On November 24, longtime television host Alexander Maslyakov celebrated his 70th anniversary and also the jubilee of the KVN show. Earlier in the month this broadly popular game celebrated its fiftieth anniversary since its first broadcast on television. Columnist Anna Loshchikhina reflects on how the game has evolved and at the same time remained both timely and trendy as other comedy projects rise and fail on Russian-language television.
For many years, just before the next birthday of the ‘lord’ – Maslyakov’s nickname among several generations of KVN participants – rumors have been circulated about the famous presenter’s retirement and that either Ivan Urgant or Maslyakov Jr. would be his successor. Nothing of the kind happens, to be sure. Those who know the ‘lord,’ who prefers to call himself a ‘despot’, only sneer. Maslyakov does not even think of giving up his post as the irreplaceable host of the popular show. Why? KVN and Alexander Maslyakov are almost inseparable concepts.
‘Almost,’ because it was actually TV star Svetlana Zhiltsova and Alik Axelrod who launched the Club of the Merry and Inventive (KVN). The latter together with MSU academic Sergey Muratov and worker of the Moscow Electric Bulb Plant Mikhail Yakovlev invented this game. Incidentally, the television management utterly hated it. At first KVN was thought to be a ‘nursery for dormitory jokes’ and the show was persistently dropped from the broadcasting schedule. That was a hard blow given that the KVN founding fathers just tried to reproduce the atmosphere of freedom and abandon found at student parties where burning jokes were born.
But in those days it was censorship managed the degree of freedom, it was censorship considerations that KVN was first kept off the air. And later, when it did show, it was heavily edited. In the late 1970s it was completely dropped.
Although the dawn of a new era has brought with it new technologies for creating humor, the principles remain the same. Today the KVN jokes and gags that reach the TV audience differ greatly from their original version, as always. According to the KVN people, a new joke is born through great pains, edited relentlessly, and then the ‘lord’ has the final word. While in Soviet years the fate of unorthodox humor was decided upon by the all-powerful Arts Council, now in the era of triumphant democracy decisions are made by a single man – the ‘Despot’.
Yet many admit that it is thanks to his ‘despotism’ and phenomenal flair for jokes, many gags were born and later stepped off the screen into the street. This is what happened to the team of Byelorussian University when its gag about Yeltsin was thought too harsh to air. However, the Maslyakov insisted, and now it is circulated as a joke of Yeltsin’s epoch:
Teachers knock on the door of Yeltsin’s office say: ‘Mr. President, we are desperately short of money.’
‘Well, that’s ok. Come on in anyway,’ the president replied.
Maslyakov is not fond of the spinoff humor shows of KVN veterans. For example, he is not afraid and never tired of saying that Comedy Club has always been and still is a cynically commercial project with jokes “below the belt” meant to rake in big bucks at corporate parties and presentations.
“Foul language is pertinent and inevitable on the construction site,” Maslyakov opines. “But this is one of the few taboos at our KVN show, as we never try to win the audience using cheap and dirty jokes.”
Today many rebuke KVN of having degraded into a funny but not necessarily sharp-witted program, increasingly tending toward the variety show genre which is now so prevalent. Nonetheless, KVN continues to occasionally allow brilliant jokes to come to the forefront and enter mass circulation. Perhaps it is this ability of the KVN show and its irreplaceable host to generate talent that explains the unprecedented longevity of this television program.
Anna Loshchikhina
