Communist Laughter, from Lenin to Lubitsch

The final phase of a world-historical form

is its comedy.

– Karl Marx

Introduction: Lenin Amongst the Fishermen

The purpose of this essay is to explore the relationship between laughter as a

cinematic form and communism as both a political ideology and an historical

construction. Its hypothesis is that communism might somehow animate cinematic

laughter – “the laughter of unrespectable people having a hell of a fine time,” as

James Agee once put it1 – in such a way that speaks to broader social realities after

1917 and during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. More specifically, I contend that the

geopolitical relationship between communism and capitalism played out not only

between sovereign states and incompatible economies but also between two film

industries, one in Moscow and the other in Hollywood, and that the films themselves

were highly responsive to all of this – their response, I will want to show, is readily

apparent in the staging of laughter. To pursue the political fortunes of neither comedy

nor humor but more specifically of laughter acquires methodological value in that it

centers critical attention on an easily recognizable and eminently reproducible trope.

As Siegfried Kracauer once averred, “films address themselves, and appeal, to the

anonymous multitude. Popular films – or to be more precise, popular screen motifs –

can therefore be supposed to satisfy existing mass desires.” 2 That interjected

clarification, which presupposes a mediation between “popular screen motifs” and

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“existing mass desires,” encourages the narrowing of critical focus down from

broader questions about genre and affect so as to hone in on the visual regime as such.

It is in this capacity that focusing on laughter as a trope, motif, or even narrative event

– that is to say, as a form – allows us to hop between key moments in otherwise

divergent films utilizing radically different types of humor and to speculate on the

determinations and sensibilities shared between them.

Methodologically, then, this essay will look to an expansive selection of films

and film types, using laughter’s unique form as a mediating category with which to

establish common ground between different cinematic genres, historical moments,

and geographical locations. In programmatic terms, we will look closely at laughter in

the work of two exemplary filmmakers – Sergei Eisenstein and Charlie Chaplin – who

are favored here because of the enormous influence the exert over the evolution of

cinema in and across both communist and capitalist states, because the attention they

received was always bound up in the political concerns of their time, and because

their comparable stature allowed for mutual familiarity between them. As such, and

perhaps more so than any other filmmakers, these two allow us to track the dynamic

relationship between Hollywood and Moscow as conjointly reciprocal. Following

accounts of communist laughter in the cinema of Eisenstein and Chaplin, the essay

asks whether this form persists in films released during the politically stifling years of

Stalinism and McCarthyism, and it does so by sampling a handful of both Soviet and

Hollywood films from the 1930s and 40s. These films are chosen for similar reasons

to those of Eisenstein and Chaplin: because the exemplify filmmaking trends in both

Hollywood and Moscow; because they are deeply embedded within political history;

and because they are conscious of their relationship to whichever competing film

industry, and either allow for it to appear on screen as a determining inspiration or

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actively suppress it through gestures of negation and elision.

While this essay utilizes the form of laughter as a means to traverse disparate

fields in response to the vicissitudes of both aesthetic influence and political ideology,

there is good precedent for this approach, from critical thought more generally if not

peculiar to film theory. It was Mikhail Bakhtin – writing covertly about life in the

USSR during the 1930s – whose celebrated book on François Rabelais showed that,

while laughter itself is powerfully trans-historical, political lessons abound if we

attend to laughter’s complicated relationship with official ideology and folk culture

across specific iterations. “Its external privileges,” he argues, “are intimately linked

with interior forces; they are a recognition of the rights of those forces. This is why

laughter could never become an instrument to oppress and blind the People. It always

remained a free weapon in their hands.”3 By approaching laughter as a form and by

thinking on the relationship between those simultaneously internal and external

forces, we can begin to map the cinematic uptake of political ideology as well as the

shifting position of that ideology within mass culture and historical actuality.

Following these opening remarks on method, I now want to outline a phenomenon

that might be called “communist laughter” as it emerges not in film but through

historical personage, before showing that its cinematic form enjoys a richly

transnational evolution, forged out of the mutual appropriations from two film

industries and framed by the material exigencies of political history.

