Q: Why despite all the shortages was the toilet paper in East Germany always 2-ply? A: Because they had to send a copy of everything they did to Moscow. Communist jokes are the strangest funniest most enchanting & meaningful legacy of the 80 years of political experimentation in Russia & Eastern Europe known as Communism. The valiant & sardonic citizens of the former Communist countries
- surrounded by an invisible network of secret police threatened with arrest imprisonment & forced labour confronted by an economic system that left shops empty & bombarded with ludicrous state propaganda
- turned joke-telling into an art form. They used jokes as a coded way of speaking the truth. HAMMER & TICKLE takes us on a unique journey through the Communist era (1917-1989) & tells its real history through subversive jokes & joke-tellers many of whom ended up in the gulags. It is also illustrated with a combination of rare & previously unpublished archive material political cartoons caricatures photographs & state-sponsored propaganda. Humorous culturally poignant & historically revealing this is the story of a political system that was (almost) laughed out of existence.