Weaponizing humor against authoritarianism in exile

Today on State of the World Cbating Russian authoritarianism with comedy Listening to State of the world for MPR. bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening Dixon There's a well known Russian fairy tale about a princess who never smiled Her father the King says anyone who can make her smile can marry her and spoiler alert, it's a humble worker that succeeds. A Russian journalist now living in exile has come up with a comedy routine that uses the fairy tale's premise as the basis for his act. It's called the Rem that never smmiled As NPR's Michelle Kellan tells us, it has Russian speaking audiences laughing at their own history Vladimir Ryjevsky has been thinking a lot about his birthplace and laughing about it. There is this enormous empire. And it never smiled on. itself and we started making a show about the country that is not used to smile as itself His standu routine is all in Russian, and at this show in the Washington DC suburbs, he incorporates a lot of research. He tells NPR that he's been digging into stories from the csarist era, the Soviet era, and Vladimir Putin's Russia I was always looking at this history Full of this inflated figures, full of this people who thought they were great, but they were not. this ridiculous documents, ridiculous orders I was just looking at it and like asking why nobody looks at it as at a comedy Take Tsar Paul I, the son of Catherine the Great, who waited for years to ascend the throne in the late eighteenth century. Ryevsky calls him a one man legislative fire hose because he knew he had little time to rule over the Russian emmpire He decided that every word of his is now in law. So he stumbled at the ball, dancing ws And he bent the Wes the next day. The next order was to ban shoelaces, which may have caused the csar to stumble. The forty year old Revsky was also fascinated by Ivan the Terrible, who wrote letters to Queen Elizabeth I to try to form a military alliance. Since Reyvsky now lives in London, he went to the archives to pick them up and read them The way he writes her is hilarious. What was so funny about them? Because he was approaching her like on a don app His jokes mix modern day references to Russian history, and that was a highlight for Rustisloav Semenka, who met NPR producer Daniel Offman after the show. Semenka calls it an intergenerational show, though he says an older gentleman next to him didn't seem to understand some of the modern references. And I was quite sure that he got some of the USSR jokes that I did not understand And at the same time, we both like laughed a lot. I came away with like a really amazing impression of what he wass able to tie together so many different things. Also in the audience was Olga Nekrasv, who says she's been following Ryevsky on Instagram. She says Russians need humor more than ever. I'm glad we still look can laugh. This is what will save us probably, although it's harder and harder every day to laugh hard because of Russia's war in Ukraine, the war that prompted Vladimir Ryjevsky to go into exile. He says it was impossible to work as a journalist in Putin's Russia. And in a way, poking fun at history is a way to counter Putinism Putin has weaponized Russia with history. greatreat in this myth Again, grand and serious and I think we have to weaponize ourselves He doesn't target average Russians for these jokes, but rather figures like Joseph Stalin, who's revered in patriotic Russian histories for winning World War two, but who also oversaw the great terror in the Soviet Union and a force famine in Ukraine. Byevsky paints Stalin as a nervous micromanager who hand wrote instructions to the authors of his biography I found a little comment written by Stalin So he devisices his authors to insert a phrase that Stalin never had any trace of self admiration or vanity. This is the kind of show that Reyevsky can only do in exile. He can't return to a country that has labeled him a foreign agent for his past reporting. But he's getting an online following and hopes Russians inside the country can eventually watch his show on YouTube, the show that's based on the old fairy tale, The Princess Whever Smiled Whenever we teach ourselves to be self ironic, to laugh at ourselves and to laugh at our history Mbe That will be the time for change for Russia And maybe that will be the end of the fairy tale. A happy ending, he hopes. With reporting from NPR's Daniel Offman, I'm Michelle Kelliman in Washington. That's the state of the world for NPL. Thanks for listening.