Laughter is, at its base level, a physiological event. And if communism ever

had a physical embodiment, that body belonged to Vladimir Lenin, a figure whose

capacity to act as political medium, to serve as the world-historical form of revolution

itself, is nothing short of legendary. Here we can echo a number of historians, both

committed and reactionary, and emphasize that it is impossible to explain Lenin the

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revolutionary without reference to Lenin the man, and that Lenin the man could not

exist without Lenin the revolutionary. 4 “Blood and judgment,” reflected Georg

Lukács on the duality of Lenin’s being: “both their opposition and their unity only

derive from the biological sphere as the immediate and general basis of human

existence.”5 In other words, to grasp Lenin’s true character is neither a purely

theoretical nor a purely historical task, but a task that must concern itself with the one

unified being. To this end, Lukács offers only the faintest impression of the

personality so exemplarily inclined to revolution. “He is lively and humorous,” we are

told; “he enjoys everything life offers, from hunting, fishing and playing chess to

reading Pushkin and Tolstoy; and he is devoted to real men.” 6 As this brief list

suggests, there was indeed a human behind the podium and the politburo. A living

subjectivity. Lenin’s was a life that not only enmeshed itself in revolution, but which

also and quite famously involved long bicycle rides, nude swimming in the Volga,

and – above all else – the joy of laughter. And it is this, the laughter, which serves as a

major point of cohesion between Lenin the man and Lenin the revolutionary. Between

the human and the politician.

In one of the more touching tributes made after Lenin’s death in 1924, the

novelist Maxim Gorky dedicates an extended eulogy to this very quality, the physical

form given to the revolutionary’s indomitable sense of humor. “I have never met

anyone who could laugh so infectiously as Vladimir Ilyich,” claimed the leading light

of socialist realism:

It was really strange to see that this stern realist who so clearly saw and felt the

inevitability of great social tragedies, a man who was unbending and

implacable in his hatred for the capitalist world, could laugh with such

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 childish glee till the tears rose to his eyes. What a strong, healthy and sound

spirit a man had to have to laugh like that!7

The key term in all of this is “infectiously,” which is taken from Leo Tolstoy and

which presents another version of that ideological electrification that is so frequently

said to infuse Lenin’s celebrity.8 What Gorky means is that, when Lenin laughs, the

laughter is generative of a collective and, as such, Lenin’s laughter seems to emanate

from the ideology he is said to have embodied. Gorky was not the only comrade to

observe this quality. For instance, Leon Trotsky used the very same metaphor: “He

tried to control himself as long as he could, but finally he would burst out with a peal

of laughter which infected all the others.”9 But there is another side to it. If, as a social

gesture, laughter means solidarity between humans, here that affirmative quality is

also contextual, and depends upon its dialectical antithesis; laughter also and

simultaneously responds to what Gorky calls the “great social tragedies,” affirming

both itself and its collective as the political opposition to mass immiseration. 10 Once

again, Trotsky reported much the same, recalling that “Lenin would sometimes have a

fit of laughter, and that happened not only when things went well, but even during

hard and difficult moments.”11

Gorky’s eulogy features a handful of anecdotes that have since become

famous in their own right.12 With one, it is suggested that Lenin’s laughter conveys “a

magnetic quality that won the hearts and sympathies of the working people,” capable

even of transcending linguistic boundaries.13 Gorky finds evidence for this claim in

his recollection that, when visiting the island of Capri in the Gulf of Naples, Lenin

forged a bond with the local fishermen despite the fact he could not speak Italian and

they could not speak Russian (or any of Lenin’s other three languages). “There was

