Jokes are notoriously hard to translate. Often one ends up not just translating them but also explaining why they’re funny. Which of course is not very funny. I thought I’d test out Chat GPT on this score. So here are three examples of jokes I’ve used in my Russian and Soviet culture classes in the past. The Chat GPT responses go on for quite some time (as the AI often does), so I’ve numbered them.
Example No. 1
RSV: Can you translate this 1980s-era Soviet joke into English and tell me why it’s funny? Человек спрашивает у продавца в рыбном магазине, “У вас нет мяса?” Продавец отвечает, “Нет, у нас нет рыбы. Нет мяса, это рядом.”
Chat GPT:
A natural English translation would be:
A customer asks the clerk in a fish store:
“You don’t have any meat?”
The clerk replies:
“No, we don’t have any fish. The place with no meat is next door.”
Or, a bit more idiomatically:
A man asks in a fish shop, “Are you out of meat?”
The shopkeeper says, “No, we’re out of fish. The shop that’s out of meat is next door.”
The joke depends on the chronic shortages in the Soviet Union during the late Soviet period, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Empty shelves were common, and many specialized state stores sold only one category of goods—fish stores, meat stores, bread stores, etc.
The humor comes from treating the absence of products as the defining characteristic of the store rather than what it actually sells.
The customer asks whether this fish store has no meat. The clerk pedantically corrects him:
- This is the store that has no fish.
- The store that has no meat is next door.
In other words, every store is empty, but each is “distinguished” by what it is supposed to have but doesn’t.
It’s an example of classic Soviet absurdist humor: people accept a ridiculous reality as completely normal and argue over an irrelevant technicality. The joke also pokes fun at bureaucratic literalism—the clerk is more concerned with the precise classification of shortages than with the fact that nobody can buy anything.
A comparable English joke might be:
Customer: “Is this the bookstore that’s out of novels?”
Clerk: “No, this is the bookstore that’s out of dictionaries. The one that’s out of novels is across the street.”
Without the context of widespread shortages, that exchange isn’t very funny; with the Soviet context, it captures the everyday absurdity people experienced.
Example No. 2
RSV: How about this one from the Khrushchev era? Капитализм стоит на краю пропасти! Догоним и перегоним!
Chat GPT: This is another classic Soviet slogan joke. A good English translation is:
“Capitalism is standing on the edge of the abyss!”
“Let’s catch up with it—and overtake it!”
Or, preserving the rhythm of Soviet propaganda:
“Capitalism stands at the brink of the abyss!”
“We’ll catch up with it—and surpass it!”
Why it’s funny
The joke combines two well-known elements of Khrushchev-era rhetoric:
- The ideological claim that capitalism was doomed and on the verge of collapse (“standing on the edge of the abyss”).
- The famous slogan “догнать и перегнать” (“catch up with and overtake”), which Khrushchev frequently used in reference to surpassing the West economically—especially the United States.
Individually, the two slogans make sense:
- “Capitalism is on the brink of collapse.”
- “We’ll catch up with and surpass the capitalist countries.”
But when you put them together, they become self-defeating.
If capitalism is already standing at the edge of a cliff, then overtaking it means going one step farther… straight into the abyss.
The humor comes from taking two pieces of official propaganda literally and combining them to reveal an unintended implication. It’s a form of logical sabotage: the slogans are internally inconsistent once you think about them for a second.
This style of joke was especially common in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods. Rather than directly attacking the government, it exposed the absurdity of official language by following it to its perfectly logical—but ridiculous—conclusion.
Example No. Three
RSV: What about this one. Учитель показывает ученикам фотографии. Спрашивает, кот это? Это Ленин! Кто это? Это Энгельс! А кто это? Володя в первом ряду отвечает, это дядя Алёша, наш слесарь! Учитель находит Алёшу. Говорит: Дядя, знаете вы действетельно похожи на Маркса? — Слыхал. — Но надо что то делать об этом, хоть бороду сбрить! — Ну, мог бы. А потом куда умище грандиозно деть?
