I love 'two envelopes'. I have tried to track down the original joke. The first time I heard it was 20 years ago. I was 10 years old at the time and the old So

I love 'two envelopes'. I have tried to track down the original joke. The first time I heard it was 20 years ago. I was 10 years old at the time and the old Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc were falling apart. My dad was a political refugee from Eastern Europe who emigrated to Australia. I asked him what was going on while we watched the news on TV, and he explained that communism was a different system to ours and it was one where the government controls the people. He told me 'two envelopes', but with the characters being leaders of the Soviet Union. It was an old joke he first heard in Russian, and had heard repeated across the Eastern Bloc as a commentary on the situation they were in. I couldn't find an earlier reference than when I heard it - so I will assume the joke originated in old communist East Europe. When you search for the joke, a lot of websites reference it as a 'Russian joke' [1], which backs up how I first heard it. [1] http://toperjokes.blogspot.com/2007/05/two-envelopes.html http://toperjokes.blogspot.com/2007/05/two-envelopes.html