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great charm in his laughter,” recalls Gorky, “the hearty laughter of a man who, able

though he was to gauge the clumsiness of human stupidity and the cunning capers of

the intellect, could take pleasure in the childlike simplicity of an ‘artless heart.’” 14 It is

this, the apparent artlessness of popular forms, which Lenin is said to have

encountered and appreciated in London, at a small people’s theatre. “Vladimir Ilyich,”

we are told, “laughed heartily at the clowns and the comic numbers, looked at most of

the others with indifference, and keenly watched the scene where a couple of

lumberjacks from British Columbia felled a tree.” 15 What appealed to Lenin most

about this scene, what triggered his laughter, is a quality described by the man himself

as its “eccentricity.”16 This term is defined in Gorky’s telling as an aesthetic of

demystification. “It is a satirical or skeptical attitude to the conventional, a desire to

turn it inside out – to twist it a little, and disclose what is illogical in the customary.” 17

If, in Capri, Lenin’s laughter served to establish new conventions between

linguistically diverse men, in London it cuts through old conventions to disclose the

hidden truth of things.

Put schematically, there are two sides to Lenin’s laughter: it is celebratory and

affirmative, but it is also critically responsive to historical actuality. It thereby inhabits

the affective space of what Bertolt Brecht would call “das gesell-schaftlich

Komische,” or the socially comic.18 Let us therefore propose, somewhat perversely,

that communist laughter is dialectical, in that it simultaneously affirms and negates;

its infectious universalism is concrete as opposed to abstract: a utopian phenomenon

that remains unrealized historically but which might only be achieved through the

opposition of historical determinations. This definition is, perhaps obviously though

fittingly enough, a version of laughter in keeping with Hegel’s phenomenology. “In

general,” Hegel claimed, “nowhere can more contradiction be found than in the things

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people laugh at.”19 That is to say, communist laughter seeks to overcome boundaries

not in some passive gesture toward liberal inclusivity but, rather, through political

antagonism hammered out in real time. In short, communist laughter aims to gather a

new society against its historical antithesis, namely capitalism, which must be torn

asunder from within. How, then, to give this philosophically abstract formulation a

cinematic form? How might communist laughter translate from Lenin’s exceptional

embodiment and Hegelian philosophy into a popular screen motif?

Sergei Eisenstein: Collective Joy, Collective Phallus

Dialectical laughter may sound like the most unfunny thing in the world, but it is

precisely this kind of laughter, simultaneously collectivist and critical, which we

encounter to great effect in Soviet film, even if in theory more so than practice. When,

in 1930, Sergei Eisenstein visited Paris he was asked the following by an audience

member at the Sorbonne: “Why doesn’t your country make comedies? Is it true that

the Bolsheviks have killed off laughter?”20 A question subtended by accusation. The

irony – which dramatically enough triggered a volley of laughter from the director – is

that this question was posed at a lecture held only to placate an audience that had

turned out for a screening of The General Line, Eisenstein’s 1929 hymn to rural

agriculture, which had been cancelled by the local police. Ironic because, with this

film’s superabundance of smutty overtones, it is about as close to an all-out comedy

as Eisenstein ever completed. We can therefore approach Eisenstein’s subsequent

response to the question, his theory of communist laughter, by way of the film in

whose place it evolved. Two scenes, both of which animate the benefits of agrarian

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technology, stand out as exemplary of Eisenstein’s comedic sensibility. Both fixate on

the film’s heroine, Marfa Lapkina, played by an illiterate peasant of the same name,

whom we might assume was chosen for the role not only because of her willingness

to milk a cow on screen, but also because of her face which, as the film makes

perfectly apparent, is as much the medium for comic exuberance as it is of

unpretentious sexuality.

The first episode is the infamous “creamer scene,” in which a farming

cooperative receives a mechanical separator with which to produce butter. The scene

begins with a series of static close-ups, taken from oblique angles, in which the

expressions of villagers’ craggy faces betray their skepticism toward the new object,

which remains concealed by a sheet. A young woman, Marfa, fills a bucket with milk

whilst being watched by three men, who stand behind the machine, and by the other

villagers, who stand to the side. The burliest of the men, dressed in a commissar

uniform of black leathers, unveils the machine. There is showmanship in the reveal,

how the sheet is whipped away dramatically. The subsequent shot slowly draws into

focus, as though the camera’s perspective has only just awoken with bleary eyes, and

a metallic body becomes slowly visible through the blur. A circular tank atop gears,

