Book Talk • Authoritarian Laughter: Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania

In the Soviet Union official humor was a propaganda tool for instituting communist ideology and governing society. In the lecture, Professor Klumbyte will focus on the founding and institutionalization of the satire and humor magazine “Broom” that was at the center of the official humor culture in Soviet Lithuania. She argues that Soviet Lithuanian laughter was multidirectional, ideologically correct and oppositional. Paradoxically, while official humor institutions involved people in co-governance through the intimacy of laughter, they also created critical publics who shared dystopian visions of Soviet modernity via authoritarian state sponsored venues. The “Broom” itself became a forum for criticism that was mobilized in anti-Soviet revolutionary laughter in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Neringa Klumbyte is Professor of Anthropology and Russian and Post-Soviet Studies and Director of the Lithuania Program at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University. She is the author of Authoritarian Laughter: Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania (Cornell UP, 2022), the winner of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Women’s Forum prize. Her recent research has focused on state violence and political participation in totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, Holocaust and genocide, sovereignty, human rights, and historical justice.