Polytonation

On television they began to joke about politics. But jokes, like TV news, are still controlled manually

Anyone can buy tickets for the filming of the ProjectorParisHilton program, which airs on Saturdays on Channel One. This is a Western practice: it is believed that the one who paid for participation in the program laughs more sincerely than the freeloaders from the extras. A week ago, the guest of the program was the French couturier Jean-Paul Gaultier. Together with him, the presenters ridiculed the outfits of Natasha Koroleva and Masha Rasputina, and then joked about director Fyodor Bondarchuk. “Okay, we're done with the political council of United Russia,” Ivan Urgant finished and put aside a photo of the director, who recently joined the party's leadership. This moment was not shown on the air.

At the same time, the entire "Ukrainian bloc" went under the knife: a parody of Viktor Yanukovych, a story about how Yanukovych called Anna Akhmatova Anna Akhmetova - in honor of his sponsor Rinat Akhmetov - and a remark due to the fact that a criminal case was initiated against Yulia Tymoshenko : "It's stupid to give a woman money and then ask what she spent it on." The ending of the reprise about the coalition British government was also greatly reduced. “Not one person rules the country, but two!” exclaimed Sergey Svetlakov. “Where is this seen?! - picked up Ivan Urgant. - You have to compete. Think about who's in charge. "Leapfrog!" - summed up Svetlakov. They cut out about leapfrog and competition.

The shooting lasts more than two hours, and on the air the hosts joke for no more than half an hour. Of course, the essence of the subsequent editing is not only to cut out too sharp political jokes. Either the time has changed, or the audience, or something else, but it suddenly turned out that without political satire it is no longer easy for today's TV to keep the interest of the audience. The ratings of central TV channels began to fall - many active young people simply stopped watching TV. They had to be returned - forced to watch the news, which today they seem to be simply boring.

The reform of television broadcasting was started three years ago by the general director of Channel One, Konstantin Ernst. He launched a whole entertainment line: ProjectorParisHilton, Personality Cartoon, Big Difference and South Butovo. One of the top managers of Channel One says that their humorous programs are now considered an even more effective political resource than newscasts. And they follow TV jokes in the Kremlin and the White House no less meticulously than they follow the news. The concept of “positive news” also extends to humor, and the set of topics and characters rarely goes beyond the general information policy. To be joking, it's about Viktor Yushchenko, Mikheil Saakashvili, Hillary Clinton and an abstract official from Putin and Medvedev's entourage.

ON THE AIR

Chastushki performed by Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev first appeared on New Year's Eve. This should have happened earlier, says a source in the leadership of Channel One, but they did not manage to draw the first persons in time. “A difficult task,” explains TV critic Anna Kachkaeva. - On the one hand, similarity is needed, and on the other hand, for the parody to be good. If you draw with little Tsakhes, you won’t blow your head off.

Little Tsakhes was already there - because of him, the Dolls program on NTV was closed. Since then, Putin has been portrayed only on the same NTV in the Real Politics program, but always without a head so that his face is not visible. “To give the image of the president a sacred meaning,” explains Kachkaeva. “The heads of the high priests were not depicted in ancient times either.”

Now, having returned to the stage, the president and the prime minister were not only drawn in full growth, but also slapped each other with tambourines to the beat of ditties. However, they did not sing anything seditious: the Nabucco gas pipeline, the deal with Opel, Sochi roads and Viktor Yushchenko. But the effect was huge. The next day, The New York Times concluded that a thaw had begun on Russian TV.

Ernst, according to his entourage, released these ditties without prior approval from the Kremlin. There were rumors that he did not air the verse about the 2012 elections. The employees of Channel One themselves in informal conversations admit that they do not see any particular courage in these cartoons - rather, they say, an illusion is created of the existence of political satire on television. And Ernst, they say, conceived the “Cartoon of Personality” with a different idea: simply to accustom the prime minister and the president to the very fact of the presence of caricatures of them on the central air.