spindles, handles, and cream spouts. Reaction shot of the villagers, who reel in shared

amazement. The man caresses the rounded side of the machine’s tank, into which

Marfa pours the bucket of milk. He adjusts one of its nuts in a manner suggestive of

foreplay and pushes down on the handle, which disappears off-screen and below his

waist. We are shown a close-up on the interplay of gears and wheels. Another man

takes over. The churning accelerates. More close-ups: of the internal mechanisms, of

the churning milk, and of the protruding spout. The villagers look unimpressed, as

though they expected more. The young woman strokes the spout’s shaft. Rhythmic

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subtitles announce a “hardening.” The cutting between shots accelerates to match the

pace of churning. Then the climax. A geyser of cream surges forth and sprays across

Marfa’s hands and face, shots of which are intercut with those of erupting fountains,

while she and the villagers laugh joyously and together in what can only be described

as sexual abandon. The collective mirth of a machine-age money-shot. The

achievement of this scene is that it raises communitarian ideology, in the words of

Gilles Deleuze, “to a properly comic dimension,” registering collectivization via the

seminal production of this ludicrously phallic machine. 21 Humor abides in the

objective incongruity. The scene is crudely funny in its overblown sexuality and the

peasant actors all seem to know as much. Their laughter is confirmation.

A similar episode plays out soon after the arrival of a tractor, ordered in from

Moscow to reap a harvest too plentiful to be gathered by hand. When the prized

machine breaks down its driver, a scruffy young man also in leathers, throws his body

over the bonnet and, with legs pitched skyward, he attempts to fix the machine. Marfa

watches on curiously. He tears the collar from his white shirt and uses it to clean out

an oil cap. Then, blind to what he is doing, he reaches up and attempts to snatch the

red flag from the tractor’s hood. Marfa intervenes. She stills his hand, preserving the

revolutionary symbol, and offers her undergarments in its stead. The remainder of the

scene is shot like a striptease. He winks at her, and she slowly parts her overcoat to

reveal a striped underskirt. In reverse-shots the two exchange a quiet laugh, before

they tear a long strip from the garment. Then more and more, effectively shredding

the petticoat. Marfa’s laughter is sustained into a close-up on her face, which she

covers with her hand as though coy to witness this apparent loss of virtue. The subtext

is all but confirmed in the subsequent shots, taken from multiple angles around the

tractor, against which the engineer vigorously thrusts his pelvis. His movements

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around the tractor seem impossible, as though he is passing through the machine

itself, as indeed Chaplin will at Electro Steel several years later. But they are also

unmistakably sexual: he is, it seems, copulating with the machine, or else the machine

has come to serve as an extension of his masculinity utilized here in seduction. The

scene ends with the couple happily riding off into the field on that foremost symbol of

agrarian collectivism, the tractor, which has been recast as another source of comic

eros.

An affirmation of the collective through comic sexuality, wherein production

quotas are tantamount to youthful procreation, and the means of production are

overlaid with symbolic phalli: that is what we see in these two scenes, first with the

creamer and then with the tractor. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, there is an

argument to be made that in such appearances the phallus is not only funny, and that

the humor communizes, but that it is funny precisely in its capacity for materializing

the missing link between heterogeneous subjects. “The sphere of comedy is created

by the presence at its center of a hidden signifier,” muses Jacques Lacan, “but that in
22
the Old Comedy is there in person, namely, the phallus.” If, as in the case with

Lenin and the fishermen, the experience of laughter transcends symbolic boundaries

precisely as a symbol, functioning as a kind of language without words, the phallus

gives objective form to that very paradox. Put simply, the phallus is like laughter

because it acts as an eminently practicable means of non-linguistic communication.

