Tag Archives: Joke

Soviet Joke about Caviar

Nationality: Russian-Jewish
Age: 53
Occupation: Mathematician
Residence: Santa Barbara, California
Performance Date: March 11, 2012
Primary Language: Russian
Language: English, Hebrew

“A person who left Russia during Revolution came to visit. He comes to the store in Moscow and says, ‘Can I please buy a hundred grams of caviar?’ Well, there was no caviar in Soviet stores, it disappeared when I was a child, somewhere in the 1960s. I still remember when I was very little and my mom would take us to buy a little bit of caviar, and there would be black caviar and red caviar, and even though red caviar is considered to be the most expensive one, I liked the black caviar. And then, it disappeared because Russians suddenly realized—the Soviet authorities—that they can sell it for dollars, for foreign currency. So all of it went abroad and it disappeared in the Soviet Union. So that’s what you have to know before you can understand this joke. So the person comes and he goes into the shop and he says, ‘Can I buy a hundred grams of caviar?’ And the saleslady says, ‘Could you step aside, sir? Just stand here.’ There’s a big line of people, and one person comes and buys bread, and another person comes and buys milk, and a third person comes and buys something else, butter or bread. So, after the man stays there for fifteen minutes, she says, ‘Do you see anyone asking for caviar?’ He said ‘No.’ She says, ‘You see? We don’t carry it anymore because there is no demand for caviar.’

Link to Russian transcription of joke: 

Q. What message is this joke trying to convey?

A. This is a joke about the shortage of food in the Soviet Union. It’s also about how the Soviet authorities would cover up the truth. Why we don’t have caviar? Not because there is no caviar in Russia, but because there is no demand. We always have some sort of an explanation. For example, at some point, in Lithuania, where I grew up, the Soviet Union started to take meat and send it to other parts of the Soviet Union, and also to Vietnam. And to cover up the shortage, they said that there is no demand for meat all the way through the week, and there should be a couple of days per week when the meat stores should be closed. (There were separate meat stores.) So, suddenly the meat stores are closed on a number of days. Why? Well, the truth is that there is not enough meat. What is the Soviet explanation? That people come from White Russia, from Belarus, which is a neighboring Soviet republic which really doesn’t have meat at all, come to Vilnius [the capital of Lithuania] and they buy all the meat. So, we don’t want to have meat stores open on the days that they come, like weekends.

Background on Soviet Jokes:

Q. Are these jokes that people would tell all the time?

A. Well, I remember them now, and I’ve been out of the Soviet Union for over thirty years. I knew them all my life. People would just sit down and they tell jokes, and if you have a new joke, that’s great. People learn those jokes, and they retell those jokes—it’s an underground joke industry. I don’t know how Soviet jokes originated, but all these jokes are something I grew up with, and thirty years later, I still remember them.

Analysis of Soviet Jokes: The Soviet regime was very oppressive. People constantly heard rhetoric about the greatness of the Soviet Union, and that it is a worker’s paradise, but in reality, the situation just grew worse and worse, and life only became bleaker. Thus, these jokes expose the population’s horrible disappointment in the regime. When I asked my informant whether people were idealistic about Communism in its early days, she told me that her grandparents were extremely idealistic about socialism, and believed that the Soviet Union would eventually become a great country with a high standard of living. When part of her family emigrated from Russia to Palestine in 1919, they invited her grandparents—and their children, of course—to come with them. But her grandparents declined, believing that socialist Russia would be a wonderful country. My informant’s parents grew up within this idealistic climate; in the 1930s, even though Russians experienced a horrible food shortage, people believed that since they inherited a terrible economy from the tsar, World War I, and the Revolution, the situation would eventually improve.

In contrast, by the time that my informant grew up, in the 1970s, the Soviet Union was corrupt through-and-through, and no one believed that there would be any improvement. In these jokes, then, we see people’s horrible disappointment, their cynicism, and their lack of hope for the future. The jokes never call you to resist the regime because resistance is futile and people feel powerless to change the system; rather, these jokes simply give people the satisfaction of laughing at the regime, an outlet for their disillusionment.

Chemistry Nerd Joke

Nationality: Jewish-American
Age: 17
Occupation: High school student, planning to major in physics or chemistry
Residence: Santa Barbara, California
Performance Date: March 15, 2012
Primary Language: English

“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.”

When liquid chemicals react to form a solid product, chemists call this solid product a precipitate; in a precipitation reaction, a precipitate will appear within a liquid chemical solution. Thus, in carrying out such a reaction, we begin with liquid reactants, but in the end, we have both liquid and solid  products: the solution and the precipitate.

My informant learned this “nerd joke” from interacting with other teenagers inclined toward science, mathematics, and engineering. He reports that he knows science jokes from science clubs, classes, and competitions; also, his ninth grade chemistry teacher, Mr. Bausback, would often tell science jokes. Thus, he does not remember exactly where he learned this particular joke.

My informant appreciates this joke because of its “nerdiness,” but also says that he finds it funny partially because he knows that most people would not understand or appreciate it—in high school, being a nerd almost means being in a special club. Thus, jokes like this may well reflect the social pressures that high school students face; less academically-inclined students tend to be more “popular” or well-liked than the “nerds,” causing the “nerds” to band together and experience an increased sense of kinship with one another. Since this joke excludes people who do not know much about chemistry, understanding this joke—and other jokes such as this one—is part of belonging to the social circle of nerds.

