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I am French. This is the exact problem I have with some movies my Polish friends told me to watch. They were from the 70-80's and were making fun of the situat

I am French. This is the exact problem I have with some movies my Polish friends told me to watch. They were from the 70-80's and were making fun of the situation at that time (how to game the communists, the system, or the absurdity of said system). I did not find them funny at all because I did not have the context. To me they were depressing. I wonder how contemporary young Polish people see them today (when they watch them at all).

butterknife 5y ago
Czech here. Lived through last ten years of Communism. These films were repeated ad nauseam like a propaganda assuring us that the system is great because we can game it. Hated it then, hate it now.
- paganel 5y ago
  Romanian here, mostly the same age as yours, humour greatly helped us during the last years of Ceausescu's regime, when things were becoming really rough (power cuts in the middle of winter, food rationing etc.). I'll leave one of the (dark) jokes in here just for the sake of history: > There's a funeral procession on the street just outside Bulă's house (Bulă was the eponymous hero of almost all our jokes back then) and Bulă and his mother could hear the grieving lady crying from outside: > "Where do you go, my beloved husband? Why do you have to go where it's eternally dark and cold?" > Bulă, to his mother: "Mom, quick, lock the doors! They're bringing that guy over here to stay with us!" It still cracks me up to this day thinking about that joke, even though the cold (especially the cold) was a very difficult thing to negotiate as a kid. We also used to have jokes with a Russian scientist, an American scientist and a Romanian (didn't really matter if he was a scientist or not), in the end the Romanian was always getting the better of the other two (that sort of joke is alluded to in the text, with the Russian scientist doing something bad to a snake in Los Alamos).
xdennis 5y ago
These jokes are often not funny to non Eastern Europeans, but jokes from one ex-communist are often easy to understand in other ones. The Martyr Made podcast guy also remarks that when he tells people a Polish joke he heard, Westerners are completely unamused while Easterners do find it funny. Here's the joke: https://martyrmade.com/19-the-anti-humans/ https://martyrmade.com/19-the-anti-humans/ (skip to 12:17) You can pretty much replace Poland with Romania, and many others and it works just as well.

butterknife 5y ago

Czech here. Lived through last ten years of Communism. These films were repeated ad nauseam like a propaganda assuring us that the system is great because we can game it. Hated it then, hate it now.

paganel 5y ago
Romanian here, mostly the same age as yours, humour greatly helped us during the last years of Ceausescu's regime, when things were becoming really rough (power cuts in the middle of winter, food rationing etc.). I'll leave one of the (dark) jokes in here just for the sake of history: > There's a funeral procession on the street just outside Bulă's house (Bulă was the eponymous hero of almost all our jokes back then) and Bulă and his mother could hear the grieving lady crying from outside: > "Where do you go, my beloved husband? Why do you have to go where it's eternally dark and cold?" > Bulă, to his mother: "Mom, quick, lock the doors! They're bringing that guy over here to stay with us!" It still cracks me up to this day thinking about that joke, even though the cold (especially the cold) was a very difficult thing to negotiate as a kid. We also used to have jokes with a Russian scientist, an American scientist and a Romanian (didn't really matter if he was a scientist or not), in the end the Romanian was always getting the better of the other two (that sort of joke is alluded to in the text, with the Russian scientist doing something bad to a snake in Los Alamos).

xdennis 5y ago

These jokes are often not funny to non Eastern Europeans, but jokes from one ex-communist are often easy to understand in other ones. The Martyr Made podcast guy also remarks that when he tells people a Polish joke he heard, Westerners are completely unamused while Easterners do find it funny. Here's the joke: https://martyrmade.com/19-the-anti-humans/ https://martyrmade.com/19-the-anti-humans/ (skip to 12:17) You can pretty much replace Poland with Romania, and many others and it works just as well.