Perhaps this is the affirmatively political aspect of Eisenstein’s infamous

phallocentrism, which abounds both on and off the screen, ranging from his frequent

use of penile imagery alongside a profusion of muscular young men; through his

theories of vertical perception, his erotic drawings, and his fondness for exclamation

marks; and which reaches its apotheosis in the notorious photograph sent from

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Mexico in 1931, wherein he sits astride an enormous dick-shaped cactus. The

inscription: “Speaks for itself and makes people jealous!” 23 While all of this and its

encroachment on his film aesthetic have been interpreted with some accuracy as a

barely sublimated homoeroticism, what that interpretation misses is the absolute

humor of it all, encoded within the frame by laughing actors – and, especially by the

film’s heroine. In addition to giving “every sign of meaning the homosexuality he

dared to intimate,”24 as Parker Tyler once phrased it, Eisenstein revels in the humor of

the phallus, as is made patent in these two instances, at least, by its phenomenal

coincidence with the peasants’ laughter, and by that of Marfa whose joy is framed

lovingly in close-up.

If, however, this film had screened at the Sorbonne we might not have had

Eisenstein’s response to the question of laughter, which is even more revealing than

the film itself. Eisenstein would recall this question half a decade later, in 1935, when

writing an essay titled “Bolsheviks Do Laugh (Thoughts on Soviet Comedy),” which

combines the author’s thoughts on the named genre with an implicit endorsement of

Joseph Stalin’s political strategy of socialism in one country. “We must,” Eisenstein

insists, “all involve ourselves and participate in creating the new kind of humor, in

filling a new page in the world history of humor and laughter, just as the very fact of

the existence of the Soviet Union has inscribed a new page in the history and diversity

of social forms.”25 Eisenstein would claim that there is laughter for us, the

communists, and there is laughter for them, the capitalists. While their laughter is that

of idle amusement and of escapism, ours contains elements not only of arraignment

but also of love. Communist laughter builds solidarity just as it divides. In keeping

with the essay’s historically-peculiar nationalism, its tacit endorsement of socialism in

one country, Eisenstein cites a handful of antecedents whose comedy he sees as

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necessary to his own evolving project, and to that of laughter in Soviet film more

generally: the gentle irony of Chekhov, the bitterness of Gogol, and the lampoon of

Saltykov-Shchedrin – three pre-revolutionary writers whose distinguishing feature, he

claims, is their shared sense of “social indictment.” 26 And yet, despite attempts at

distancing Moscow from Hollywood, the figure to whom Eisenstein dedicates the

most explicatory vigor is not a Russian national. Rather, Eisenstein seems to find an

exemplary version of communist laughter in the films of British vaudevillian turned

Hollywood superstar: Charlie Chaplin.

Surely Eisenstein’s irrepressible affection for Chaplin results, at least on some

level, from the Soviet director sensing a mirror image of his own narrative strategies,

given the two filmmakers’ shared reliance on the figuration of “social types,” on

caricatures of class position as opposed to a more conventionally deep subjectivity –

of tramps and peasants and factory-owners, of heroic workers pitted against fat

bourgeoisie, and so on. Singularly, however, Chaplin is said to have created a comedy

of “social lyricism,” which Eisenstein explains in his typically intuitive though not

wholly comprehensible way:

If we love our fellow man, share our younger brother’s afflictions and mourn

those brought low, insulted and passed over by fate, then a social emotion will

replace them. But a social love of humanity does not exist in sympathizing but

in recreating, so that a comedy scene does not become individually lyrical, but

socially lyrical. And a social lyricism is pathos. The lyricism of the masses at

the moment they merge into one being – that is an anthem. And this shift in

comedy, not towards lyrical tears but tears of pathos – that is where I saw the

guiding principle for the contribution that would turn our cinema to film

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 comedy.27

Felt here is the affective gravity embodied nowhere more obviously than in Chaplin’s

most celebrated screen persona, the Tramp, who was created for the myriad shorts and

two-reelers in the 1910s before going on to star in several features during the 1920s

and 30s. Sympathy, lyricism, and pathos, all underwritten by that elusive social

object, a matrix of relations that gives rise to such affects: this is the stuff of which

Chaplin’s Tramp is made. “A picture with a smile – and perhaps, a tear,” reads the

opening intertitle of the Tramp’s first feature in 1921, The Kid, which splices slapstick

mayhem into a heartfelt tale of economic destitution and surrogate paternity. The

resulting pathos, however, is said to want for the critical edge so desired by Soviet

cinema’s number one ideologue. Chaplin’s laughter, claims Eisenstein, is lacking in

militancy. And yet, the films themselves have other things to say on the matter.