Joke about Jewish Mothers

Nationality: Jewish-American
Age: 97
Occupation: Retired teacher
Residence: Santa Barbara, California
Performance Date: March 14, 2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Yiddish

Cultural background:

My informant was born in 1915 in New York City, to immigrant parents—her mother was an Austrian-Jewish immigrant, and her father was a Russian-Jewish immigrant. Describing her childhood, she states that “at that time, New York City had a density that was closer—or more—than that of China. There were so many people jammed together in these old tenement houses—you had a whole floor of people in your apartment, who shared one bathroom. None of them even had windows, except on skylights, or looking out on someone else’s tenement window. So, it was just a very crowded condition. For the most part, people got along very well because they all came more or less from the same place, they were all poor, but, you know, though you didn’t have much, you didn’t think of yourself as poor. . . . Life was spent on the street because the apartments were crowded, dark, and very uninviting. So, we used to spend our time on the street playing hopscotch, jump rope. The little boys were always playing ball in the street. Everything was street-oriented. . . .

“I remember going to school. At that time, I only spoke Yiddish at home, and my mother took me to the teacher, and the teacher said, when did she come from Europe? And my mother said very indignantly, ‘she was born here!’ I’m a citizen! And, I was speaking only Yiddish at home, but I did not struggle with English; I caught onto it very quickly. The classrooms were so crowded that they didn’t have enough seats for everybody. But everybody there was hungry to get educated, and at that time, of course, the emphasis on higher education was only for the boys. Everybody wanted their sons to be doctors or accountants or lawyers. But the girls would wind up being in the factories at sewing machines. The highest honor was to be a teacher. In two years you could become a teacher, and then you would be one of the elite.”

Joke about Jewish Mothers:

“There was a baby carriage with two boys in it. And somebody says, ‘Oh, how wonderful these boys are! What’s their ages?’ And their mother said, ‘The two year old is the doctor and the three year old is the teacher.”

When I asked my informant what it means, she replied, “She had it mapped out, what they were going to be. It’s a joke about Jewish mothers.”

Indeed, Jewish parents are stereotypically overprotective of their children. While this quality is certainly not unique to Jewish culture, Jewish culture does place strong importance upon family values. Parents usually plan carefully for their children, hoping that their children will one day be more successful than they have been. This joke certainly reflects concern for the future; most parents do not map out their toddlers’ career trajectories. Perhaps, Jewish culture is, in part, so oriented toward children because Jews lived as minorities for centuries, preserving their traditions only by teaching younger generations.

No Soap, Radio (Joke)

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Finance
Residence: New York City
Performance Date: 3/14/12
Primary Language: English

Two elephants are in a bathtub. One elephant says to the other, “Please pass the soap.” The other elephant says, “No soap, radio!” 

My informant  first heard this joke from her father, who’d been telling it for as long as either she or he can remember. My informant told me that her father used to say this joke to her all the time, and it would always make her laugh. It wasn’t until she turned 12 or so that she realized she had absolutely no idea what the joke meant. She would ask her dad again and he’d just laugh and say the punchline again, “No soap, radio!” As if it were incredibly obvious. After bothering him about it for a long time, she finally told me her that he, in fact, had no idea what the joke meant either. It was just something someone had told him years ago and had stuck with him. The point of the “joke” is that there is no punchline, it’s just a practical joke, meant to provoke a reaction from the person who hears it. Either the person hearing the joke will assume a false understanding of the joke–“Oh, hahaha, I get it!”–and thus becomes the butt of the joke himself, or they will confess that they don’t get it, and therefore feel left out.

The joke is best when told with a wingman. Way when the joker says the punchline, the wingman laughs, which encourages others to laugh–even if they have no idea what they’re laughing about.

My informant tells me her entire immediate family knows this joke, and once in a while they’ll employ it on an unsuspecting stranger. “Everyone always falls for it and laughs the first time,” she said, “and so even after, when you’re on the ‘inside,’ it’s never mean-spirited…everyone is always embarrassed about the time they laughed!”

Joke: Knock, Knock…

Nationality: Caucasian, Filipino
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Chicago, IL
Performance Date: 25 April 2012
Primary Language: English

Man 1: Knock, Knock…

Man 2: Who’s There?

Man 1: Britney Spears.

Man 2: Britney Spears who?

Man 1: Britney Spears…

OOPS I DID IT AGAIN.

My informant told me this knock-knock joke one day when there we were in an awkward situation. He later explained that his sister always told people this joke when there was an awkward silence or to break the ice when meeting new people.

Jokes, I feel, are often an overlooked division of folklore. Since jokes are so common nowadays in our society, they become almost part of our everyday speech. They also seem to come out of nowhere, but somehow everyone knows them. Jokes permeate our culture and often represent certain aspects of politics, society and popular culture. In this case, the reference to Britney Spears truly demonstrates that certain jokes are only understood by special groups of people. If you told this joke to someone who do not know who Britney Spears is, the joke would lose all meaning.