To joke or not to joke?

 

To joke or not to joke?

Boris Gulko

The saddest literary genre is humor. The life of a joke is short. It is like a life of a one-day butterfly – it flutters and disappears. There is nothing more boring than listening to an old chewed up joke.

You can reread and search for a new meaning in "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Faust", but what is the point in rereading a book of humor?

Jokes are quickly made. In Russia there was a popular pun on words from a popular song: “We’re born to turn Kafka into a reality” (Kafka on Russian sounds like a fairy tale).

But why was it funny? It is tragic. At the end of Kafka’s "Process" “one gentleman’s hand already laid down on K.'s throat, while the second stabbed him deep in the heart and turned it there twice. K.'s glazing eyes still saw these gentlemen leaning close to his face and rubbing their cheeks to each other, watching his finale."

Why Joseph K. had to be executed? It had no reasons: "One morning he was arrested, although he did nothing illegal." A similar event took place recently in Russia: the president of the country ordered to kill Alexei Navalny, although he "did nothing illegal" either. Wasn’t he sentenced to death by Putin for fighting corruption -- something he was known for?  

At some point this incredible story has acquired a literary quality of character with all shades of farce. After a series of happy coincidences and awkwardness, as well as two weeks in a coma spent in a German hospital, the anti-corruption campaigner survived. Then Navalny, with the help of the British online publication Bellingcat, specializing in investigative journalism, unraveled a tangle of conspiracy, identified the names and positions of the intelligence officers who poisoned him, and even asked on the phone one of them - how the case was going and what went wrong. It seemed that in those days the shadow of the great detective writer John le Carre, who was leaving our world at that time, hovered over him.

Putin, who has been Russian leader for the past two decades, when asked about the failure of the intelligence services to try to kill Navalny, defended himself: "If they wanted to poison him, they would accomplish it at the end." So, it appears, they did of those killing games in jest.

The world of Kafka has crossed the Atlantic. On December 12, Americans gathered in the capital to protest election fraud in key states designed to hand over power to neo-Marxist groups behind the decrepit figure of the corrupt elder Biden. How many protesting participants were there? According to friendly press reports - several thousands. The presidential administration estimates more than a million. Welcoming the crowd, Trump flew around this sea of people in a helicopter.

Ten days before, on December 2nd, Trump delivered a speech that was rumored to be one of the best of his career. Newspapers, TV, and the electronic press withheld its content from the Americans. The momentum was extinguished. As in the same Kafka’s "Process" after Joseph K.'s address to the court: "Now he was facing the crowd. Did he wrongly judge these people? Did he overestimate the impact of his speech? Or when he spoke, they were faking it, and now that it has come to conclusions, they've decided enough is enough?... They were all single-rooted, and right and left of these imaginary parties..." Or maybe Joseph K.'s speech, like Trump's speech, just wasn't heard?

In 1992, Texas billionaire Ross Perot, who was the third in the U.S. presidential election, pulled 18.9 % of the vote from President Bush Sr. thus giving Bill Clinton a victory. Clinton, taking the presidency, immediately announced the reform of the American morality - allowing homosexuals to serve in the military. Most of the people rejected the innovation. The young president's approval rating plummeted to 26%.

Sensitive to such things, Clinton immediately rushed to change the trend and offered to create separate parts in the army for "sexually different". Newsweek magazine responded to this exotic idea with a charming caricature: generals are bent over the map of the upcoming battle, and the leader lays out the plan of battle: "On the left flank we will launch a squadron of lesbians, on the right - a brigade of sadomasochists, then in the center ...”

It seemed ridiculous at the time, but not anymore. The Nasdaq Technology Exchange plans to introduce rules, that only firms that have at least two members of the minority, including sexual, can trade on it. Biden picks members of his administration preparing to preside over the United States on the same principle. Among already approved by him are two gay men and two lesbians, as well as a transgender woman, but still with a male name. But this administration has only just begun to form. According to critics, most of the elected candidates are not specialists in the areas planned for them. Being professionally qualified is no longer the criteria.

Under the new president, a progressive quota system for sexual preferences for executives promises to become the norm. Universities and colleges every year put out on the labor market crowds of graduates with professions like "sex studies," " homosexual studies," "women studies " (don't confuse with gynecology), perhaps comparable in size to the release of so-valued programmers. Those, however, can always be imported from India or China.

Sex specialists in the U.S. work hard. The classification of sexual minorities in the United States is constantly expanding. They discover new groups of "sexually different", such as those representing several genders at the same time, or who do not have any sex at all. But in order to protect their rights, all such recruits must be represented by someone in the governing bodies of campaigns and in the government. Well, how, for example, such a complex mechanism as the U.S. can do without a gerontophile in his administration? France, for example, is not without it.

In accepting the broad consideration of the sexual peculiarities of applicants when filling the leadership vacancies set by Biden for his administration, as well as the rapid expansion of the list of protected groups, it is easy to imagine the problems of the near future: in the working plan of the leader of the Democratic Party will be written clearly: "Find for positions in the personnel department two nymphomaniac and one onanist; for the government -- a frigid woman and an impotent." But Biden, because of his advanced age, has probably already filled this last niche.

In career struggle, ethnicity has long been a factor of success, and the "Johnsons" suddenly turn into "Sanchez," according to the surname of the first husband of the grandmother or the last wife of the grandfather. In the world we are entering, discover the wicket to success will be able to belong to the community of LGBT+, or whatever it will be called, when "+" will no longer fit all the discoveries of sexologists.

But still the humor from our lives should not be written off. Biden's election for the world's most important post gave birth to dark but good jokes. For example, "Out of outrage that my parents voted amicably for Biden, I decided not to visit their graves anymore."

Translated by Alla Axelrod (laughing all the way).