Reflecting on “Red Laughter”: English-Language Studies of Soviet Comedy

Abstract

In this article, I address foreign English-language works on Soviet film comedy, tracing the waves of researchers’ interest to it, and identifying the time periods as well as film directors attracting scholars most often. The first surge of interest in Soviet film comedy came in the first half of the 1990s and was largely associated with the fall of the Iron Curtain. The major subject of research during those years were Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, musical comedies of the 1930s, and films of the Perestroika period. The second wave came in the 2010s with the emigration of a large number of Russian scholars who had personally witnessed the Soviet Union. Thanks to them, the range of the studied material has significantly expanded through the analysis of film comedies of the 1960s and 1970s. The main thematic directions and topics in the study of the comedy genre are structured in accordance with the history of film timeline. Soviet comedies of the 1920s–1930s are of specific interest to foreign researchers in terms of the ideological regulation of art, as well as in terms of how the mythology of the new socialist society was formed, and how Soviet filmmakers adapted or rejected Western standards. In the comedies of the 1960s and 1970s, scholars analyze the discordance between declared and unspoken humor and study the Aesopian language of famous comedy film directors (Ryazanov and Gaidai above all). Finally, in late-Soviet films, researchers note the growth of absurdist motifs as a sign of a complete and no longer hidden disillusionment with communist ideals.