Introduction: The Amusing Disturbance of Soviet Laughter

Ioffe, Dennis; Oushakine, Serguei Alex.

doi:10.1016/j.ruslit.2013.10.001

Cited by 14 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Indeed, it performatively expressed a form of political detachment; it eschewed the binaries of political discourse and stepped outside the political frame to express irony about the whole terrain and did not articulate opposition to the state (Yurchak 2006; 2011). In fact, stiob , like other Soviet comic practices, expressed relations of what Neringa Klumbytė terms “political intimacy” between the state socialist regime's representatives and their subjects (2014); this “multidirectional laughter” accomplished different things for different audiences (Klumbytė 2022; Ioffe and Oushakine 2013). This changed in the post‐Soviet period.…”

Section: Stiob and Its Postsocialist Mutations: An Ethnographic‐histo...mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Satirical strikes and deadpanning diplomats: Stiob as geopolitical performance in Russia–US relations

Hemment

2022

PoLAR

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines humor as geopolitical performance in the context of Russia–US political communication. Humor has featured prominently in the mass‐mediated performances of Russian state actors since 2012. Public officials such as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have engaged in ambiguous play and satirical borrowings via the circulation of memes and other political theatrics. “Russiagate”—the scandal about Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election—proved to be a particular flashpoint. I draw on recent scholarship in anthropology and media studies as well as prior ethnographic work to account for these humorous performances and consider the work that they do. Dominant analyses view this humor in militarized terms, regarding it as part of a deliberate “hybrid war” strategy. I contend that deadpanning diplomats like Lavrov are produced when a transformed Soviet‐era humorous form, stiob, intersects with a hybridized and transnationally dialogic global media context, resulting in a volatile form of geopolitical communication. In taking this state propagated humor and the confusion it generates as ethnographic objects, I contribute to anthropological interrogations of the politics of post‐truth.

show abstract

Section: Stiob and Its Postsocialist Mutations: An Ethnographic‐histo...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…99There is nothing new here; as Slavoj Žižek notes, laughter and irony are “part of the game” in democratic and totalitarian societies alike (cited in Ioffe and Oushakine 2013, 2).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%