‘If we cannot laugh like that, then how can we laugh?’: The ‘problem’ of Stalinist film comedy

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe debates surrounding Konstantin Iudin's two pre-war comedies starring Valentina Serova — A Girl with Character (1939) and Hearts of Four (1941) — and Boris Barnet's The Old Jockey (1940) indicate that Soviet comedy had reached a dead end by the beginning of the 1940s. The Stalin-era film industry was acutely aware of the dangers of failing to tackle the lack of comedies on the Soviet screen, yet its attempts to develop the genre were persistently hindered by a distrust of comic play. Reading comedy through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, this article explores why fully harnessing the genre to the ideological task of bolstering social norms and fostering a sense of coherent selfhood proved impossible. Shedding light on the growing contemporary anxiety over laughter as ‘an end in itself’, I trace the changing conception of appropriate forms of Soviet comedy and the affects it elicited after the advent of the ‘guiding line’ of socialist realism. Called to deploy laughter as a means of shaping p...

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