During communism kids were expected to become responsible citizens and defenders of a communist system they couldn’t understand…\u00a0A terrifying system that sent our grandfathers in prison and took them everything\u2026 the land, the houses, everything they ever owned;\u00a0a system which sent them to the grave one way or they other; some lost their lives in prison or work camps because of the torture they had to go through;\u00a0those who survived died on what you call “bad heart”<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0They died because they remained true to themselves no matter what, for not giving up their principles, for not betraying their families or friends. They died for freedom. That was their way of opposing communism\u2026. Yet, Romanians also found a different way of opposing the system. Humor was their weapon.<\/p>\n “Communism is the only political system to have created its own international brand of comedy.” Ben Lewis<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Humor was a\u00a0way of rebellion and\u00a0survival at the same time; an escape of the mind and soul, a\u00a0way of\u00a0coping\u00a0with all those absurd and restrictions imposed by a communist regime who did not care about its own people.<\/p>\n Humor was a way of standing up or\u00a0fighting back, a form of active resistance against a criminal regime; at that time the\u00a0political jokes served as a catalyzer of the constant state of discontent Romanians felt towards the things they did not agree or even\u00a0hated\u2026 towards\u00a0what was happening with our country.<\/p>\n It came with a price\u2026 in some cases, you could even go to jail, if the wrong person heard you saying a political joke. People went to prison. Their families had to endure all forms of oppression. Phones were tapped. People were constantly\u00a0spied on. \u00a0Despite all these, political jokes were part of our daily lives. I remember I was hearing or telling them during the breaks in the courtyard of the school, although our parents had us promise not to share them publicly as it was dangerous. I also remember my dad covering the fixed line phone with pillows, so he and his friends can talk about the things you were not supposed to.<\/p>\n To anyone living in Western countries, enjoying a decent good life, learning\u00a0about the so-called socialism from the books, such a joke may not make them laugh. If you are one of them, it would be difficult to image that hot water was scheduled. Hot water\u00a0would ran on our taps few hours per week; sometimes, not at all. For those who lived it, it’s very different.<\/p>\n I once read that the nature of Ceausescu’s dictatorship forced Romanian society to create it own zone of informational oxygen. It still feels a correct and truthful insight of those days.\u00a0Rumors and political jokes built that zone we so much needed it. \u00a0All these political jokes came anonymously and contemporaneously, from the mouth of ordinary people.<\/p>\n Communist jokes encompassed almost every aspect of our lives, from the queues of people waiting to get some milk, meat and bananas (only in December), to Ceausescu and his family, communists leaders, to all sorts of events.<\/p>\n As Ben Lewis so well pointed out,<\/p>\n “the rulers of Communism were wicked and they hated many things – the bourgeois, the liberals, imperialists, free elections, wealthy farmers and Capitalists, but there was one thing they hated more than anything else and that was Communist jokes”.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Despite of the communist propaganda, secret control state agencies, these political jokes could not be controlled. They were told by ordinary people, whether drivers, professors or engineers, but what drove them nuts was that even Communist Party members or prot\u00e9g\u00e9es of the regime told them. Just by telling them, they all kept the laughter going and the rebellion spirit alive.<\/p>\n “Slowly but surely the jokes eroded the strength of the leaders of Communism. Then, one day, people had enough of joke-telling and they rose-up against their cruel rulers. Then leaders quickly admitted the jokers had been right all along and Communism ended”.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In august 1979, Calin Bogdan Stefanescu, a former member of the Communist Party endowed with all the skills of a statistician, decided to keep a very personal kind of journal or better said an accurate inventory of the communist jokes Romanian were creating each day. \u00a0As Stefanescu later confessed, his initiative was driven by a strong and personal motivation:\u00a0“I started \u00a0to perceive my collection of jokes as a way to justify myself in front of my children. I started to imagine my children asking me, ‘Dad, what did you do under Communism? Why didn’t you get out in the streets, why didn’t you do something?'”<\/em><\/p>\n After the fall of communism, Stefanescu published his collection of jokes in a book called “Ten Years of Black Humour in Romania.”<\/em> What stands out it’s not the impressive number of jokes his collected, 950 to be very specific,\u00a0but also the conclusions he reached by applying various complex statistical analysis:<\/p>\n Just like a meticulous archeologist taking down as many details as possible about the relics found on a site, Stefanescu calculated the velocity of a communist joke, making a clear connection between a social or political event and the number \u00a0of jokes appearing afterwards.<\/p>\nHumor as an act of rebellion<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nThe informational oxygen<\/h2>\n
10 years & 950 Romanian communist jokes<\/h2>\n
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