Laughter Research in the Former USSR

As part of my ongoing scientific research here at the Laughter Institute, I am planning a trip to the area formerly known as the Soviet Union, where behind the Iron Curtain there were many experiments done on the laughter mechanism in the body. The fact that hundreds of beautiful women over there have been anxiously awaiting my arrival for months has nothing to do with it. (Even though I got an email that made that claim in no uncertain terms).

In addition to trying to overtake us in the nuclear arms and the space races, the Soviets were hard at work trying to split the laughter atom, as it were. They knew that if they could make people laugh under the oppressed and harsh conditions they endured, they could rule the world! And they were right, of course.

But vodka made from spoiled beets always interfered with the research, or so I’m told. If you drink enough of that crap you’ll laugh at anything (when you aren’t puking your guts out or passing out on the street corner, that is). Believe me, I know, even though I’ve never visited Moscow or St. Petersburg proper.

In the laughter laboratories that were set up by the Kremlin and monitored by the KGB (like everything else in those days), people were subjected to some pretty cruel experiments. The Russian version of the Stooges were not even a pale imitation of the Big Three. Besides the stupid sight gags there were only jokes about bourgeois capitalist pigs and the sounds they made. OINK! OINK! Not so funny if you ask me.

The reason the laughter atom wasn’t split or the mechanism itself wasn’t studied is because very few people laughed, that’s all. And the ones who did were the equivalent of the village idiot in those Tolstoy novels. But those guys laugh at their own shadows if they aren’t running away from them!

What I hope to uncover in some dark closet in a dusty filing cabinet in some dank old gray building in Moscow could be a gold mine, however. If Natasha or Ludmilla can help me decode the funny character set I can piece together the puzzle and at least pick up where they left off. I’ll bet the Russian Three Stooges could make a comeback in today’s trendy world of retro comedic fashion and all!

It doesn’t take a village idiot in a peasant Russian village to know that laughter is a universal language with a standard character set and font. Laugh and the whole world laughs with you. Cry and you’re a crybaby with an inner child that needs to be spanked! Either that or you have a sourpuss gland on steroids.

I needn’t comment on the sourpuss glands of old Joseph Stalin or Leonid Breszhnev, although the latter’s eyebrows kept the sourpuss glands under control and the humor glands enlivened for most of the oppressed masses back then. I laugh just thinking about them! Had those little scissors not been discovered yet over there? Maybe his were rusted like the buttons on the nuclear missiles are nowadays. Or maybe he was too inebriated from the cheap vodka to use them. Either way, he made a fashion statement that nobody else seemed to agree with over there!

Kruschev was a cut-up if there ever was one. Banging on the table with a shoe is a sight gag that went down on the pages of every history book written since that day. “We will bury you”, he proudly boasted. With what? Spoiled beets? Certainly not with a tidal wave of laughter, except for the chuckles that you evoke when you act like such a blustering idiot on international television that way. Give me a break, Nikita, Babe! Pop some Prozac, or maybe add some lithium salts to your borscht.

Anyway, I’m sure that my trip to Russia will be a fruitful one, even though I cannot re-apply for the K-1 visa to bring a foreign bride back with me. Unfortunately we will have to bargain with the INS, or maybe bribe a corrupt official in their bureaucratic maze of power structures and competing factions. One way or another, I will return triumphant – with all the research I need to go forward on the Quest for the Holy Grail – Splitting the Laughter Atom!

Stay tuned for more late-breaking news from the forefront of modern research. We at the Institute have to take a potty break. I wish I knew the Russian words for “potty break”. Do you?

Early Attempts to Split the Laughter Atom

One of the threads that runs throughout my research papers is about the History of Humor. How the attempts to stimulate the laughter reflex have been like a Darwinian struggle of mythic proportions, second only to the survival of the species itself, whether fit to survive or not. There have been periods of great famine in the world of humor, and periods that make the Renaissance look like the Boston Tea Party attended by hairdressers not revolutionaries. The Three Stooges were not an example of such a revival - more like a famine, really.

They were masters, of course, but masters of a lost comedic art (thank God). One problem they had was turnover amongst the cast; were there really six Stooges in all, or was only Curley swapped out in later reruns? There was the bald and silly looking Curley, and the one with really short hair who looked somewhat menacing. Both Curleys had a name that was Oxymoronic, a fact that was only lost on the modern day village idiot. Moe was a regular, and I don’t recall him being bounced from the cast – do you?

The problem with the Stooges style of humor is that it is totally lost on the average village genius. If your cerebral cortex has more gray matter than the sky in Moscow like my dear old friend’s does, then you aren’t going to bust a gut when Moe busts Curley’s (unless it’s the scary looking Curley, that is). No, you demand more subtlety in your humor, more depth and so forth. Or at least a little variety! A guy can only poke your eyes out so many times before it begins to get old!

And yet humor that caters to the intelligentsia of any place or time is not going to be wildly successful or anything. More like a cult following is how I see it. A bunch of physicists and research scientists like me do not a mass market make. So jokes about quarks and light particles fall on deaf ears, like jokes about our subtle anatomy and the body’s laughter response typically do. Someone with the equivalent gray matter of the skies in Hawaii is just not going to get it, I’m afraid.

And yet if such highly evolved forms of humor as my own are casualties of the Darwinian Food Chain in the world of laughter, how can the war be won? How can the sourpuss element be effectively vanquished forever? It can’t. We are still waiting for the breakthrough that has been prophesied since the ancient days. We are awaiting the day of the megaton Laughter Bomb that will be dropped from the sky over Your Town, USA on any day of the week. You pick. And you know the devastation that would ensue, and that’s what makes it so funny to think about!

The Soviets knew about it too, and thus all the frenzied research in the “Moscow Laugh Labs” over there. They knew all about Fat Boy because of the Russian spies who worked on the Manhattan Project by changing their last names and trimming their eyebrows to escape detection. They laughed when Kennedy got shot because they were jealous, pure and simple. I was jealous too, but mostly because of his alleged affair with Marilyn – what a dish!

In previous columns I have made bad jokes about spending the night with her but I will not go there this time. But in the Soviet Union the fashion amongst women was depressing to say the least. Most women would make a cuckold feel safe and unthreatened, even though extremely unpleasant to come home to (the woman, not the cuckold). Best to stay late at the laugh laboratories than to go home to that, I say. I’m sure that many beautiful women existed over there, but they were kept hidden from the news cameras. I don’t blame them, do you?

Back in the days of the Crusades and all that hogwash, the standard battle cry of an invading horde of barbaric peoples was “rape, pillage and burn”! I'm sure it was in the ears of the Transylvannians in 1002 or thereabouts. If I were amongst the invading hordes, I would rather sign up for rape duty than the others. I would bring flowers and red wine, of course, and not bother with all that violence and male domination brouhaha. Sometimes just the reflection of the white moon on the Black Sea is all it takes to ignite the fires of passion as I imagine it to be soon!

But I’ll bet all the guys traveling in hordes must have wanted rape duty, don’t you? Pillaging was only fun for collecting trinkets, like family heirlooms and ancient art. Burning was no fun, especially since lighters had not been invented and matches were crude at best, and wet from the ship. Plundering was very similar to pillaging, so they lumped it all together into one category called “pillaging”.

But I digress and so do you. If someone were here to keep me on track and focused by the sexy sound of a soft Russian voice I would probably fare much better. Left to my own devices I end up going from laughter research to the atrocities of the Crusades before I know it. Then I end up by the Black Sea with Olga, as it always happens in my dreams. The one with the big brown eyes, that’s who!