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‘If we cannot laugh like that, then how can we laugh?’

Elaborating an appropriate form of Soviet laughter was one of the most pressing tasks faced by the film industry in the 1930s. Increasingly sensitive to the ideological perils of failing to deliver more Soviet comedies to the public, industry bosses turned the development of this genre into a high priority. Such efforts, however, were persistently hindered by anxieties about facilitating the ‘mindless’ laughter of comic gags rather than the ‘meaningful’ laughter of triumphant celebration or satirical condemnation. Drawing on psychoanalytic readings of the comic, this chapter explores how the play with process of signification and disruption of habitual sense-making patterns became increasingly difficult to reconcile with the objectives of socialist realism. The thorny debates surrounding Konstantin Iudin’s two pre-war comedies, A Girl with Character (1939) and Hearts of Four (1941), are used to demonstrate the ways in which the project of creating film comedy based on Soviet material had come to a standstill by the beginning of the 1940s. The war against ‘mindless’ and ‘mechanical’ laughter pushed filmmakers to abandon the comic mode that had been so central to early Soviet cinema in preference for ego-affirming humour. The new paradigm of realistic comedy purged from the ‘excess’ of comic devices, however, little satisfied the expectations of Soviet audiences. Whilst the stultifying demands previously placed on the genre briefly eased as the Soviet public’s right to the ‘laughter of victors’ was granted after the end of WWII, the onset of the Zhdanovshchina brought post-war concessions in the sphere of comedy to a halt.