Soviet Humor

This is a book of cartoons from the Soviet humor magazine *KROKODIL*, mainly from the Brezhnev-to-Gorbachev 1970s and 80s. It's fascinating to compare them, in terms of style and content, with their American counterparts in *The New Yorker* and *The National Lampoon*. A lot of the gags involve privations and bread lines, but there are also a lot of classical and mythological references. They don't try to be hip (one of the best cartoons is of a teacher trying a little to hard to relate to teenage students, with his skateboard, spiky hair, wraparound shades, and Heavy Metal t-shirt), and the sexual content is fairly chaste, if I recall correctly, more in the vein of *Punch* than *Playboy*. If you love magazine cartoons, this book is indispensable for its insights into the closing days of the USSR.