Radio Yerevan joke

In the Soviet Union and the former Communist Eastern bloc countries, a popular type of humour emerged in the 1950s and 1960s featuring the fictional broadcaster called the Armenian Radio (Russian: армя́нское ра́дио, romanized: armyánskoye rádio) in the USSR and Radio Yerevan elsewhere. These jokes are typically structured in a question-and-answer session with what would purportedly be the host of the actual Armenian Radio but which would often touch topics that would be sensitive for the Communist authorities or which would otherwise be liable for censorship.

Radio Yerevan jokes likely appeared from "Armenian riddles", a kind of absurdist Russian joke that was particularly popular in the post-World War II years. By the late 1950s, these jokes increasingly became political in nature and were actively lampooning the realities of the Soviet people, such as the lack of civil liberties, shortages, poor quality of household items, as well as satirizing Communist propaganda clichés. However, many of the jokes referred to other aspects of life, particularly sexual matters, and in the Soviet Union, also to stereotypical representations of Armenians. Warsaw Pact countries evolved their own nuances of Radio Yerevan jokes, such as the answers of East German ones often starting with Im Prinzip ja/nein, 'In general yes/no'. Few jokes from this cycle have been created since the fall of Communism in these states.

History

Many types of question-and-answer jokes exist, and they are pretty much universal across cultures, such as lightbulb jokes. Some however, are more specific to one culture, such as elephant jokes that were an American fad in the 1960s. In the Soviet Union, a peculiar type of such jokes appeared that involved not the narrator but a fictional entity called the Armenian Radio.