Authors

Discussion

Being a programmatically autobiographical genre and appealing to the current agenda, stand-up always gives a confident overview of the discursive dominants, habits and mores of a particular culture. However, the representativeness of this art doesn’t go beyond everyday sketches. But in times of crisis (cf. COVID-19 pandemic), stand-up becomes a forum for discussing related personal traumatic experiences and begins to tend towards a specific kind of testimony.

An important role here is played by the therapeutic component of stand-up, inscribed in its laconic performance poetics: a microphone, an audience and a person who tells private stories and turns his performance into an act of public psychoanalysis. Stand-up theorists recommend the authors first of all to appeal to the situations in which the comedian personally felt anger, irritation, sadness, discomfort or fear. Stand-up is humor built on bad memories, and the self-ironic discoursing of a bad memory allows it to be overcome. Exactly such therapeutic articulation has become acute in Ukraine. Already two weeks after the Russian invasion during the bombing, Feliks Red’ka performed in Sumy in a new format: stand-up from a bomb shelter. The once underground genre is returning – literally – underground again.

With the start of a full-scale war, Ukrainian stand-up faced an urgent problem: all pre-war jokes became morally obsolete in one second. Therefore, the performances of comedians (especially) in the first months are quite unique monothematic content: a lot of reporting voices and narratives on current events. Many plots of these ‘stand-up-testimony’ intersect and overlap each other.  Moreover, geographically, these testimonies cover the whole country: many regulars of the capital’s stand-up-clubs in the first weeks of the war went to their parents in the regions and villages.

However, the most popular subject of the Ukrainian war stand-up, repeated in literally every performance, was the experience of a categorical language conversion, switching from Russian into Ukrainian. Stand-up of the first three months of the war is a godsend for philologists. The comedian’s frequent linguistic confusion between two languages, the inability to find the right Ukrainian word, the construction of sentences according to Russian-language patterns, the literal translation of Russian-language idiomatics into Ukrainian, the irony of one’s own mistakes, the contamination of new words – so in addition to all off these purely translinguistic aspects the new stand-up also provides a rich collection of metalinguistic tropes, just waiting for scrupulous study and classification.