Laughing all the way to the Gulag

THE FIRST communist joke I heard as a postgraduate in Moscow in the Sixties was: "How do you catch a lion? Easy: you catch a rabbit and beat it till it confesses to being a lion." I have heard hundreds since, but never thought to give them the analytical attention Ben Lewis does in his grimly entertaining and thoughtful study. There are not many books where you can shout with laughter one moment and relapse into morose reflection the next.

This is no mere compendium. In preparing a BBC4 documentary on the subject Lewis travelled throughout the Eastern Bloc in search of material, sketching in the history of communism and ruminating on the place of humour in totalitarian regimes as he went.

There are post-modern touches — several pages record discussions with his German girlfriend, an artist earnestly nostalgic for the Honecker era, as she puts her new show of painted-over communist propaganda together — but Lewis keeps his feet on the ground. He is right to argue that not all those who told jokes were anti-communist; many were just grumbling about shortages and public lies. Yet Russians didn't make fun about prison camps from light-mindedness but from fear or horror: everyone knew some of 20 million or so who had been tortured, starved and killed in them.

Beneath it all there was a sense of submission and resignation bred by centuries of serfdom and repression. Under the communists, political humour became not just an outlet for frustration but a popular art form: a kind of verbal graffiti, except that the grievances were personal and nobody bought your work.

The Russian surreal tradition of Gogol and Bulgakov was alive and well in many of these jokes, notably my favourite. A (true-life) Party boss and obsessive anti-Semite is appointed Soviet ambassador to China. Seeing the dignitaries lined up to receive him at Beijing he says: "Ah, you Yids, always something.

Now you're squinty-eyed." The notion of all foreigners being Jews in disguise is superb, and that "always something" sublime.

In the 1930s, when satirical writers like Mikhail Zoshchenko or the poet Mayakovsky were still around and the revolution was newer, the jokes were fewer.

Things got funnier, as it were, with Stalin, and the worst jokes were by the great leader himself. "If he doesn't do his job properly we'll hang him," he told General de Gaulle over dinner, pointing to his air force commander Novikov, and adding: "People say I'm a monster but you see, I make a joke out of it." Novikov was lucky: he wasn't hanged. He was arrested, tortured and given 15 years hard labour.

Lewis helps to make communist humour a little less alien than it seems. "Jokes were Eastern Europe's jazz, the music of the oppressed." He could also have pointed out that, occasionally, even in Britain a parallel phenomenon is felt: in the days after the death of Princess Diana, when government and media combined to impose a mood of ghoulish sentimentality on the country (an article I wrote was spiked for lack of reverence), a wave of jokes about her death erupted, many in startlingly bad taste.

In post-communist Russia the tradition lives on. The last anekdot I heard concerned a bloody decapitated corpse discovered one snowy morning in the middle of Red Square. It is the billionaire Russian refugee Berezovsky. At a press conference a BBC man asks whether there is any indication of official involvement. "Typical BBC lies and slander," replies a Kremlin spokesman. "After all, it wasn't as if he was a young man."