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→Soviet Union and the Department of Jokes
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For the next year, they could only tell jokes from their approved list. Improvisation was strictly forbidden. The only way a comedian could keep an act fresh was to steal gags from the competition. Plagiarism was fine, as long as the material you stole was approved.<ref>[http://listverse.com/2016/11/13/10-bizarre-ways-the-soviet-union-controlled-its-people/ 10 Bizarre Ways The Soviet Union Controlled Its People]</ref>}}
For the next year, they could only tell jokes from their approved list. Improvisation was strictly forbidden. The only way a comedian could keep an act fresh was to steal gags from the competition. Plagiarism was fine, as long as the material you stole was approved.<ref>[http://listverse.com/2016/11/13/10-bizarre-ways-the-soviet-union-controlled-its-people/ 10 Bizarre Ways The Soviet Union Controlled Its People]</ref>}}
The website Open Culture was about the Department of Jokes:
{{Cquote|For example, about twenty minutes into his.. interview, Smirnoff discuss the serious subject of joke approval in the Soviet Union. That’s right, in all seriousness, he tells us, comics were required to submit their material to a Department of Jokes. Smirnoff also once spoke expansively on the subject in a 1985 Chicago Tribune piece on him at his peak.
Yep. There’s a Department of Jokes. Actually, the Ministry of Culture has a very big department of humor. I’m serious now. Once a year they censor your material, and then you have to stay with what they have approved. You can`t improvise or do anything like that. You write out your material and mail it to them, and they send it back to you with corrections. After that, you stay with it for a year.
It is perhaps for this reason that comics in Soviet Russia borrowed liberally from each other, rarely did original material, and never, ever improvised. Says Smirnoff: “I would do some original material, but that would be unusual. Also, it was OK for comedians to borrow—if one of the big comedians went on television and did a monolog, next day 10 or 20 other comedians would do the same thing in clubs. That wasn’t considered stealing.”<ref>[http://www.openculture.com/2013/12/yakov-smirnoff-remembers-the-soviet-department-of-jokes.html Yakov Smirnoff Remembers “The Soviet Department of Jokes” & Other Staples of Communist Comedy], Open Culture</ref>}}
=== Dwight Eisenhower said that Joseph Stalin was humorless ===
=== Dwight Eisenhower said that Joseph Stalin was humorless ===