Lviv, Ukraine — Some news is so harsh and ridiculous that it sounds like it was imagined in the distorted imagination of a boring satirist. Like the Belarusian headline a few weeks ago, it reports that grade 10 was taught how to use a shovel to aim a rifle.
“What do you think about that?” Ask comedian Vadym Dziunko.
Dziunko is on stage with two other comedians and a famous singer. Everyone sits down and has a mic, trying to find humor in one place, trying to beat something interesting with a stunning margin in a tragic moment.
It’s a recent Saturday night at the cult comedy hall, a comedy club in downtown Lviv near the relatively peaceful western border of Ukraine. About 100 people spend about $ 13 per person eating, drinking, and listening to comics that riff what comes to mind, often the latest news about the war with Russia. Or, for this shovel business as a rifle, the topic is the strangeness of life in Belarus, a dictatorship just 150 miles north.
“What do you expect from a country where potatoes are a weapon?” Says comedian Oleksandr Dmytrovych. Then he imagines an instructor and gives hints to the children.
“‘I can’t give you a rifle yet ——’
“‘Because we only have one'” ends the third comic, Maksym Kravets.
This is a cultural defense, an unscripted, free-flowing humor evening performed in Lviv every few nights. Two weeks after the Russian invasion, when Ukrainian intelligence officer and comedian Kravets during the day called show co-creator Bodan Srepkra and pointed out that the cult comedy hall was in the basement. It started in.
“I said,’As you know, the place is a bomb shelter,'” recalled the strong, bearded 42-year-old Kravets.
Kravets and Dmytrovych, wearing T-shirts with “Wildness,” sat in another room in the club after a recent show. Initially, they said they weren’t convinced that everyone in the country was in the mood for laughter. After that, the impact of the aggression was fresh, with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants flowing into the city from the eastern part of the country.
“Before the first show, we thought it might not be the right time for comedy,” said Dmytrovych, a bearded man at the age of 30. (“Without the beard, we are ugly,” he explained.)
“We were surprised,” he continued. “But after the first show, we came to this room and sat down and realized that people wanted to laugh. They want to hear jokes about our enemies. From the first night, I realized that this would be bigger than we expected. “
There is just one international breakout star in the Ukrainian comedy, who happens to be the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. If this puts pressure on others in the business, no one seems particularly forced to land on the punch line on this Saturday stage, and singer Mykhailo Khoma rumors about his childhood. Spent a lot of time on.
Ukraine has long had a discreet live comedy scene, but anyone accustomed to the standard setup of American clubs will find novelty in the form of a show. There is no warm-up act and no one is standing alone on the stage. There are different guests every night. The night begins with four men leading a noisy call and response in Ukrainian, as well as the rest of the show.
Organizer: “Glory to the country!”
Audience: “Death to the enemy!”
Organizer: “Ukraine!”
Audience: “more than anything”
Organizer: “Putin!”
Audience: Putdown that cannot be printed!
After that, the star sits down and starts talking.
Some of the humor is self-deprecating. At the previous show — They are all available on YouTube — Dmytrovych riffed on the news that Ukrainian soldiers had mastered a “disposable” anti-tank missile called the NLAW. This was surprising, he said, as Ukrainians are essentially and inevitably accustomed to reusing everything over and over again.
“I wore slippers at a hotel in Egypt a year and a half ago, and I still wear them,” he said. “I washed it when it got dirty. When it fell apart in the washing machine, I glued it. Now these are the slippers I give to my guests.”
There are many jokes at the expense of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is despised as a ferocious idiot who underestimates the Ukrainian spirit and determination. On the other hand, the Russian army is largely spared. The point Dmytrovych explained is not to downplay the invading forces that the Ukrainians consider to be horrific and horrifying. It is to raise the spirit of those who are not on the front line, or who once lived near the front line and may have subsequently relocated.
So at one show, Clavet praised the surprisingly sophisticated beauty of Lviv’s checkpoint (“I’m not surprised to offer a latte”). Some of them have very long columns. (“At first I thought they would receive my order and finally I would be given a Big Mac.”)
Domestic affairs is a recurring theme. During the show a few weeks ago, a poll found that 90 percent of Ukrainians wanted to join the European Union was cited.
How the Ukrainian War Affects the Cultural World
“What do you do first when we join the European Union?” Asked a guest on stage.
“Look for the 10 percent who didn’t want to join the European Union,” Dmytrovych stalled. “Who are these people?”
The show also serves as a fundraiser for Ukraine’s war effort. All performances will be streamed live on YouTube and viewers can send donations online. Throughout the night, behind-the-scenes hosts share some details of the larger donations, along with a message to the performers. This Saturday night, a donor stabbed the host because of a lack of jokes.
The evening goal was to raise enough money to buy a car for the border guard. By the time the spectators returned home, the goal was almost achieved about an hour before the war curfew. With over 50 shows, Cultural Defense has raised nearly $ 70,000.
The audience for these shows is young and distorted, mostly in the range of 20-35 years. For those who want to sample the cult menu, there is a row of seats near the stage and a table at the back. Offering sushiIncludes rolls and grips. In a brief interview before the show, some spectators said the melancholy news onslaught made laughter essential.
“I think it’s one-to-three,” said Petro Diavoliuk, who was drinking and eating with friends. “All money is sent to the army and people are cheaper than relaxing and shrinking.”
But here too, reality is invading. Minutes before the final applause this Saturday night, many mobile phones began ringing classic air raid sirens at the same time. .. Everyone checked their phones and opened an app (several available) to track government warnings about missile strikes.
“Warning! Air Alarm!” For civil defense, read both Ukrainian and English texts on a Telegram channel called NotificationsCD.
No one seemed to be worried from a distance, and the flow of chatter on the stage didn’t stop for a moment. Air alerts occur quite often in Lviv. There were 10 during the Cultural Defense Show. And anyway, the place is a certified bomb shelter. If there is a real danger, this would be a good place to wait for it.
About an hour later, well after the show ended, I got a second message saying “Air alarm has stopped”.
In a post-show interview, both comedians said they hoped the war would end by the fall, for purely career-oriented reasons. They have several corporate gigs lined up in other countries, and men are forbidden to leave the country as long as hostilities intensify.
This was a joke. Ukrainian humor is a prayer for normality as well as a form of resistance. It is also somehow uniquely enhanced. As Dmytrovych said, “As long as we are laughing, we are not giving up.”
