“It sucks that so many of us have to live in evacuation with our parents,” Anna Kochehura told the crowd around me. “It’s like being a teenager again: Your mom keeps asking you to clean your room. You never know when a Russian rocket is going to hit your apartment nowadays. Do you really want the whole world to see your mess?”
I burst into laughter. So did the people next to me, and everyone else too. For a moment, I forgot about fear. Surrounded by so many young Ukrainians, all of us laughing in spite of all we have seen, all we have gone through, I felt powerful.
…
I think there are two types of people in the world. There are those who cry after falling, and those who pick themselves up and laugh. We Ukrainians are the second type. Our sense of humor is special. We elected a comedian to be our president, after all.
But our sense of humor is dark—it has to be, given what we’ve been through. We laugh when Russian soldiers accidentally detonate their own mines. We laugh at Chechen fighters filming TikToks in our destroyed city of Mariupol, only to be killed by Ukrainian snipers. We laugh at Russian propaganda that claims we train birds to identify Russians and infect them with diseases we’ve created in our U.S.-sponsored biolabs. “Ukrainian soldiers say the Russian invaders are brainless,” Sviat Zagaikevich, another comedian who performed on the night I went to the comedy club, said, “because a bullet goes in one ear, and comes out the other.”
In fact, to some degree, our sense of humor has always been dark. Eneida, an 18th-century poem by the Ukrainian writer Ivan Kotliarevsky, which parodies Virgil’s Aeneid…
…
Our country now sells stamps emblazoned with the words russian warship, go fuck yourself, commemorating our troops’ incredible response to the invaders.
Our national Twitter account jokingly captionsa photograph of our prime minister standing alongside the president of the European Council—two men who look startlingly alike—with “Our PM on the right.” When the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, the Moskva, was sunk after sustaining damage from Ukrainian forces, our defense minister tweeted a photo of himself diving, along with the text “We have one more diving spot in the Black Sea now.”
How can you not laugh, especially when Russian propaganda is so absurd? When the Moskva sank, the country at first denied that anything had happened, then claimed that the warship had not sunk, that it had suffered a localized fire yet “retained buoyancy.” Even when Russia acknowledged the truth, it insisted that the sinking had been caused by a fire, and then a storm. …
Or what about the reported Ukrainian attacks against Russian territory? Moscow cannot officially blame us, given that it claims to have destroyed our aerial capabilities, so instead, Russian outlets describe explosions caused by our rockets and helicopters as loud bangs of unknown origin. (“Russian propagandists are stealing my job,” Kochehura joked to me. “After five years in stand-up comedy, I still can’t make up such funny shit.”)
This guy id totally onto something! Ukrainians have the perfect straight man for comedy in Rooski. Hell, I joke about them. True story: I subscribed to a weekly English version of Pravda during Soviet Union days because its propaganda was so funny.
All of the comedians I watched that night, and all those I’ve spoken with since the invasion, told me about the cathartic effect of comedy, of laughter, in such depressing times. “A stand-up night in a basement is a good way to get people to ignore air-raid sirens…
“Ukraine is the best place to be a comedian nowadays,” he said during another bomb-shelter stand-up gig. “Your career can rise very high. If you are a good comedian in the U.S., you can have a late-night show. If you are a good comedian in Ukraine, you can destroy Russia.”
All of the comedians I watched that night, and all those I’ve spoken with since the invasion, told me about the cathartic effect of comedy, of laughter, in such depressing times. “A stand-up night in a basement is a good way to get people to ignore air-raid sirens…
“Ukraine is the best place to be a comedian nowadays,” he said during another bomb-shelter stand-up gig. “Your career can rise very high. If you are a good comedian in the U.S., you can have a late-night show. If you are a good comedian in Ukraine, you can destroy Russia.”
