Forbidden Laughter

Soviet Underground Jokes - Odessa Joke

Forbidden Laughter
Soviet Underground Jokes

by Emil Draitser
©1980
94 pages

Publisher: CreateSpace
Publishing Platform
Revised edition
(January 12, 2014)

ISBN-10: 1494472554
ISBN-13: 978-1494472559

The first bilingual (English/Russian) sampling of authentic Soviet underground jokes - mostly political, but also ethnic, and at times erotic - published in the United States at the height of the Cold War. As the title page has it, these jokes were "collected and smuggled across the Soviet border in a false-bottomed box (known as "a skull"), recorded by Emil Draitser, illustrated in the best tradition of Socialist realism by Igor, translated from the language of Pushkin to the language of Shakespeare by Jon Pariser, and published without the consent of Soviet censors.