[lbo-talk] Hammer & Tickle: A History of Communism Told Through Communist Jokes by Ben Lewis

John E. Norem jnorem at cox.net
Fri May 30 15:42:35 PDT 2008


The Sunday Times review by Christopher Hart

This marvellously original new study of the collapse of the Soviet bloc began as an article on communist jokes in Prospect magazine. Ben Lewis's thesis is not simply that jokes alleviated the sufferings of those who lived under Soviet communism during those long, grey decades, but that by constantly depicting communism as ludicrous and unworkable, they ultimately - along with numerous other factors, of course - helped bring about its collapse.

http://tinyurl.com/5rxlzt



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