A New Story

A classic example of Russian “intelligent” humor. The best part of “The General History, Edited by ‘SATIRIKON’,” which saw the light at the beginning of the 20th century (1910) on the pages of the St. Petersburg satirical magazine SATIRIKON.

The story of Russian laughter is very short… In the distant past, Russian laughter was cultivated only by mermaids—who, catching an inexperienced passerby on the shore, would start tickling him until, writhing from laughter, he surrendered his soul to God…

The subsequent stages of Russian laughter were marked by the same enchanting simplicity and lack of complication: they would put a naked man out in the cold and pour him with icy water, which caused the noblemen of that time to have unstoppable bouts of laughter. They bought jesters—and if the jester was hunchbacked, the buyer’s good mood was guaranteed for a long time.

But when Russian laughter left behind mermaids, frozen people, and cheerful hunchbacks and sped on toward the cultural ideal, it crashed headlong into the embrace of a fat, loud mother-in-law, who long squeezed this poor soul in her arms, while kind censorship stretched its hands over them and blessed such an unnatural union.

By removing from its program all the listed stages of Russian laughter—from deadly tickling of readers by mermaids to the popular mother-in-law, “SATIRIKON” chose a new, its own path; and entering its third year of existence, it can confidently say that the direction it has chosen inspires more admiration than the laughter of frozen people and travelers who died untimely from tickling.