Personality Cartoon was launched on the back of the success of ProjectorParisHilton, a success that continues to this day. Guests, they say on the channel, often come on the recommendation of the Kremlin or the White House. For example, not so long ago Nikita Mikhalkov. But the leaders were happy. “He set off with us in all serious ways,” recalls Alexander Tsekalo. “Already in the first minute, he fell under the table, and then he allowed Svetlakov to pull his mustache.”

TWO TROUBLES

Political satire on TV has its own rules of the game. News for the Searchlight is selected by a group of screenwriters. She also writes jokes and comments. Then the presenters of the programs rehearse other people's jokes, diluting them with their own. There is a lot of improvisation on the record. The authors do not receive written instructions on how and on what topics to joke. But everyone admits that the principle of tacit agreements works. The writers don't go out of their way.

And if we were to joke, then without jokes about the president and the prime minister, there would be no way - questions would arise. “Prime Minister Putin says that intermediaries got him. He probably decided to register his Niva, ”they scoffed in one of the issues of Searchlight. In another, about a photo in which Medvedev waves his hand, they said: “Free cash desk!” When, during a trip to Svalbard, Putin put a collar on a bear, "Projector" joked about "United Russia" - they say, the same bear posed for the party's logo.

Employees of the First do not hide the fact that they have mastered the main creative method of political satire - to joke not at Putin and Medvedev, but at those around them: "If the president is slandering his subordinates at a video conference, then it is worth making fun of frightened officials." The official is an excellent target for criticism. The audience will approve. He can even be a very specific official. After the failure of the Olympic team in Vancouver, the Searchlight did not leave a living place on the head of the ROC, Leonid Tyagachev. It was soon removed.

“Television allows itself as much satire as the leaders of the country have a sense of humor,” says showman Alexander Tsekalo. When Medvedev and Putin came to the shooting of KVN, they joked about them according to the same principle: they laughed at the retinue. During one of the games, the Pyatigorsk team told Putin that Russia had two troubles - fools and roads: "And when you, Vladimir Vladimirovich, go somewhere, one trouble immediately begins to repair another." In humorous programs, Putin is usually called by his first name and patronymic.

In the Kursk team of KVN there is a parodist of Dmitry Medvedev. And during the reign of Putin, a whole galaxy of kaveenschikov parodying him appeared. Carte blanche, however, was only with the artist Maxim Galkin. He joked about the Chekist past of the President of Russia, imitated German speech and teased Putin for not speaking English. On Channel One they claim that once Galkin was invited to the celebration of the Day of the Chekist, and the president was delighted. But over time, Galkin's parodies began to sound less and less.

Uladzymyr Uladzymyrovych

The program "Cartoon Personality" should also play with current news. She has the same problem: few people can draw. In the first episodes of the cartoon, Yuri Luzhkov, wearing a funny cap, sells out Red Square. The members of the government are portrayed as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, with whom Hillary Clinton flirts all the time, and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin in the form of Koshchei the Immortal languishing over gold. You can joke that the Minister of Finance is greedy, but in general about budget policy - not very much.

In the same "Projector" it is difficult to imagine a joke on Deputy Prime Ministers Igor Sechin or Igor Shuvalov. They have a good reason: the general public does not know them by sight. Although until they start to joke about them on the air, or at least show them on the news, they will not be recognized. The expert Kachkaeva recalls that in "Dolls" there was exactly the same effect: many learned from there what Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov or Interior Minister Viktor Yerin look like. In the same way, the first deputy head of the presidential administration, Vladislav Surkov, with his initiatives, does not get on the TV screen. And it depends on his opinion in many respects how and what you can joke about on TV.

There are also difficulties with foreign leaders. On the one hand, the PR people of the Kremlin and the White House carefully select curiosities from the lives of unfriendly politicians. On the other hand, the authors explain, one cannot joke about many things. An employee of the TV channel explains that, first of all, they cut just jokes that can offend foreigners: “When Lukashenka slipped away from a meeting with Putin, he was ridiculed, but a long reprise about his illegitimate son was cut off entirely.”

