Click, Giggle, Open, Review

By Bill Fick

Before I moved to Russia, during New Year’s week I would often dabble in Marxism -- not pompous, bearded, Karl-Marxism, but the vaudeville variety made famous by Groucho, Harpo, and the rest of the Marx brothers in their classic films such as "Duck Soup" and "A Night at the Opera" aired faithfully on late-night television annually beginning on New Year’s Eve in many U.S. cities.

Russian television has also been on a comedy track this week, but without the Marx brothers -- perhaps the irony is still more than the television apparatchiki can bear. Not surprisingly, however, I can get my annual fix of hilarious audio, pictures, and the lyrics to the national anthem of Freedonia ("....if you think this country’s bad off now, just wait ‘til I get through with it...") on the Web at http://www.rpi.edu/~austib/marx/marx.html.

If you are a serious ideologue, you can add your polemical essay to a comparative discussion of "Who is Funnier: Marx Brothers or Monty Python?" at http://pw2.netcom.com/~toymoose/contest.html.

Seasonal humor to beat the post-holiday blues abounds on the net. A favorite every year is humorist Dave Barry’s incomparable "Year in Review", illustrated by political cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, which you can find at the Miami Herald’s site: http://www.herald.com/tropic/barry. As a post-party bonus, there is also a link to his famous column "Twas the night before the morning after". And, of special value for Muscovites who still face the prospect of gift shopping for Orthodox Christmas and "Old New Year", Dave offers a 1996 gift guide with winners such as a toilet paper dispenser baseball cap and Love Ewe inflatable sheep.

If you feel that you missed the news while living in Moscow and lack the context to understand Barry’s jokes, you can refresh your memory with CNN’s very complete, serious, and high-quality review of 1996, from show business to obituaries, at http://www.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/. The editors attempt to rank the most important events of 1996, placing Yeltsin’s re-election at number 3, before the re-election of Clinton but after the election of Netanyahu. If you disagree, you can "vote" online for a different ranking, and watch as results from around the net tabulate.

CNN also offers a calendar showing a variety of "scheduled" events for 1997, including a rather dry reference to the fact that on January 23, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune will be aligned for the first time in 200 years. To find out what this means and review other 1997 prognostications, you can visit any of thousands of horoscope sites on the Web. I randomly chose Horace’s Cope, "a weekly guide through the mystic corridors of your future" at http://www.blueberry.co.uk/Horace.html. It also contains links to other Astrological sites around the world.

Most of the celebrity predictions solicited by CNN were predictably dull, except for the offering from Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert comic strip, who foresees 1997 as such a slow news year that the media conglomerates will have to foment their own revolution, preferably in a Third World country with good hotels and names that are easy to pronounce.

You can find a link to Dilbert itself, along with Doonesbury, the Far Side, and 50 other daily comic strips with passwords where necessary, from the online version of the newspaper I edited in college at http://www.yale.edu/herald/features/comics.

The Russian Web is rich in humor resources, many of which are updated passionately and feature New Year’s additions this week. A good starting point is the "Chertovye Kulichki" (which roughly translates to "The Ends of the Earth") site at http://www.kulichki.com with everything you need to while away the time on a desert island in the "trivial archipelago", including lots of original jokes and links to other Russian-language humor sites around the Internet.

Another site at http://www.quicklink.com/~chelnya/nr.html is dedicated to a whole new genre of post-Soviet humor: page after page of jokes about New Russians and their foibles.

Finally, you can enter your e-mail address in a form at http://win.tomcat.olly.ru to receive a daily joke in Russian via e-mail. It can help to lighten your mood, improve your Russian, and add a bit of surprise to your day. But be careful not to click the box to have the weather report included with your joke in the mail. "Cloudy and Cold" followed by "Cloudy and Cold" may be more than even the best humor can overcome. Happy New Year!