Jokes About Disabilities
Jokes set in mental hospitals are just as common in Russian humor as in the humor of other cultures. However, "punitive psychiatry" was part of Soviet political repressions, and this method purportedly continues in today's Russia (see article "Psikhushka"). Therefore, in Russian humor jokes about the mentally ill often have a political subtext.
- A lecturer visits the mental hospital and gives a lecture about how great communism is. Everybody claps loudly except for one person who keeps quiet.
The lecturer asks: "Why aren't you clapping?" and the person replies "I'm not a psycho, I just work here."
A large number of jokes, arguably unparalleled among other nations, are about people with acute dystrophy. The main topics are extreme weakness, slowness, leanness, and weightlessness of a dystrophic patient.
Some of them originated in the infamous Gulag camps. Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago (as well as other writers about Gulag) wrote that dystrophy was a typical phase in the life of a gulag inmate. He quotes the following Gulag joke.
- In order to deny international rumors, Stalin allowed a foreign delegation to inspect some Gulag camps. As a result, a foreign reporter wrote "a zek is lazy, gluttonous, and deceiving".
By a misfortune the same reporter landed in a gulag as an inmate himself. When released, he wrote "a zek is lean, ringing, and transparent" (Russian: tonkiy, zvonkiy and prozrachny).
Other ones depict scorn of working-class people to intelligentsia, who were most often physically underdeveloped.
- Muscular dystrophy patients are playing hide and seek in the hospital.
"Vovka, where are you?"
"I'm here, behind this broomstick!"
"Hey, didn't we have an arrangement not to hide behind thick objects?" - A jolly doctor comes into a dystrophy ward: "Greetings, eagles!" (a Russian cliché in addressing e.g. brave soldiers)
In reply: "No, we are not. We're only flying because the nurse turned the fan on!" - A muscular dystrophy patient is lying in bed and shouting: "Nurse! Nurse!"
"What is it now?"
"Kill the fly! It's trampling my chest."
Read more about this topic: Russian Jokes
Famous quotes containing the words jokes and/or disabilities:
“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)
“A child is not a salmon mousse. A child is a temporarily disabled and stunted version of a larger person, whom you will someday know. Your job is to help them overcome the disabilities associated with their size and inexperience so that they get on with being that larger person.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)