Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Neville Chamberlain, Philippe Pétain, and Vidkun Quisling walk into a coal-miners’ bar in Donetsk, in Russian-occupied Donbass, where a band of Putin-lookalikes is warming up for their evening set. The out-of-towners order three bottles of cheap vodka, one for each of them, but the bartender confesses he has only one bottle left, so they’ll have to compete for it. A singing contest, he says, and the band will play any melody you choose. The boys at the bar will vote on your singing.

Pétain went first, belting out Госуда́рственный гимн Росси́йской Федера́ции ‘State Anthem of the Russian Federation’ (lyrics from 2000, music from 1939), which got some appreciative catcalls but mostly polite applause.

Next up, Quisling performed a surprisingly seductive rendition of Подмосковные вечера ‘Moscw Nights’, a Soviet Russian patriotic song from 1956, and the guys at the bar went wild, miming lewdly what they’d do on their patriotic Moscow nights.

Then Chamberlain read the room and, abandoning all reserve, stripped off his coat, tie, and shirt and leapt onto the nearest table, to shout — at the top of his lungs, red-faced, dripping sweat from his bare chest, the downest, dirtiest rendition ever seen of Боже, Царя храни! ‘God Save the Tsar!’ (the national anthem of the Russian Empire, from 1833). The crowd went crazy, paraded him on their shoulders as a conquering hero, licked the sweat from his body, showered him with boozy kisses. For this they awarded him that last bottle of vodka (which he kept all for himself). Plus Poland, with an option to take the Sudetenland.

Acknowledgments. Most directly, thanks to Woody Allen’s early comic pieces, which still break me up. At great distance, to whoever supplied me with the shaggy dog stories I serialized in 1957-58 in the humor column I wrote for my high school newspaper — and, more important, to whoever gave me the idea of analyzing the joke form along with the telling of the jokes. You could make a career of that.

And then of course, to that delightful comic actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has grown into a true Герой нашего времени, a hero of our time (not Lermontov’s). May we see him back in a coat and tie, at peace, and serving the people of his country with skill and grace as they rebuild the devastated Ukraine. It could happen; the equivalent happened, against all expectation, for John Lewis.

Meanwhile, I note that the Ukrainians have been managing to mount opera performances in an underground bomb shelter in the city of Kharkiv. They sing and dance and enjoy one another’s company. This is the country VZ is fighting to save. Sing with me, friends.

This entry was posted on March 2, 2025 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Humor, Jokes, Language and politics, Russian, Ukrainian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.