Authoritarian Laughter: Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania

Authoritarian Laughter explores the political history of the satire and humor magazine Authoritarian Laughter published in Soviet Lithuania. Artists, writers, and journalists had to create state sponsored Soviet humor and serve the Communist Party after Lithuania was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. Neringa Klumbyte investigates official attempts to shape citizens into Soviet subjects and engage them into co-governance through a culture of popular humor.

Broom was multidirectional--it facilitated Communist Party agendas as well as expressed opposition towards the Soviet regime. Official satire and humor in Soviet Lithuania increasingly created dystopian visions of Soviet modernity and were a forum for critical ideas and nationalist sentiments that were mobilized in anti-Soviet revolutionary laughter in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Authoritarian Laughter illustrates that Soviet Western peripheries were unstable and their governance was limited. It shows that authoritarian states engage in a statecraft of the everyday and engineering intimate lives. It argues that authoritarianism is defied not only in revolutions, but in the many stories people tell each other about themselves in jokes, cartoons, and satires.