Chat GPT: This is one of the better Soviet jokes because it works on two levels: it mocks the cult of Marxist icons and sneaks in a compliment to the common working man.
A polished English translation would be:
A teacher is showing the class some portraits.
“Who is this?”
“That’s Lenin!”
“And this?”
“That’s Engels!”
“And who is this?”
Vovochka, sitting in the front row, says,
“That’s Uncle Alyosha, our locksmith!”
Curious, the teacher finds Uncle Alyosha and says,
“Do you know you look remarkably like Karl Marx?”
“I’ve heard that.”
“Well, you should do something about it. At least shave off the beard!”
“I could…”
“But then where would I put my tremendous brain?”
Why it’s funny
The joke hinges on the stereotypical image of Karl Marx:
- enormous white beard,
- wild hair,
- supposedly a towering intellectual (“великий ум” / “great mind”).
The teacher assumes the resemblance is just physical and suggests the obvious fix: shave the beard.
But Alyosha, a humble слесарь (a locksmith or fitter, a blue-collar tradesman), pretends that the beard exists to contain his gigantic intellect.
The last line is the punchline:
А потом куда умище грандиозно деть?
“But then where would I put my tremendous brain?”
A few nuances make it especially Russian:
- Умище is an augmentative form of ум (“mind,” “brains”). It’s colloquial and a bit boastful—something like “my massive brain” or “my colossal intellect.”
- Грандиозно (“grandly,” “enormously”) exaggerates it even further.
The joke is funny because the answer is absurdly self-confident. Instead of denying the comparison, Alyosha implicitly claims that he really does possess a Marx-sized intellect.
There’s also a subtle ideological twist. Marx is revered as the greatest thinker of socialism, yet the person who supposedly shares his genius isn’t a Party theoretician or professor—he’s an ordinary factory locksmith. That fits a common thread in Soviet humor: the working class often comes across as sharper and more grounded than the ideological establishment.
Finally, the use of Vovochka is significant. Vovochka is the stock mischievous schoolboy in Russian jokes, roughly analogous to “Little Johnny” in English. His identifying Marx as “Uncle Alyosha, our locksmith” immediately sets the irreverent tone.
[Back to RSV]
The strength of the responses is in the explanations, in my opinion. I especially appreciate that the AI changed my “Volodya” to “Vovochka.” That’s not wrong; it’s a correction. Vovochka is the stock character in such anecdotes. I had it incorrect. But the last one is also more complicated than the others, and it might be funny for other reasons from those that the AI highlights. It strikes me as less praising the average man than it is making fun of both him and the regime that makes a saint out of Marx. It’s a great joke.
The translations, on the other hand, are explanatory rather than evocative, let alone performative.
My sense of the first one is that it needs to be snappier: “Don’t you have any meat?” And then the punch line: “No meat’s next door.” Ba-da-boom!
All three, in delivery, could probably use some stealth glossing. The first one might need a repetition of the kind of store, explaining the customer’s mistake to the customer but also reminding the listener of an important piece of info that went by very fast. “No, no, this is the fish store. Here we don’t have fish.”
The last one has politically sensitive aspects that could be brought out by the concern of the teacher. “You know, you really ought to do something about that.” Because looking too much like Marx could get a person in trouble. (An idea that’s also darkly funny. People could have started laughing at this part of the joke when it was being told in the 1980s, then continued laughing to the end.)
But the slogans are hard, and I’d have to think more about how best to handle those, “Dogonim i peregonim” especially, as it’s both telegraphic and reminiscent of a specific person’s voice and delivery. A fist slamming a table might help, but it’s not very subtle.
No great revelations in terms of how the AI handled these. The outputs are consistent with my prompts (notice this language). The explanations are correct mostly, and my disagreements there are interpretive differences about which others might have still other opinions. The translations provide a strong sense of the source and maybe more than that.
I suspect the shortness and relative absence of perspectival depth make the first two much easier, while the third one hints at the kinds of uncertainties that appear when more than one character with an inner world becomes important.
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Russell Scott Valentino 