The first joke was banned in Russia

You can consider this a boundary, or you can not consider it, since last year the article on the Lurkomorye was already banned .

In November 2014, in Izhevsk, the Industrialny District Court recognized as extremist a joke beginning with the phrase “Court. The case of the beating of a Caucasian…” This unimportant text will solemnly supplement the already impossibly cumbersome List of extremist materials.

In order to avoid accusations of violating Article 20.29 of the Code of Administrative Offenses (production and distribution of extremist materials), we will retell here not the forbidden joke itself, but its original Soviet-era version, which coincides with the forbidden one in almost everything except the nationality of one of the characters (and, as they say , at that time perceived as unequivocally non-nationalist).

Two people are tried for attacking a Jew - an intelligent-looking man and a young guy. The judge asks the intellectual to tell what happened.

I was on the bus and my neighbor stepped on my foot. I think if after 3 minutes he doesn’t remove his leg and apologize, then I’ll hit him. I look at the clock - 1 minute - it's worth it. 2 minutes is worth it. 3 minutes is worth it. Here he hit.

The judge addresses the guy:

- And why did you join and start kicking with your feet?

- Can you imagine: I'm on the bus, I see some man and a Jew standing there. A man looks at his watch, then at a Jew, then at his watch, then at a Jew. Then, when he started to beat him, I thought that it had begun all over the country.

Let our courts unlawfully recognize much more significant texts as extremist, but the ban on the joke itself looks ominous (especially since this story also contains a criminal charge under article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation on inciting hatred, potentially threatening with a real term). Too unpleasant pages from the history textbook are resurrected by the phrase “Sit down for a joke”.

Humor, even with a xenophobic tinge, is a subtle thing, not regulated in principle. The number of ethnically colored jokes is large, and it is not always possible to accurately determine even who exactly in the joke is the object of ridicule. For example, in many jokes about the Chukchi, we laugh not at the Chukchi, but at the “big brother”, his conceit, megalomania and inability to objectively look at his own shortcomings and problems.

So it is in the now banned joke. It contains the offensive word "hachik". It has a morally dubious ease in handling the tragic theme of hate-motivated violence. But in this anecdote there is not a single call, there is not even an approval of the described situation. Formally, it does not fit the legally defined definition of extremism . Maybe someone will want to object that the joke affirms “the inferiority of a person on the basis of his nationality” (wording from the law) ... But this is not the case either. The situation is described neutrally. It is not claimed that he did this because he is Caucasian, nor that all Caucasians always do this. And there is no more nationalism in this joke than in that Soviet joke - anti-Semitism, where the object of ridicule, of course, is a young man who attacked a Jew. If nationalists - some out of simple stupidity, some out of self-irony - laugh at this joke and interpret it in their own way, then it's not a joke at all.

Everything that I wrote here is, as it seems, obvious things. But the official court decision to ban the joke remains an ironclad fact, with all sorts of consequences.

Sources

• Rosalskaya Maria. First joke banned in Russia // Snob.ru. 2014. November 18.