Russian jokes
Poruchik (Lieutenant) Dmitry Rzhevsky of the jokes is a cavalry (Hussar) officer, a straightforward, unsophisticated, and innocently rude military type whose rank and standing nevertheless gain him entrance into high society.
[6] The following example explains Vladimir Putin's remark about "Comrade Wolf", describing the policies of the United States, that many non-Russians found cryptic.
Vasily Ivanovich Chapayev, a Red Army hero of the Russian Civil War, in the rank of Division Commander, was featured in a 1934 biopic.
Chapayev is usually accompanied by his aide-de-camp Petka (Петька, "Pete"), as well as Anka the Machine-Gunner (Анка-пулемётчица), and political commissar Furmanov, all based on real people.
)[11] A number of jokes involve characters from the short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about the private detective Sherlock Holmes and his friend Doctor Watson.
The standard plot of these jokes is a short dialog where Watson naïvely wonders about something, and Holmes finds a "logical" explanation to the phenomenon in question.
Occasionally the jokes also include other characters – Mrs Hudson, the landlady of Holmes's residence on Baker Street; or Sir Henry and his butler Barrymore from The Hound of the Baskervilles; or the detective's nemesis Professor Moriarty.
Some older jokes involve Fantômas, a fictional criminal and master of disguise from the French detective series, a character once widely popular in the USSR.
Указатель сюжетов reports an earlier version, a record of a censored sketch of the comic duo Bim Bom.
A similar parable was told by a 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi Jalal ad-Din Rumi, in which a person was scared to be taken for a donkey and skinned.
Lewis traces it to "a Persian poet in 12th-century Arabia, where it involves a fox running away from a royal ordinance that in theory applies only to donkeys.
These often revolve around the supposition that the vast majority of Russian and Soviet militsioners (policemen, now called politzia) accept bribes.
Ukrainians are depicted as rustic, stingy, and inordinately fond of salted salo (pork back fat); their accent, which is imitated, is perceived as funny.
There is a humorous expression deriving from the custom in police reports of referring to them as "persons of Caucasian ethnicity" (Russian: лицо кавказской национальности).
In the everyday life, a person may be derisively called a "hot-headed Estonian fellow" (or in similar spirit, a "hot-tempered Finnish bloke", a phrase popularized by the 1995 Russian comedy Peculiarities of the National Hunt) to emphasize tardiness or lack of temperament.
A good many of the jokes are puns based on the fact that a widespread Chinese syllable (written as hui in pinyin) looks very similar to the obscene Russian word for penis.
For this reason, since about 1956 the Russian-Chinese dictionaries render the Russian transcription of this syllable as "хуэй" (huey) (which actually is closer to the correct Standard Chinese pronunciation).
The most embarrassing case for the Chinese-Soviet friendship probably is the word "socialism" (社会主义; pinyin: shè huì zhǔ yì), rendered previously as шэ-хуй-чжу-и.
Another common plot is a Russian participating in a contest with technologically-superior opponents (usually, an American and a German or a Japanese) and winning with sheer brute force or a clever trick.
"Vicious 90s" (ru:Лихие девяностые) refers to the period of transition from communism to "jungle capitalism" in the history of Russia, characterized by the rise of Russian oligarchs accompanied with the growing poverty of common people and banditism.
The physical stereotype of the New Russians is often that of overweight men with short haircuts, dressed in thick gold chains and crimson jackets, with their fingers in the horns gesture, cruising around in the "600 Merc" and showing off their wealth.
Other jokes depend on grammatical and linguistic oddities and irregularities in the Russian language: A basically identical plot by Mikhail Zoshchenko involves yet another answer: after great care and multiple drafts to get the genitive case correct, including the substitution of "five штук (pieces)" for "five pokers", the response comes back: the warehouse has no kocherezhek (fully regular genitive plural of kocherezhka, "little poker").
Rarer variants include jokes about historic figures coming back from beyond to observe or settle issues of modern Russia.
A. Dmitriev illustrates his sociological essay "Army Humor" with a large number of military jokes, mostly of Russian origin.
[27] There is an enormous number of one-liners, supposedly quoting a praporschik: The punchline "from the fence to lunchtime" has become a well-known Russian cliché for an assignment with no defined ending (or for doing something forever).
Some of them are philosophical and apply not just to warrant officers: A persistent theme in Russian military, police and law-enforcement-related jokes is the ongoing conflict between the representatives of the armed forces/law enforcement, and the "intelligentsia", i.e. well-educated members of society.
The life of most Russian university students is characterized by many people coming from small towns and crowded into grim dormitories.
Other jokes use the fact that many (or even most) students really study only when the exam is in the imminent future (in one or two days), otherwise spending time with more interesting activities such as parties.
Other languages often use profanity in a similar way (like the English fuck, for example), but the highly synthetic grammar of Russian provides for the unambiguity and the outstandingly great number of various derivations from a single mat root.
