Comedians Waiting for Cars and Coffee

Soviet-style humor is finding a new life in Venezuela, where joking can be a way to criticize the government.
CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY FERNANDO LLANO / AP

In late November, I found myself at an emphatically chic hotel bar in Caracas. I was there for a large gathering that had technically started an hour earlier, but I sat alone, a victim of my own near-punctuality. To fill the time, I began a conversation with the friendlier of two bartenders, a fellow who clearly preferred speaking to conversing and who, with a practiced spontaneity, segued seamlessly from taking my order to telling this joke:

An old man walks into a grocery store in Caracas. After waiting patiently in line, he asks the shopkeeper for a container of cooking oil, a jug of milk and, a quarter kilo of coffee. The clerk apologizes, saying that all three items are out of stock, and the disappointed patron walks off. Overhearing this exchange, the next person in line remarks to the proprietor: “Cooking oil? Milk? That stupid old man, he must be crazy.” The storekeeper considers this a moment and responds: “Yes, but what a remarkable memory!”

What struck me most about the joke was that I’d heard it before, over a decade earlier, in the Czech Republic, from a gruff reformed communist. I’d gone to Eastern Europe as an exchange student, to learn about transitions away from socialist economics—an invaluable skill set (or so I believed) for when Hugo Chávez’s revolution inevitably floundered, and my generation of foreign-educated Venezuelans was called upon to rebuild the country. This was 2003, when Chávez was still consolidating his power. Since that time, I’ve both endured and chronicled the entrenchment of the country’s misfortunes: its overnight arbitrage fortunes for the well connected, its rampant shortages and interminable lines for the rest. Yet the bartender’s joke was the most explicit echo of Soviet-era Europe that I’d experienced in Venezuela.

He soon told me another:

An Englishman and a Frenchman are at a museum, admiring a Renaissance work depicting Adam, Eve, and the apple in Eden. The Briton observes that Adam sharing the apple with his wife shows a particularly British propriety. The Frenchman, unconvinced, counters that the pair’s obvious comfort with their nudity clearly marks them as French. A passing Venezuelan, overhearing, remarks candidly, “Sorry to intrude, caballeros, but these are obviously Venezuelans: they have nothing to wear, practically nothing to eat, and they are allegedly in Paradise.”

This joke, too, has a Warsaw Pact pedigree. It can be found on the Internet in numerous iterations, with only the final character’s nationality changed—to Soviet, Cuban, even North Korean. (The Englishman and Frenchman, to their credit, remain largely static.)

These life-under-Marxism jokes, known as anekdoty to Russians during the Cold War, became an increasingly vital outlet for criticism during the period immediately preceding the collapse of the Soviet system. The genre has changed little since those days, but it has travelled, seamlessly transcending culture and geography to underscore certain commonalities of revolutionary Marxist systems (scarcity, triumphalist propaganda, bungling government bureaucracies) and, sometimes, to highlight the amalgam of cleverness, patience, indignation, and despair with which people respond to such conditions.

That these are features of life in today’s Venezuela is incontrovertible. Even the usually Panglossian government media no longer seems to deny Venezuelans’ hardships, having shifted from the official line that the C.I.A. is carrying on a “media war,” aimed at bringing down the revolution with lies, to the idea that the C.I.A. is carrying on an “economic war,” aimed at toppling the government through manufactured scarcity and fake lines full of agents provocateurs. The Venezuelan economy relies excessively on petrodollars, and the country’s government has been funnelling oil rents into imports of the food, medicine, and other basic goods that it is incapable of producing internally. Having neither diversified economically nor saved much during years of high oil prices, Venezuela was already in recession even before those prices collapsed last year. Loath to admit defeat and officially devalue its fixed currency, or to abandon popular subsidies such as penny-priced gasoline, the government has remained mostly solvent by printing money to cover its domestic obligations, enforcing onerous price controls, and being increasingly tight-fisted with access to foreign currency. This has come at the cost of stratospheric inflation and harrowing shortages of basic goods. The appeal of Soviet-style humor in the face of such problems is obvious.

In 2008, the documentary filmmaker Ben Lewis published “Hammer and Tickle,” a remarkable collection of jokes amassed from the former Soviet bloc. The book also provides a survey of the role humor played in European communism, building a case, albeit mostly through anekdotal evidence, that humor played a fundamental role in the downfall of that system. Alas, Lewis restricts himself almost entirely to the Soviet sphere. In a lonely paragraph addressing the rest of the world, he shrugs off the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodians, arguing that none of them “appear to have expressed their experiences of Communism this way”—presumably they did so by means other than joke telling. Cuban jokes, in his view, focus more on insulting Castro personally than on the bleakness of life within the system. Where true life-under-Marxism jokes exist in Cuba, Lewis writes, they are rehashed from the Soviet experience, and may not be “genuine expressions” of the citizenry.

