THE BALM OF POLITICAL LAUGHTER

...history did...

...Yugoslav communism can best be understood as an institutionalized version of the extended family...

...Another joke had the Indian ambassador bringing Tito a baby elephant as a get-well gift...

...is a way of taking the anxiety of pain and externalizing it, formalizing it so that its threat becomes more distant and less potent...

...Still, the Yugoslavs are hardly naive about the difficulties they face...

...One joke had Tito, Leonid Brezhnev, and Jimmy Carter comparing their countries' respective standards of living...

...Peter calms Satan and agrees to take Tito...

...Such jokes take the pain and anxiety of a national crisis and convert it into an expression of national.hope...

...The cynicism toward bureaucracy that is so widespread in the nations of Eastern Europe is transformed in Yugoslavia into a benevolent impatience with the system's imperfections and failures—benevolent because in practice the system openly allows room to work around it...

...Why...

...the Russian, lean and tough, will have to be boiled for a while...

...Incredulous, they radio back for instructions on what to do with so little paint...

...Tito, like Mao Tse-tung, learned early that the strength of his compatriots lay in what had once been their greatest weakness—their ti^s to the soil and to the old-world style of life...

...everyone knew that he survived as long as he did largely because of modern advances in life-support systems...

...his mother wrote back...

...When the ambassador replies that elephants live for a hundred years, Tito remarks sadly, "The problem with owning pets is knowing that death will take them before you are ready to part with them...

...Peter will take him...

...Here again, what might be a liability has been approached as an asset—and may ultimately prove to be the greatest of all Yugoslav assets: Yugoslavia, largely under the influence of Tito, has avoided close identification with either of the superpowers...

...There are countless Yugoslav jokes about Soviet-American competition for dominance, and while they generally show America getting the best of the Russians, the humor reflects a bemused plague-on-both-your-houses attitude...

...On a trip to a mountain village last spring, my host's aging mother repeatedly reminded him to warn her before the next war came so that she could stock up on salt...

...Because the Montenegrin soldiers are considered the elite fighters of the Yugoslav army, the council was shocked and perplexed by the secretary's response...

...Three weeks later, St...

...The American...

...The chief then asks their companion where he hails from, and when the man identifies himself as a Yugoslav, the chief exclaims, "Oh, really...

...On the contrary, they reflected a commodity in short supply in the West, but one that has apparently not become scarce in Yugoslavia—the capacity for hope...

...they asked, "What problem...

...Where," the secretary pondered, "will we bury them...

...Tito did not give the Yugoslavs their character, their courage, or their sense of humor...

...Peter meets Satan and asks him how things are going with Tito in Hell...

...Brezhnev and Carter looked at each other in disbelief and demanded to know how this was possible...

...Such humor requires confidence that human troubles can be overcome, or willingness to laugh in the face of the inevitable...

...The party secretary asked his advisers how many Chinese there were, and when they answered that estimates ran into the billions, he frowned...

...Tito recognized that belief in the family adapted itself well to the idea of a nation-family, and held out hope for transforming a weak, disjointed country into a strong, united one...

...Peter and Satan are discussing what to do with him...

...Living in a country still dotted with pill boxes and blockhouses, plowing fields that still yield machine gun casings, the Yugoslavs understand that the winds of change- can shift suddenly...

...Post-Tito Yugoslavia will survive the conflicts of the coming decades only if it recognizes that the nation is, like Tito, only human...

...Don't be so sure...

...PrijetnoT—the Yugoslav equivalent of "Bon appetitr Inherent sympathy with the Third World and the ability to overlook an underdeveloped country's "primitive" shortcomings may prove to be Yugoslavia's greatest assets in the critical post-Tito years...

...When Yugoslavia sided with the Soviets in the early stages of the Sino-Soviet split (a position long since abandoned), a joke had the Montenegrin party congress discussing the possibility of open hostilities with China...

...On the contrary, they display a hard-nosed realism about the twists and turns history can take...

...Yugoslavs remember Tito as the leader who lifted them out of confusion and pointed them toward the future, but it would be a violation of the hard-won Yugoslav reality principle to worship him as a mythological figure of perfection...

...Satan throws up his hands: "Awful...

...and second, there is no such place as Heaven, so get your feet back on the ground...

...The Tito jokes reflected neither cynicism nor boredom...

...But the Yugoslavs found in Tito's lingering death a symbol of their own tenacity and will to survive...

...The weather here is very cold," he informed his mother, "but the officers tell us we will be on the Yugoslav coast by spring...

...While the superpowers are, almost of necessity, locked into an adversary relationship with underdeveloped countries, the Yugoslavs have the political, economic, and cultural sympathies that permit them to establish relationships based on equal footing with countries far below them in political and economic status...

...is ordered served up immediately...

...Just paint 'Coca-Cola' across the middle...

