[galoisgirl]

For you, maybe.

Communism came with heavy censorship. You had to be sly to pass some jokes.

For instance, Seksmisja features a scene where two guys end up in the middle of nowhere. One says "let's go east, there must be civilization there". The east if of course a dab at the Soviet Union. There were jokes that 99% of the population would understand, and yet the censors would miss them.

[d3ckard]

I seriously doubt censors missed that. I think they were playing the game as well. Seksmisja quote is a good example of that.

[aebtebeten]

The entire premise of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome,_or_No_Trespassing is that people who seek power (and hence rise in bureaucracies) take themselves way too seriously. So maybe all a censor had to do was to make sure the jibes were cerebral enough that uncultured people would automatically take the opposite[1] Poe's Law interpretation...

[1] for polyvalence, cue the Stalin/moustache joke

(Based on Boyarskiy's stage personality, I'm guessing the following had some ambiguity:

    Пора пора порадуемся на своем веку
    Красавице и кубку, счастливому клинку

despite being the theme song for a kid's show. Or am I overinterpreting?)

[rimliu]

Wait, that song was a theme song for a kids show? I only knew if as a song from the soviet interpretation of "The Three Musketeers".

[082349872349872]

That's what I was thinking of (most recently seen by me in a Rule 63 quartet complete with costume horses for New Year's carnival).

Sorry if it wasn't a kids' show; I had assumed so from the all the YouTube comments when I discovered it to the effect of "cool, I totally remember watching this at my grandmother's." But maybe that says more about how old current internauts were in 1978 than what the target audience really had been?

[pndy]

I wonder if critics would have issues with Seksmisja today - especially the ending shot.

[tartoran]

Yes, artists were getting very creative with censorship during communism. A lot of those movies are masterpieces