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But hold on, you say. There's a difference between late-night TV and a formal dinner pregnant with self-important dignitaries of the Washington press corps. Perhaps, but the point is there is a receptive constituency for this kind of bile. The organization had to have known what to expect from Wolf, and she admits she was just being herself that night. "If you've seen any of my comedy, you know that I don't -- I'm not (nice)," said Wolf. "I don't pull punches. I'm not afraid to talk about things."<ref>[https://www.thespectrum.com/story/opinion/2018/05/05/what-passes-liberal-humor-these-days/583878002/ Limbaugh: Sorry, Liberal Media, but You Own Michelle Wolf] by David Limbaugh, The Spectrum (part of the [[USA Today]] network), 2018</ref>}}
But hold on, you say. There's a difference between late-night TV and a formal dinner pregnant with self-important dignitaries of the Washington press corps. Perhaps, but the point is there is a receptive constituency for this kind of bile. The organization had to have known what to expect from Wolf, and she admits she was just being herself that night. "If you've seen any of my comedy, you know that I don't -- I'm not (nice)," said Wolf. "I don't pull punches. I'm not afraid to talk about things."<ref>[https://www.thespectrum.com/story/opinion/2018/05/05/what-passes-liberal-humor-these-days/583878002/ Limbaugh: Sorry, Liberal Media, but You Own Michelle Wolf] by David Limbaugh, The Spectrum (part of the [[USA Today]] network), 2018</ref>}}
== Soviet Union and the Department of Jokes ==
[[Image:Stalin-140508 27880t.jpg|right|235px|thumb|[[Joseph Stalin]], the Premier of the [[Soviet Union]] from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953, patronised the [[League of Militant Atheists]], whose chief aim, under the leadership of Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, was to propagate militant [[atheism]] and eradicate [[religion]].<ref name=Hesemann-Strieber>{{cite book|author=Michael Hesemann, Whitley Strieber|title=The Fatima Secret|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=tx-BEpkJBq8C&pg=PT107&dq=Joseph+Stalin+militant+atheism&hl=en&ei=-DeRTpLrJoPi0QHo88wi&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAzgK#v=onepage&q=Joseph%20Stalin%20militant%20atheism&f=false|quote=Lenin's death in 1924 was followed by the rise of Joseph Stalin, "the man of steel," who founded the "Union of Militant Atheists," whose chief aim was to spread atheism and eradicate religion. In the following years it devastated hundreds of churches, destroyed old icons and relics, and persecuted the clergy with unimaginable brutality.|publisher=Random House Digital, Inc.|date=2000|accessdate=9 October 2011}}</ref><ref name=Steeves>{{cite book|author=Paul D. Steeves|title=Keeping the faiths: religion and ideology in the Soviet Union|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=l7soAAAAYAAJ&q=%22When+a+priest+is+deprived+of+his+congregation,+that+does+not%22&dq=%22When+a+priest+is+deprived+of+his+congregation,+that+does+not%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_ijVUemwOoXRyQGqkICwBA&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAQ|quote=The League of Militant Atheists was formed in 1926 and by 1930 had recruited three million members. Five years later there were 50,000 local groups affiliated to the League and the nominal membership had risen to five million. Children from 8-14 years of age were enrolled in Groups of Godless Youth, and the League of Communist Youth (Komsomol) took a vigorous anti- religious line. Several antireligious museums were opened in former churches and a number of Chairs of Atheism were established in Soviet universities. Prizes were offered for the best 'Godless hymns' and for alternative versions of the Bible from which ... the leader of the League of Militant Atheists, Yemelian Yaroslavsky, said: "When a priest is deprived of his congregation, that does not mean that he stops being a priest. He changes into an itinerant priest. He travels around with his primitive tools in the villages, performs religious rites, reads prayers, baptizes children. Such wandering priests are at times more dangerous than those who carry on their work at a designated place of residence." The intensified persecution, which was a part of the general terror inflicted upon Soviet society by Stalin's policy, ...|publisher=Holmes & Meier|date=1989|accessdate=4 July 2013}}</ref>
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[[Dwight Eisenhower]] said that Joseph Stalin was humorless.<ref>''Presidential Anecdotes''
By Paul F. Boller, page 295.</ref>]]
The [[Soviet Union]] practiced [[state atheism]] and the atheism was of a [[militant atheism]] variety. See also: [[Soviet atheism]] and [[Atheism and communism]]
Listverse declares in its article ''10 Bizarre Ways The Soviet Union Controlled Its People''
{{Cquote|For comedians in the Soviet Union, every attempt at humor had to be read from a government-approved list of comedic material. Each year, comedians were required to submit every joke they’d written to a section of The Ministry of Culture called The Department of Jokes, and they couldn’t crack a single one until it had been approved.
Jokes against the state, of course, were forbidden, as was everything even remotely edgy. Even ''jokes against the United States had to be tame. When the list came back, comedians were usually left with just a handful of tame jokes about their mother-in-laws.
''
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>}}
== See also ==
== See also ==