Authoritarian Laughter : : Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania / / Neringa Klumbytė.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2022
• VerfasserIn: Klumbytė, Neringa,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (306 p.) :; 26 b&w halftones, 1 chart

Authoritarian Laughter 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. Neringa Klumbytė 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 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. Authoritarian Laughter 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Relevant Dates -- Note on Transliteration -- Introduction: Authoritarian Laughter -- 1. Banality of Soviet Power -- 2. Political Intimacy -- 3. The Soviet Predicament -- 4. Censorial Indistinction -- 5. Political Aesthetics -- 6. Multidirectional Laughter -- 7. Satirical Justice -- 8. Soviet Dystopia -- Post Scriptum: Revolution and Postauthoritarian Laughter -- Conclusion: Lost Laughter and Authoritarian Stigma -- Notes -- References -- Index