesa, and to some extent the phrase "Odesa humor" is synonymous with "Jewish jokes," even if the characters don't have Jewish names and even their religion/ethnicity is never mentioned.
During the 1967 Arab–Israeli War sympathies of the ordinary Soviet people were on the side of Israel despite Egypt under Nasser being officially a Soviet ally, "on the Socialist path of development".
The above joke is in part based on the common stereotype about Jews that they answer a question with a question.
Common jokes center on the enormous size of the Chinese population, the Chinese language and the perceptions of the Chinese as cunning, industrious, and hard-working. Other jokes revolve around the belief that the Chinese are capable of amazing feats by primitive means, such as the Great Leap Forward.
A good many of the jokes are puns based on the fact that a widespread Chinese syllable (written as hui in pinyin) looks very similar to the obscene Russian word for penis. For this reason, since about 1956 the Russian-Chinese dictionaries render the Russian transcription of this syllable as "хуэй" (huey) (which actually is closer to the correct Standard Chinese pronunciation). The most embarrassing case for the Chinese-Soviet friendship probably is the word "socialism" (社会主义; pinyin: shè huì zhǔ yì), rendered previously as шэ-хуй-чжу-и. The following humorous possibilities for the misunderstanding of the Chinese syllable hui are derived from Aarons's (2012) text:
Russians are a stereotype in Russian jokes themselves when set next to other stereotyped ethnicities. Thus, the Russian appearing in a triple joke with two Westerners, German, French, American or Englishman, will provide for a self-ironic punchline depicting himself as simple-minded and negligently careless but physically robust, which often ensures that he retains the upper hand over his less naive Western counterparts. Another common plot is a Russian participating in a contest with technologically-superior opponents (usually, an American and a German or a Japanese) and winning with sheer brute force or a clever trick.
"Vicious 90s" (ru:Лихие девяностые) refers to the period of transition from communism to "jungle capitalism" in the history of Russia, characterized by the rise of Russian oligarchs accompanied with the growing poverty of common people and banditism.
New Russians (Russian: новые русские, Novye Russkie, the nouveau-riche), a rich class of businessmen and gangsters in post-perestroika, were a very common category of characters in Russian jokes of the 1990s. A common theme is the interaction of a New Russian in his archetypal shiny black Mercedes S600, arguing with a regular Russian in his modest Soviet-era Zaporozhets after their vehicles collide. The New Russian is often a violent criminal or at least speaks criminal argot, with a number of neologisms (or common words with skewed meaning) typical among New Russians. In a way, these anecdotes are a continuation of the Soviet-era series about Georgians, who were then depicted as extremely wealthy. The physical stereotype of the New Russians is often that of overweight men with short haircuts, dressed in thick gold chains and crimson jackets, with their fingers in the horns gesture, cruising around in the "600 Merc" and showing off their wealth. Jokes about expensive foreign sports cars can be compared to German Manta jokes.
Like elsewhere in the world, a good many of jokes in Russia are based on puns. Other jokes depend on grammatical and linguistic oddities and irregularities in the Russian language:
A basically identical plot by Mikhail Zoshchenko involves yet another answer: after great care and multiple drafts to get the genitive case correct, including the substitution of "five штук (pieces)" for "five pokers", the response comes back: the warehouse has no kocherezhek (fully regular genitive plural of kocherezhka, "little poker").
The Russian word for "testicle" is a diminutive of "egg", so the slang word is the non-diminutive form (yaitso, cf. Spanish huevo). A large variety of jokes capitalize on this:
Some religious jokes make fun of the clergy. They tend to be told in quasi-Church Slavonic, with its archaisms and the stereotypical okanye (a clear pronunciation of the unstressed /o/ as [o]; Modern Russian or "Muscovite" speech reduces unstressed /o/ to [ɐ]). Clergymen in these jokes always bear obsolete names of distinctively Greek origin, and speak in a deep voice.
Other jokes touching on religion involve Heaven or Hell. They usually focus on the attempts to settle in Afterlife in a non-trivial way, or how different nationalities/professions/occupations are treated. Jokes about specific people going to Hell and receiving fitting punishment are common as well. Rarer variants include jokes about historic figures coming back from beyond to observe or settle issues of modern Russia.