I would argue otherwise. The adoption of one anekdot over another taps into something deeply authentic: a spectral snapshot, suitably blurry, of the zeitgeist in a particular place. For Venezuelans, the jokes’ focus on certain aspects of life—scarcities, corruption, propaganda, and mummified ex-leaders come to mind—reveals something about the state of the country’s revolution and the current concerns of its people. A gag about the absence of cooking oil and milk takes root in Caracas at a given moment, while another joke, about totalitarian extremes—say, the one where a frantic rabbit flees a secret-police crackdown on camels (“I know, but you try explaining that to the secret police!”)—never gains traction.

Or at least, it never used to gain traction. I still haven’t heard a frantic-rabbit joke in Caracas, but I wouldn’t be surprised if something like it has become more popular there since Nicolás Maduro came to power, in 2013. Say what you will of the late Chávez’s faults: a lack of confidence wasn’t among them. He frequently countenanced criticism, returning it as good as he got it. Maduro, by contrast, has proven gaffe-prone and insecure, and has injected a new paranoid severity into Venezuela’s revolution. A new law was recently passed that authorizes the use of “potentially deadly” force, including live ammunition, to maintain order. And political detentions are now tragically common—February’s arrest, by SEBIN intelligence-service police forces, of the Caracas metropolitan mayor Antonio Ledezma, on conspiracy charges, is the most recent high-profile example. Maduro has likewise sought to impose silence as best he can, increasing censorship of the country’s cartoonists, editorialists, and TV satirists. (My own column, for El Universal, was among those recently terminated.) Whether or not such moves are shaping the nature of the jokes being told in Venezuela, they have had the effect of leaving the form as perhaps the safest outlet for humor critical of the government.

There’s no real way of telling if the subversive joke-telling has grown more pervasive, but I did hear about one making the rounds recently whose characterization of the revolution felt like an indicator of sorts. When I consulted with Francisco Toro, a blogger and former freelance newspaper correspondent in Venezuela, about this piece, he told me that he’d just heard a joke whose origins he figured were Soviet:

Two men are waiting in a food queue and one of them finally snaps. “That’s it,” he announces, “I’m sick of lines, and I’m off to shoot Nicolás Maduro.” With that, he storms off, only to return an hour later, and jostle back into his former spot. “Well, did you do it?” asks his companion. “I couldn’t,” the man says. “The line to kill Maduro was even longer than this one.”

Indeed, in the former U.S. national-security advisor Brent Scowcroft’s memoir, “A World Transformed,” (which is co-authored by George H. W. Bush), he recounts hearing the same joke told about Mikhail Gorbachev during the last days of the Soviet Union—by none other than Gorbachev himself. During Gorbachev’s era, life-under-Marxism jokes were seen by many as a bellwether of the sturdiness of the Soviet regime. In this belief, as European communism was entering its period of final decline, Ronald Reagan had the State Department compile lists of the jokes being told by Eastern Europeans so that he could use them himself. He told this one, about purchasing an automobile in the Soviet Union, during a 1988 speech:

This man, he laid down his money. And then the fella that was in charge said to him, “Okay, come back in ten years and get your car.” And he said, “Morning or afternoon?” And the fella behind the counter said, “Well, ten years from now what difference does it make?” And he said, “Well, the plumber is coming in the morning.”

The current wait for a new car in Venezuela is only around four years, but Venezuelans’ patience with the system does appear to be rubbed raw. With the country’s economic model seemingly continuing its inexorable disintegration, pro-government media have tried to placate the populace with think pieces purporting to explain why waiting in line is actually good for you, and have lauded the state’s creation of a new Vice Ministry of Supreme Social Happiness, but the results have been underwhelming. According to a survey conducted in December by the polling firm Datanálisis, eighty-six per cent of Venezuelans currently think that the country is off track, and only twenty-three per cent approve of Maduro. Meanwhile, YouTube videos showing barren shelves, people stampeding for scarce products, and angry outbursts from those in line (particularly when the well-connected attempt to skip ahead) circulate widely, even beyond the opposition’s traditional middle-class base. It has long been an exasperated mantra among critics of the revolutionary regime that Venezuelans should stop laughing at their misfortunes and actually do something about them. From jokes to polls, there are signs that this motion is taking place.

Daniel Lansberg-Rodríguez is on the faculty of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and is a weekly columnist for Venezuela’s last independent national newspaper, El Nacional.