Hammer & Tickle

Lewis says that an eighth of the people in the gulag were there for ‘telling anecdotes’, a figure that he finds small but I thought sizeable enough. The joke about the notorious White Sea canal project, built by prison labour, goes as follows:

Who built the White Sea canal?

The right bank was dug by those who told jokes…

And the left bank?

By those who listened.

The point of punishing joke-tellers was to demonstrate that the state would tolerate not the smallest or most casual expression of dissent, as Roy Medvedev tells Lewis. There’s a joke about that as well:

What is the difference between Stalin and Roosevelt?

Roosevelt collects the jokes that people tell about him, and Stalin collects the people that tell jokes about show more him.

More here: http://aroundtheedges.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/the-seven-wonders-of-communism/ show less

I think Ben Lewis's research methods and conclusions were interesting and insightful. The book is primarily a narrative of his research process, which can be slow at moments but gives credibility to his ideas. He skillfully blends jokes into the story. I learned a lot about the people who lived under the USSR by reading the jokes, and I laughed.

An interesting premise, and one that works fine when Lewis is capable of sitting back and letting the jokes and the people telling them do the talking. The problems arise from his constant need to insert himself and his presupposed conclusions into the narrative, alienating his interview subjects and leaving the reader to wonder just how much better the book might have been had it had a less opinionated interviewer as an author.

Jokes are nostalgic, the narrative is boring although seems quite authentic.

Good jokes, repeated and repeated, with clumsy prose