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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (March 27, 1980)
world ussia’s ‘ironic curtain’ f VOTE FOR | PHIL DAVIS THE BATTALION Page 11 THURSDAY, MARCH 27, 1980 leaks underground humor * * * * * * * * SR. YELL LEADER * * & * * * SELL YOUR BOOKS FOR MORE! ipiprfcipipjpypipipipjp BTi University Book Stores NORTHGATE 409 UNIVERSITY DR. CULPEPPER PLAZA , ^ NEXT TO 3C-BBQ ' l United Press International LOS ANGELES — Have you heard the joke from Afghanistan, omrade? Or the one about Brezh nev’s shoes? Nicolai Abbotchekov asks Vladi mir Costellovich: ‘Why are our troops staying so long in Afghanistan ?” ft Reply: B "They are still looking for the peo ple who invited them. ’’ | That is the first Russian joke about lAfghanistan to reach the Western i world, says Emil Draitser, a former | Moscow comedy writer who now keeps track of underground Russian Rebuilt city hums again United Press International YUNGAY, Peru — It has been I fiearly 10 years since a mile-long, i half-mile wide mass of glacial ice, mud and boulders thundered down a Steep canyon at more than 200 mph, burying Yungay under 80 million 1V \ cubic feet of debris, e sutiL h ums again in the rebuilt kiJBjMartyr City of Yungay” a decade re Jafter the the worst natural disaster in il ra Irecorded history of the Western (], f Hemisphere. W The earthquake of May 31, 1970, Icentered in the Pacific Ocean and Imeasuring 7.7 on the Richter scale, fkilled outright an estimated 60,000 Ipeople. It injured another 50,000 land destroyed 186,000 dwellings. LlV B A t/.S. Geological Survey expert, Dr. George Ericksen, called the damage “almost unbelievable, poss- forepibly surpassing in magnitude such pt catastrophic events as the M t. Pelee constojeruption of 1902 on the island of Martinique and the eruption of iievattpuvius in the year A.D. 79 that rderedjburied the city of Pompeii.” .e said!■ The earthquake’s destruction cen- ipedpSitered on Yungay. Thousands of tons ctor al of rocks and ice from the. peak of Peru’s highest mountain, 22,000- eveni pot Mt. Huascaran hurtled into two land, taL's. The overflow mixed with the lustra ! wall of debris that crushed Yungay tedthand the nearby, smaller town of Ran- era otfflfflhirca. t prop*' I was east and just above the town /asn’t pasturing my animals when every- n’tAl thing started shaking,” said Augusti- no Acuna. “After, there was a calm. All the |Bildings in the city fell down, and Ben I heard the rumble coming from S Huasc iinin. It covered the whole city less than a minute. No one could cape. Other towns along the canyon paped Yungay s total devastation, I it their survivors were left home- is, hungry and frightened. “I was scared,” said farmer Gri- aldo Ulloa, a mountain dweller lose land lies above the neighbor- city of Caraz. “Our house fell wn and I thought at least now it 11 stop. It didn’t. The earth moved lain and Huascaran fell.” A decade after the catastrophe, mmerce bustles in the market of a gely prefabricated new Yungay rth of the rocky plain covering the city. “The earthquake all seems like a jeam now,” said farmer Ulloa’s oghter, Mercedes, 24. Still, once awhile, I wonder if it will all hap- humor from Los Angeles, aided by his joke-intelligence network behind the ironic curtain. But Draitser, a scholar of the sub ject, recognized it instantly: “This is an old joke. I heard it years ago about Soviet troops in Czechos lovakia. “Many underground jokes have been in existence for many years and the names and places change to fit new circumstances and persons,” he said. “When I first got to the West five years ago, I read some emigre jour nals published 50 years ago. Some of the jokes I had heard from friends in Moscow just the month before. “In Russia, we can recycle the jokes that are never printed or heard on radio or television.” For instance: Why is there always a meat shor tage in Moscow? We are moving toward commun ism so fast the animals cannot keep up. Draitser, 42, a professor of Rus sian literature at UCLA, was for more than 10 years a humor writer for Russian publications including: “Izvestia,” the humor magazine; “Krokodil,” Soviet movies and tele- is the level of what is permitted. My totalitarian mind still is not used to such frontal attacks on governmental personalities.” While working on his doctoral dis sertation on Russian satire, and a col lection of stories on “America through the eyes of a Russian,” he has published a book-length collec tion of underground jokes, titled “Forbidden Laughter.” He keeps abreast of the latest on the Moscow jokeline through coded letters from fellow humorists in the Soviet Union. He does not fear for them, he said, because “So far, I’m not on the (KGB) list of dangerous people. They have more important people than me to go after.” "But I imagine if 1 would be kid napped by the KGB my little book would sell in the millions right away.” Here are some examples of jokes from Draitser’s “Forbidden Laughter”: Pravda reporting two-man foot race between President John Ken nedy and Premier Nikita Khrush chev, won by Kennedy: “Our beloved Nikita Sergeivitch won a respectable second, but the American president barely managed to finish next to last. ” Habitech PROBLEM: A six-foot man looking for a comfortable chair at a comfortable price. SOLUTION: Our vision. Draitser came to the United States in 1974 when a satire on a play back fired and he was suddenly “unem ployable.” Krokodil published the play just as the playwright was prom oted to a high-ranking editorship. Why America? Thank fellow satir ist Art Buchwald. “Buchwald is widely known in Russia because they print all his col umns making fun of the White House, the CIA, things like that. Almost every week in Russia you can read something by Buchwald. “I thought ‘Oh God, they have such freedom there.’ In Russia you would be in jail for even thinking such things as Buchwald does, much less writing them. “What amazes me about America Jew asking KGB for permission to emigrate to Israel: “Every night my neighbor bangs on the wall and yells ‘As soon as we put an end to the Soviet regime we ll take care of you Jews. KGB official: “Why leave the best country in the world for that? The regime will last forever. ” Jew: “That’s my second reason. ’’ JUpInamk, I pUTf-*1©^ Eddie Dominguez '66 A W Joe Arciniega '74 m Brezhnev to cosmonauts: “The Americans were first to land on the moon, so we will be the first to land on the sun. ” Cosmonauts: “Comrade, we will be burned to death. ” Brezhnev: “Do you think we know nothing? 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