...These days it is the rare humorist who can attack anxiety and put it on the run...

...Neither really wants Tito, but they strike a bargain: Satan will take him on a trial basis for three weeks, and if things don't work out, St...

...U Dan Shanahan, a member of the faculty of the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, lived for a year in Yugoslavia...

...Though the Yugoslavs still rely heavily on Western economic support, they have invested even more heavily in cordial relations with countries controlling many of the natural resources essential to modernization...

...No one believed for a minute that Tito might recover once his illness became prolonged...

...For the jokes circulating about Tito were qualitatively different from those one might expect to hear under similar circumstances in the West...

...who is "fat and succulent...

...One day the Soviets receive a shipment of 200,000 gallons of red paint—with which they begin painting the moon red...

...Look," Peter answers, "first of all it's 'comrade,' not 'saint...

...How's it going with Tito in Heaven, St...

...Tito, gazing off into space and shaking his head, replied, "I don't know...

...Today, the great majority of Yugoslavs feel a tie to socialism, not because they understand Marxist dialectics but because they understand family feeling and have begun to extend it beyond the blood bond into the societal one...

...Yugoslavia has one foot in the modern, "developed" world and one in the underdeveloped old world...

...This creates a serious problem," he said...

...The implication of Pemstein's report was that Yugoslavs had become bored with waiting for Tito's death...

...Brezhnev said, "The average Russian earns only $500 a month, but he spends it all...

...But that interpretation says more about Western attitudes than it does about Yugoslavia's attitudes toward Tito's death...

...it rejects pain and exorcises it...

...Then Tito took his turn: "The average Yugoslav earns $700 a month," he said, "and lives on $900...

...The modern world, however, finds itself faced with so much anxiety that its humor often fails to do anything more than draw attention to the underlying pain...

...Satan asks...

...My son goes to the University of Zagreb...

...Shortly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a joke was told about a young Russian writing home from Kabul...

...What Tito did was to set their imaginations afire and allow them to believe in themselves...

...The Yugoslavs value the strong ethnic flavor of their culture, and they see it as a bond with the developing countries of the Third World...

...Carter said, "The average American earns $1,500 a month, lives on $1,000 a month, and saves the rest for a rainy day...

...One joke deals with two moon bases, one Soviet and one American...

...three weeks later they meet again...

...Houston replies, "Simple...

...The Americans frantically radio the news to Houston control, and a week later they receive 10,000 gallons of white paint...

...I've got demonstrations, strikes—and now he's organizing unions...

...They saw a reflection of the dogged determination that allowed them to resist the Nazis and the Soviets, and in that reflection they found reason to hope—not, perhaps, for Tito's survival, but for their own...

...Laughter, Freud would say...

...They told your father the same thing in 1948...

...Peter...

...But as Yugoslavia faces the period of global hard times ahead, an even greater asset than its Third World diplomacy, its roots in old-world solidarity, or its imaginative blend of capitalist and Marxist economics, will be the will of the people to survive and to triumph over any obstacles they may encounter...

...Perhaps this joke, told in the weeks after Tito's funeral, gives some indications of Yugoslavia's chances of success: After Tito's death, St...

...The Balm of Political Laughter Yugoslav jokes about the system help to ease the pain BY DAN SHANAHAN Early in April of last year, as Josip Broz Tito entered his eighth week in a coma, the Voice of America's Belgrade correspondent, Ron Pemstein, reported that jokes about Tito's prolonged agony had started to circulate in Yugoslavia...

...One Yugoslav joke has the obligatory Russian, American, and Yugoslav set upon by cannibals in the jungle and brought before the chief...

...Humor," Freud said, "is rebellious...

...one was left imagining tasteless black humor spreading through Belgrade...

...While its standard of living is comparable to some West European countries, the spirit of the East is still at the forefront of national character...

...I want him out...

...The joke involved a glimpse into the future, a report attributed to the three o'clock news in the year 2000: "In the daily bulletin issued from the Ljubljana clinic today," the announcer says, "President Tito announced that there would be no further reports on his condition because the last of his team of physicians has died of old age...

...confident that the government will look out for him in difficult times...

...Stroking the animal, Tito asks about the elephant's life expectancy...

...Even in the post-Tito era, there seems to be a recognition that blind faith is no substitute for tempered realism...

...Take this joke, one of those most frequently heard around the time of Pemstein's report, when daily bulletins on Tito's condition were issued in time for the main news program at three o'clock in the afternoon...

...Perhaps it is the tempering to which Yugoslav optimism has been subjected that leads one to become infected with it...

...A closer look at the jokes made as Tito lay dying confirms what the bulk of Yugoslav humor suggests: Yugoslavia—for reasons too complex to be grasped in a brief glimpse at its society and culture—is a nation capable of intense laughter and rebellious hope...