I think they actually did! I took a class with the Soviet historian once back during my masters… he was there in the 1970s for an extended period doing research, and he told us a story of being on a bus, and his friend told him a joke along the lines of “in America it’s dog eat dog, in Soviet Union it’s exactly the opposite…” or some such!
18 Likes
There was this classical joke, sorry if I butcher it, I heard it second hand from bulgarian to french to spanish and retranslating:
A judge comes out laughing his ass off and a friend ask him.
– Nikolai, is been a while since I’ve seen you in such high spirits, has something good happened to you?
– The judge replies - Ah Petrov, I’ve just heard the most funny joke.
– His friend asks: Well, tell it to me then!
– I can’t. I just sent someone to prison for ten years for that!
19 Likes
That’s like people who are purposefully messy in retail stores and restaurants. Because its someone’s job to pick up after them, so them being messy is good in their mind. I don’t want to go somewhere and make someone’s job worse or harder, every crappy job i had i really cared about giving good service and having to spend time doing bullshit things really sucked. That and having shitty bosses but i could do a TED talk on bad bosses alone.
19 Likes
I don’t know if this was originally a Soviet joke. In the book Contact by Carl Sagan (1986-ish), a Russian character with a sense of humour occasionally wears a badge that says “Pray for sex”. When asked about it, he says “In your country, this is offensive for one reason. In my country, it’s offensive for two.”
12 Likes
Well it was told to me in Bulgaria, in 1989, via a french translator, via my mother, who understood French. And it took me a while to fully understand it because I was 9 at the time 
I mean, maybe they read Sagan… Or maybe Sagan knew soviet humor. Also Soviet humor = telling this joke to a 9 year old 
8 Likes
Along the lines of Soviet jokes, this was told to me by a Polish colleague:
Q: Poland is invaded simultaneously by Germans from the west and Russians from the east. Whom do you shoot at first?
A: Of course you shoot at the Germans first. Business before pleasure.
13 Likes
Little Boxes first two verses:
Little boxes, on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
Little boxes, little boxes
Little boxes, all the same
There’s a green one, and a pink one
And a blue one, and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same
21 Likes
Thanks for reminding me of that song. I then listened to my favorite cover of it.
14 Likes
What is very strange is I was reciting those lyrics to myself two days ago. Except I get the first verse’s lyrics wrong:
See the boxes, little boxes, see the boxes on the hillside
Little boxes, little boxes, all lined up in a row.
There’s some green ones, and some pink ones
And some blue ones, and some yellow ones
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.
11 Likes
There is a four-panel cartoon from 2016 that I have been looking for for the past 2 weeks.
It’s a weightlifting competition between a young WOC and a large Nazi-guy.
He says: “So if you win, I promise to treat you like a human being.
She says: “And if you win you promise to kill my entire family?”
He says: “Yes.”
She says: “Excuse me.”
She goes out of the frame and comes back with a sledgehammer and whacks him on the leg.
He is writhing in pain, the audience boos, and she has a pithy observation about evening the playing field, or something like that.
Does anyone remember that and where it came from?
10 Likes
When Weeds was still on Showtime, every time my wife and I would go visit my sister in Temecula (which sure looks a lot like Stevenson Ranch, where the first two seasons were filmed), she would begin singing the song as we turned into my sister’s neighborhood, with a wee bit of editorializing:
“There’s a beige one, and a beige one, and a beige one, and another beige one…”
20 Likes
Nailed it.
During the American midcentury economic expansion, having a job meant being middle class. Now, even having a good job still means you’re one catastrophe from homelessness and young people with good jobs can’t afford to buy a home the way that anyone with almost any job could back in the 50s-80s (aside from particularly nasty practices like redlining).
15 Likes