In Russian military jokes, a praporschik (warrant officer) is an archetypal bully, possessed of limited wit.
A. Dmitriev illustrates his sociological essay "Army Humor" with a large number of military jokes, mostly of Russian origin.
There is an enormous number of one-liners, supposedly quoting a praporschik:
The punchline "from the fence to lunchtime" has become a well-known Russian cliché for an assignment with no defined ending (or for doing something forever).
Some of them are philosophical and apply not just to warrant officers:
A persistent theme in Russian military, police and law-enforcement-related jokes is the ongoing conflict between the representatives of the armed forces/law enforcement, and the "intelligentsia", i.e. well-educated members of society. Therefore, this theme is a satire of the image of military/law-enforcement officers and superiors as dumb and distrustful of "those educated smart-alecks":
Until shortly before perestroika, all fit male students of higher education had obligatory military ROTC courses from which they graduated as junior officers in the military reserve. A good many of military jokes originated there:
Sometimes, these silly statements can cross over, intentionally or unintentionally, into the realm of actual wit:
There are jokes about Russian nuclear missile forces and worldwide disasters because of lack of basic army discipline:
There is also eternal mutual disdain between servicemen and civilians:
Medical jokes are widespread. Often, they consist of a short dialogue of doctor or nurse with a patient:
The phrase "The doc said 'to the morgue' — to the morgue it is!" (Доктор сказал «в морг» — значит, в морг!) became a well-known Russian cliché, meaning that something must be done whether it makes sense or not.
The life of most Russian university students is characterized by many people coming from small towns and crowded into grim dormitories. State universities (the only type of universities in existence during Soviet times) are notable for not caring about the students' comfort or the quality of their food. Most jokes make fun of these "interesting" conditions, inventive evasion by students of their academic duties or lecture attendance, constant shortage of money, and sometimes the alcoholic tendencies of engineering students.
Also, there are a number of funny student obsessions such as zachyotka (a book of grade transcripts, carried by every student), khalyava (a chance of getting something (in this context, good or acceptable grades) without any effort), and getting a stipend for good grades. Jokes about student life (filled with relationships, alcohol, and a permanent lack of any money) are common.
A large number of jokes are about an exam: these are usually a dialogue between the professor and the student, based on a set of questions written on a bilet (a small sheet of paper, literally "ticket"), which the student draws at random in the exam room, and is given some time to prepare answers. Many jokes refer to students trying to pass an exam with little or no knowledge at all (khalyava as mentioned above).
Other jokes use the fact that many (or even most) students really study only when the exam is in the imminent future (in one or two days), otherwise spending time with more interesting activities such as parties.
Cowboy jokes are a series about a Wild West full of trigger-happy simple-minded cowboys, and the perception that everything is big in Texas. It is often difficult to guess whether these are imported or genuinely Russian inventions:
A joke making fun of American films and their pirated English-to-Russian dubbing:
There is a series of jokes set in mental hospitals, some of which have a political subtext:
A large number of jokes are about distrofiks, people with severe marasmus (termed "alimentary dystrophy" in Russian). The main themes are the extreme weakness, slowness, gauntness, and emaciation of a dystrophic patient. Some of the jibes originated in jokes about Gulag camps. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his Gulag Archipelago, wrote that dystrophy was a typical phase in the life of a Gulag inmate, and quotes the following joke:
The very use of obscene Russian vocabulary, called mat, can enhance the humorous effect of a joke by its emotional impact. Due to the somewhat different cultural attitude to obscene slang, such an effect is difficult to render in English. The taboo status often makes mat itself the subject of a joke. One typical plot goes as follows.
Another series of jokes exploits the richness of the mat vocabulary, which can give a substitute to a great many words of everyday conversation. Other languages often use profanity in a similar way (like the English fuck, for example), but the highly synthetic grammar of Russian provides for the unambiguity and the outstandingly great number of various derivations from a single mat root. Emil Draitser points out that linguists explain that the linguistic properties of the Russian language rich in affixes allows for expression of a wide variety of feelings and notions using only a few core mat words: