The Only Good Thing About Living Under Oppressive Communism--the Jokes

The Free Thinking Film Society presents Hammer &Tickle, a documentary about how people living under the U.S.S.R.'s yoke used jokes to help lighten their load:

Beginning with the tongue-in-cheek claim that jokes were the only good thing to come out of Communism, Hammer & Tickle recounts a humorous history of the Soviet Union and its satellite states through the jokes that flourished under the oppressive regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe. Jokes, the film contends, were a language of truth under Communism; a language that allowed people to navigate the disconnect between propaganda and reality and provided a means of resisting the system despite the absence of free speech...

Making jest of those who take themselves too damn seriously is about as subversive as it gets--the reason why, in our time, totalitarians both leftist and Islamist so detest unbridled levity. (As that quintessential grumblepuss Khomeini once thundered, "There are no jokes in Islam.")