- published: 05 Sep 2015
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Russian jokes (Russian: анекдо́ты (transcribed anekdoty), literally anecdotes), the most popular form of Russian humour, are short fictional stories or dialogues with a punch line.
Russian joke culture includes a series of categories with fixed and highly familiar settings and characters. Surprising effects are achieved by an endless variety of plots. Russian jokes are on topics found everywhere in the world, be it sex, politics, spouse relations, or mothers-in-law. This article discusses Russian joke subjects that are particular to Russian or Soviet culture.
Every category has a host of untranslatable jokes that rely on linguistic puns, wordplay, and Russian's vocabulary of foul language. Below, (L) marks jokes whose humor value critically depends on untranslatable features of the Russian language.
A huge category is Russian political jokes.
Standartenführer Stierlitz, alias Colonel Isayev is a character from the Soviet TV series Seventeen Moments of Spring («Семнадцать мгновений весны», based on a novel by Yulian Semyonov) played by the popular actor Vyacheslav Tikhonov about a fictional Soviet intelligence officer who infiltrates Nazi Germany. Stierlitz interacts with Nazi officials Walther Schellenberg, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Müller. In the jokes he interacts with them as well as with fictional female radio operator Kat, Pastor Schlagg, Professor Pleischner and other characters in the series. Usually two-liners spoofing the solemn style of the original voice-overs, the plot is resolved in grotesque plays on words or in dumb parodies of overly smart narrow escapes and superlogical trains of thought of the "original" Stierlitz.