In his original new study, Seth Graham analyzes a rich and forgotten vein of humor in an otherwise bleak environment. The late Soviet period (1961 1986) hardly seems fertile ground for humor, but Russian jokes ("anekdoty") about life in the Soviet Union were ubiquitous. The cultural and political relaxation in the decade following Stalin s death produced considerable optimism among Soviet citizens. The "anekdot" exploited and exposed what Graham calls "Soviet diglossia" (official Sovietese vs. Russian everyday language) and emphasized the distance between official myths and quotidian...