At one of the latest ProjectorParisHilton programs, the hosts, as if jokingly, invited Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to the studio: “Come in, Vladimir Vladimirovich, let's have a cup of tea.” Around the same time, Ukrainian comedians from the Kvartal 95 studio performed a parody of ProjectorParisHilton on Ukrainian TV. The parody was as follows: Vladimir Putin comes to the improvised studio of the Searchlight, and the hosts eat paper with questions and news in horror. Further - the conclusion: "Russia is a democratic country where they boldly joke about Ukraine."

In the spring, the Rossiya TV channel released a female version of the Searchlight - the Girls program with the host Ksenia Sobchak. “We were promised complete freedom of speech,” says Ksenia Sobchak. “But, of course, we will coordinate the topics of the news with the producers of the channel.” So far, her sharpest joke: to call the Russian prime minister in the Belarusian manner - Uladzymyr Uladzymyrovich Putsyn.

COUNTRY DUTIES

There are also specific areas that are not joked about on television. Sobchak admits that the Rossiya leadership has filtered out religion and public holidays. Similar conclusions were reached by the creators of the film "Election Day", which grew out of the popular theatrical performance "Quartet I". “Over time, it became clear that it was not recommended to joke about religion and, in particular, the Russian Orthodox Church,” recalls one of the authors, Leonid Barats. Several episodes about a rogue priest performed by Mikhail Efremov disappeared from the film. In the play, Efremov played exactly the priest, but in the film he was made a thief who stole a cassock.

Not all political humor on television is under direct control. On "Russia", for example, there is a sacred cow - the program "On duty in the country" with Mikhail Zhvanetsky. On federal TV, probably, only from him today you can hear a remark that “persons from the past have returned to power,” or even talk about marches of dissenters. Zhvanetsky is a living classic, and the program has been on the air for seven years now. Once with the idea to discuss current events on the air, the head of the ATV studio, Anatoly Malkin, came to the head of the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, Oleg Dobrodeev, says Andrey Maksimov, host of the Country Duty Officer. Dobrodeev came up with the idea that Zhvanetsky became the hero of the program. “He speaks and does not speak,” explains Kachkaeva. “This is the humor of half hints, half smiles, half tones.”

On cable TV, political humor is not so picky. For example, the authors of the Nasha Russia program on the TNT channel say that government officials have no complaints about jokes about deputies traveling around the country's strip bars. And about the honest traffic cop Nikolai Laptev, who breaks his wife's leg so as not to buy her new shoes, they say that this is "an exact disclosure of the image."

“We try to make Nasha Rush spicy,” says producer Semyon Slepakov. - But she is impersonal due to the genre. So we have no complaints. Unless, when you start to resolve the issue on the road, traffic cops say: now I will decide with you, like your Nikolai Laptev, who does not take bribes.

The Silver Galosh award, which was broadcast on STS for several years, was at first full of political jokes. But at the dawn of Vladimir Putin's second presidential term, after the ballet number "Putin and the Oligarchs", the channel's management was summoned to the Kremlin. A source close to the leadership of STS says that the first deputy head of the administration, Vladislav Surkov, proposed to decide: “Either you are an entertainment channel, or an information channel. And then we will treat you differently.” The following year, they didn't joke about Putin, but they joked about the new Minister of Defense Anatoly Serdyukov, the "furniture minister", thanks to whom "our border is on a sliding lock." Then the politics from the scenarios of the Silver Galosh ceremony disappeared forever.

The only comedian shown on TV who complained about political censorship was Mikhail Zadornov. On the eve of Victory Day, in a column for the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, he called television producers robots that "automatically cut out all the jokes about the president and the prime minister," and came up with a new name for the United Russia party - "Let's Eat Russia." The Newsweek satirist was never contacted. He turned off his mobile phone for several weeks, leaving an answering machine: “You called the presidential administration. Your call is very important to us…”