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Join us for a Meet VCU Authors event with Austin Garey, Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Focused Inquiry at VCU, and author of "Leagues of Laughter: War, Comedy and the Soviet Legacy in Russia and Ukraine."

Description

"Leagues of Laughter: War, Comedy and the Soviet Legacy in Russia and Ukraine" (University College London Press, 2025) outlines how Soviet censorship, the fall of the USSR, and war have changed student comedy in the region. Millions of students across the former Soviet Union compete in team comedy leagues, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself gained fame through the activity. Before his election to the presidency in 2019, Zelenskyy had no political experience, made few campaign appearances, and announced his candidacy only four months before the elections — and he won in a landslide. Zelensky didn’t have to campaign because everyone already knew who he was. This comedy game, called KVN (Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh, or Club of the Cheerful and Clever), became a sensation in universities across the USSR in the 1960s, and it remained entrenched in educational establishments even after the fall of the Soviet Union. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Russia and Ukraine between 2015 and 2019, Garey examines how international pressures and locally-held values interacted to reproduce comedy tradition in two nation states on divergent post-Soviet trajectories. A series of interconnected, cross-border stories spanning 60 years illustrates how laughter and oppression entwined in the long cultural context of the war in Ukraine.

About the Speaker

A. Austin Garey is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Focused Inquiry at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research examines interactions between institutional practices and moral assumptions in post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine. She earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and has published on issues of semiotics and cultural reproduction in the Journal of Childhood, Education, and Society, the edited collection Soviet Policies on Gender, Education and Culture, and Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Science.