Ben Lewis directed a documentary film in 2002, When Propaganda Ruled: Nicolae Ceausescu, King of Communism, intended to put Ceausescu's theatrical propaganda skills center-stage. For those interested in the personality cult developed by Ceausescu in the 1970's and 1980's, this film is a gold mine. It documents the absurdity of life under the Ceausescu personality cult, including grimy and humiliating details of daily rituals and symbolic rites. According to this film, newspapers were required "to mention his name 40 times on every page" and "factory workers spent months rehearsing dance routines for huge shows at which thousands of citizens were lined up to form the words Nicolae Ceausescu with their bodies".
Lewis used Ceausescu's own archive of propaganda films to make this documentary, and the truth therein is stranger than fiction and more mind-numbing than the cliche-infested chatter of cocktail parties. In an interview with the BBC, Lewis discusses how he got the idea for his more recent film, Hammer and Tickle: The History of the Communist Joke, while hanging out in Romania with his friends listening to the many jokes they told to pass the time. He notes that the atrocity of communism is best understood through the humorous ways in which people dealt with it:
"First I observed that there was this anonymous body of literature in communist countries, namely the jokes. Then I asked former citizens of communist states if they remembered the jokes. They all replied with a tangible passion and enthusiasm, that these jokes were important to them. They told me ones I hadn't yet heard spontaneously, and told me how they used to spend evenings round the kitchen table telling each other political jokes. That convinced me that the jokes were important - they not only had a significance as historical documents, they had an emotional significance to the people who told them. I don't know if communism 'depends' on humour but it is, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, a humour-producing machine. The absurdities of communist economic theory, and the obvious gap between what the state said was happening and what people were experiencing in their daily lives, was in itself absurd and ridiculous and therefore humorous. As one interviewee told me "Reality contained jokes, and the jokes contained reality."
Lewis fascination with the communist joke led him to write an essay, "Hammer and Tickle" (pdf version), for The Prospect, in which he reveals some fascinating history:
In 1950-51, a group of Harvard anthropologists undertook one of the
most influential research projects of the postwar era. The US
government wanted to find out how Soviet citizens might react if the US
invaded Russia. So the academics interviewed thousands of displaced
Russian citizens living in camps in Germany. When asked to describe
what Soviet society was like, the refugees told jokes: "Did you hear
the one about the sheep who tried to leave the USSR? They were stopped
at the border by a guard…." "Why do you wish to leave Russia?" the
guard asked. "It's the secret police," replied the sheep. "Stalin has
ordered them to arrest all the elephants." "But you aren't elephants."
"Try telling that to the secret police."
In the 1950s, the New York Times Magazine would devote the odd page to
jokes from the Harvard project. From the 1960s onwards, volumes of
communist jokes were published in paperback form in Europe and North
America. Willy Brandt was a renowned communist joke-teller, but there
was one western politician who took the jokes more seriously than
anyone else: Ronald Reagan. He ordered the state department to collect
the jokes and send them to him in weekly memos. As a result, Paul
Goble, head of the Balkan desk in the 1980s, assembled a collection of
15,000 communist jokes. Reagan often used Goble's gags in his speeches
and negotiations. When Gorbachev came to Washington, Reagan told him a
communist joke, later boasting at a press conference that he had
laughed. The joke, which made fun of the communist theory that a
transitional era of socialism was preceding the communist utopia, went
like this: Two men are walking down a street in Moscow. One asks the
other, "Is this full communism? Have we really passed through socialism
and reached full communism?" The other answers "Hell, no. It's gonna
get a lot worse first."
Here is a YouTube bit on the communist queen Elena from Lewis' movie. And here is Ben Lewis on the Internet Movie Database.
