Leagues of Laughter: War, comedy and the Soviet legacy in Russia and Ukraine

What is it about?

Leagues of Laughter describes why traditions continue – and why they don’t. For keeping a tradition going takes work. Each time someone puts on a kilt in Scotland, conducts a Buddhist ritual in Mongolia or ages cheddar in Somerset, they make a choice to take that action instead of choosing something – anything – else from the realm of imaginable possibilities. People do these things for reasons that go beyond not being able to think of alternatives. Instead, traditions endure when they reinforce values that hold meaning in a given community. In part, this book is a story about how geopolitics affects tradition. Mostly, though, this is an ethnography about laughter, and about why people work to create it.

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Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Leagues of Laughter introduces the idea of tradition as stance. Stances may be verbal or nonverbal, referential or nonreferential, but in all cases comment on some aspect of social life, either immediate, indexed, or mass-mediated. Social stances thus link present action to narratives about the past, interpersonal practices to cultural imaginaries, and individual choices to a community that understands what they signify. Because stances cut across scales of social action, they allow us to tie instances of individual agency to the very real influence of structures like laws. Stances, importantly, do not just display an orientation towards a tradition, but towards what that tradition represents. And if traditions get reproduced it is because people value all that it signifies, in terms of community and semiotic value.