Comedian Denis Chuzhoy performs in Belgrade, Serbia, in August 2022. Chuzhoy has left Russia and now tours Europe and the United States. Photo / Konstantin Kondrukhov
At a bar in downtown Moscow, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin, the comedian stepped out into the purple lights and picked up the microphone.
A modest crowd had gathered to drink beers, to laugh and unwind from the pressures of the week.
“I’m a patriot, by the way,” the comedian said, by way of introduction. “If there are any nationalists in the room, please applaud with your right hand!”
His joke was met with an uncomfortable silence. A couple in the front tittered nervously.
“I love coats of arms and anthems,” the comedian soldiered on, unfazed. “Shall we just cancel the stand-up and have a national anthem karaoke night?” This too, drew subdued laughter.
Welcome to wartime Russia, where political humour is now taboo and comedians and audiences are keenly aware that the wrong joke can land them in jail.
The show had been organised by a collective of self-described avant-garde comedians and had only been advertised in small circles, among people who were ready, the comedian later explained, “to experiment” and “dig a little deeper”. But even here, the tension showed.
Before the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin’s sweeping repression, stand-up comedy was an edgy and popular genre. Like late Soviet rock music, it captured the energy and youthful defiance of a generation yearning for a free, open society.
Being a comedian was often fraught, but the crackdown accompanying the war has all but choked off the art form as authorities subdue one of the last islands of creative freedom. Those left in Russia largely stick to tame, escapist family-friendly jokes, leaving the political material to those who have chosen exile.
Inside Russia, Putin, politics and the war are obviously out of the question, but anything that pokes fun at religion or traditional values is also taboo, as are jokes that even obliquely condone drugs, abortion, LGBTQ+ people or women who don’t want children.
It’s not just the security services that pose a threat: ultranationalist pro-war “activists” show up and film comedy shows, hoping to denounce performers to the authorities.
In March, comedian Artemy Ostanin was arrested after a joke about a legless man whizzing around the Moscow metro on a skateboard. After military bloggers denounced him for insulting Ukraine war veterans – although he did not mention the war and denies that is what he meant – he is now in detention facing up to six years in prison for allegedly inciting hatred.
“Now you can joke about family, the subway, for example, and I don’t know what else, but no hint of politics,” said the Moscow-based comedian from the club, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the risk of arrest or legal harassment. “But now people are just more tense when they hear jokes about politics. Because there is a feeling, ‘Will I get in trouble if I react to it?’”
Denis Chuzhoy, who now tells his jokes outside Russia, recalls the time soon after the war began when he saw agents from Russia’s Federal Security Service filming his show in a small Moscow comedy club. He quickly dropped his jokes about Putin and politics, but was determined at least to make them laugh.
Somewhere in the midst of his darkly humorous monologue about self-esteem, depression and death – one of his signature themes – one of them finally cracked up.
He didn’t last much longer in Russia. In March 2022, after a series of telephone death threats following his condemnation of the February invasion of Ukraine, two men accosted him onstage at a venue in Vologda, northeast of Moscow. They were carrying a funeral wreath and card, addressed “to a traitor of Russia”.
“Oh, finally I got my merch,” he quipped at the time. But he knew that “something is terribly wrong with the society”, so he left.
Now he tours Europe and the United States, doing shows in Russian as Denis Chuzhoy and in English as Dan the Stranger, with the pitch, “Who will get me first: HBO or KGB?”
After he was designated a foreign agent by Russian authorities last year, his routine is now peppered with jokes about self-esteem, the FSB and the telephone death threats: The FSB was at his show? That must mean he’d made it!
“Being anti-war, being anti-Putin is illegal now, so I couldn’t do a lot of my jokes,” he tells his audience. “I had to do the trailers of my jokes. I would start my last shows in Russia by just saying, ‘One day, he will die.’ That was the whole joke. Everybody laughed and applauded.”
Back in present-day Moscow, things are going better at the stand-up show in the bar. The comedian has moved on from his edgy, political jokes. The tension has dissipated as other comedians talked about sex, relationships and the absurdity of daily life – interspersed with funny impressions.
The comedian’s co-host, however, veered back into political territory at the end of the show with a joke portraying Putin as soft and feminine – which he abruptly cut short.
“Well, that’s the whole joke! That’s all the political satire that is possible in Russia today. Thank you for coming!”
After the show, five young comedians – whom The Washington Post is not identifying because of potential risks to their security – described how they were less afraid of a tepid failed joke than a wildly successful risky one that could go viral online and get them arrested.
Smart and thoughtful, they expressed both hope and loss, striving to carve out what freedom they could despite having to shrink their ambitions.
“I wouldn’t want to go to jail for a joke. But at the same time, you start thinking, ‘Why the hell should I go to jail for a joke?’” said the co-host. “That’s when you start to wonder, ‘What’s going on in general?’ Why can’t I go out and say what I personally don’t like, what I think is strange, stupid and so on?”
Hemmed in by suffocating wartime censorship and humourless nationalists, they expressed a yearning to break barriers, to be excellent comedians and to find a way to do something new and interesting.
While the comedian’s riff on nationalists fell rather flat, he told The Post that it was important to make people uncomfortable and to get people to engage a little with political tensions of the day. As a left-wing liberal, he said, his goal was to play on the unresolved political divisions within Russia that colour everything in black and white.
“In my opinion, Russian society as a whole has become more right-wing … and this is a problem that needs to be talked about and raised in every way possible.
“At least through humour, we can find some kind of unconventional solution and, at the very least, have a laugh.”
But jokes had to be written “very carefully” and sometimes were not worth the risk, he added.
“Now you should think 20 times how your joke would be perceived and whether this joke is worth the effort,” he said. Jokes even hinting at political turbulence – for example, a vague reference to how state television airs Swan Lake during coups – automatically create tension.
“Nowadays, the audience doesn’t judge how funny a joke is,” chimed in his co-host. “They judge how much trouble the comedian will get into after telling it.”
Those who gave up successful careers on the stand-up circuit and left Russia are nostalgic for the joyful freedom of stand-up before the crackdown, when being funny was all that mattered.
“We were obsessed,” said Ilya Ovechkin, who left Russia after the war began. “Our industry was built by dreamers, built by people who really wanted to be stand-up comedians. It was something new. It was something fresh. And the authorities didn’t know about us. Nobody paid attention to us. So we could do whatever we wanted.”
Russian viewers’ distaste these days for anything political also affects those who have gone abroad, since their YouTube audiences are still largely within Russia. If political jokes once elicited applause, now they feel stale, Ovechkin said.
“When the war started and we emigrated, I did a lot of Putin jokes because it was really something fresh, and we wanted to say it,” he said, but that soon felt predictable and repetitive, not edgy or groundbreaking.
“What would you say? ‘He’s a dictator, he’s a war criminal.’ Okay, that’s all. It’s not funny. Putin is not funny anymore.”
Those who left and those who stayed understand each other’s difficulties. Outside Russia, it’s hard to live away from home and family and develop a foreign following. Inside Russia, the opportunities and money are good, but the risks are high.
But the co-host from the show did his best to be positive. To him, the only option is to keep searching for that elusive perfect joke, in spite of political censorship.
“We shouldn’t forget that this is art. It’s about creativity, and it doesn’t always have to be about politics. It can be about timeless topics that will always be relevant,” he said.
The group nodded in agreement.
“Given that we have all these restrictions and we have to somehow still exist and continue our work … in a way this only makes us stronger as comedians,” he said.
- - -
Dixon and Abbakumova reported from Riga, Latvia.
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.