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Authoritarian Laughter: Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania

Online ISBN:
9781501766701
Print ISBN:
9781501766688
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

Authoritarian Laughter: Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania

Neringa Klumbyte
Neringa Klumbyte
Miami University
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Published online:
18 May 2023
Published in print:
15 December 2022
Online ISBN:
9781501766701
Print ISBN:
9781501766688
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

This book explores the political history of the satire and humor magazine Broom published in Soviet Lithuania. Artists, writers, and journalists were required to create state-sponsored Soviet humor and serve the Communist Party after Lithuania was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. The book investigates official attempts to shape citizens into Soviet subjects and engage them through a culture of popular humor. Broom was multidirectional—it both facilitated Communist Party agendas and expressed opposition toward the Soviet regime. Official satire and humor in Soviet Lithuania increasingly created Soviet dystopian visions of Soviet modernity and were a forum for critical ideas and nationalist sentiments that were mobilized in anti-Soviet revolutionary laughter in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The book illustrates that Soviet Western peripheries were unstable and their governance was limited. While authoritarian states engage in a statecraft of the everyday and seek to engineer intimate lives, authoritarianism is defied not only in revolutions, but in the many stories people tell each other about themselves in jokes, cartoons, and satires.

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