Leagues of Laughter: War, Comedy and the Soviet Legacy in Russia and Ukraine

Leagues of Laughter traces the evolution of a Soviet-created youth game called KVN (Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh or Club of the Cheerful and Clever) over sixty years as students’ nation-states collapsed, competed, and eventually went to war. Through cross-border narratives, the book shows how humor persists—and transforms—amid authoritarianism, censorship, and conflict. With insight and compassion, author A. Austin Garey reveals how laughter became a mode of resistance, identity, and cultural continuity in the long cultural context of the war in Ukraine. In addition to introducing a novel theory of “tradition as stance” to explain how traditions are reproduced and reinterpreted over time, the book offers a compelling comparative analysis of cultural production under political pressure.