Russian jokes (Russian: анекдо́ты (transcribed anekdoty), literally anecdotes), the most popular form of Russian humour, are short fictional stories or dialogues with a punch line.
Russian joke culture includes a series of categories with fixed and highly familiar settings and characters. Surprising effects are achieved by an endless variety of plots. Russian jokes are on topics found everywhere in the world, be it sex, politics, spouse relations, or mothers-in-law. This article discusses Russian joke subjects that are particular to Russian or Soviet culture.
Every category has a host of untranslatable jokes that rely on linguistic puns, wordplay, and Russian's vocabulary of foul language. Below, (L) marks jokes whose humor value critically depends on untranslatable features of the Russian language.
A huge category is Russian political jokes.
Read more about Russian Jokes: Puns, Religion, Russian Military Jokes, University Students, Cowboy Jokes, Jokes About Disabilities, Taboo Vocabulary
Famous quotes containing the words russian and/or jokes:
“Who are we? And for what are we going to fight? Are we the titled slaves of George the Third? The military conscripts of Napoleon the Great? Or the frozen peasants of the Russian Czar? No—we are the free born sons of America; the citizens of the only republic now existing in the world; and the only people on earth who possess rights, liberties, and property which they dare call their own.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“He left behind, as his essential contribution to literature, a large repertoire of jokes which survive because of their sheer neatness, and because of a certain intriguing uncertainty—which extends to Wilde himself—as to whether they really mean anything.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)