Charlie Chaplin: From Indictment to Insurgency

Before the increasingly sentimental features of the 1920s and onward, Chaplin’s early

shorts were more obviously works of social indictment than of social lyricism. More a

critique of American capitalism than an endorsement of human communality, the

eventual balance of which would give us the clearest expression of the actor-director’s

political consciousness: “the secret of his immense success,” writes Walter Benjamin,

“is that the films appeal to the most international and the most revolutionary emotion

of the masses: their laughter.” 28 If the positive content of Chaplin’s laughter is a bond

shared between the variously blighted men, women, and children in the factories and

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the slums, the cause for that blight is never far from the narrative, and in the earliest

films it was the narrative. Of Chaplin’s critics, Robert Payne – biographer to Lenin,

Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, and Marx – is perhaps most sensitive to the conditioning

presence of this social milieu, which he describes in literary terms. “The dreams of

paradise were seen to be no more than dreams,” he reflects on humanity’s progression

through industrial modernity. “Out of that failure came the shabby, carefree, mutilated

creatures of Dickens; and form the same failure comes Charlie, who may be Pan in

disguise, but he wears the cutaway of a Victorian dandy. Once, before he grew lean

with misery and imprisonment, he may have been Pickwick – how else can one

explain those trousers five sizes too big for him?” 29 While, in a subsequent sentence,

Payne shifts the citations from Dickens to Marx, Julian Smith similarly provides a

provisional catalogue of moments that “would delight a Marxist critic searching for

images of exploitation,” and which lists several of the shorts:

… in Work, Charlie is an undersized beast of burden; the drab janitor

surrounded by the wealth and glamour of The Bank fights back in the only

way he can, with incompetence, laziness, and a final pathetic flight into the

fantasy that he has some value in the marketplace; in Shanghaied, a corrupt

businessman wants to blow up the ship to collect insurance. Contemplating the

last of the Essanay films, the Marxist critic would have died and gone to

heaven, for in Police Chaplin plays a convict released form the security of the

prison where he had been fed, sheltered and protected into a world of hunger,

exploitation and danger.30

If this was the case for the shorts – released between 1914 and 1917 by Keystone,

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Essanay, and Mutual – similar things can said be for the early two-reelers and feature

films distributed by First National and released between 1918 and 1923, which retain

their narrative concentration on urban squalor and the obstinacy of human labor, even

while furnishing their embodying vagrant with a potentially sentimental subjectivity.

“In the Keystone days the tramp had been freer and less confined to plot,” Chaplin

would later reflect (in language echoing F. W. Taylor and Henry Ford). “His brain

was seldom active then – only his instincts, which were concerned with the basic

essentials: food, warmth and shelter. But with each succeeding comedy the tramp was

growing more complex.”31 To be sure, by the 1920s the Tramp was acquiring the

virtues for which Eisenstein would appraise Chaplin, and from which the Soviet

director would claim to distance himself. Chaplin was allowing for laughter’s

admixture with “tears of pathos,” and it was these films, the First National

productions, which Eisenstein had seen before setting out to theorize communist

laughter.32 It was also in these films that we approach something like communist

laughter.

The most iconic iteration of Chaplin’s blending of social pathos with social

indictment takes place in the film for which Chaplin hoped to be remembered, The

Gold Rush (1925), the very title of which alludes to the opportunistic greed through

which capitalism finds sustenance.33 Here we look to the scene in which the Tramp

dreams wistfully of how he will entertain his expected company during a New Year’s

feast. The gag in question – shot in no fewer than eleven takes – follows from when

the Tramp is asked by his imagined guests to give a speech, respectfully declines, and

instead performs what is referred to in the register of scenes, quite simply, as “doing

dance with rolls.”34 Filmed from the space between a medium shot and a close-up, the

Tramp sinks two forks into as many bread rolls and, with the comestible objects now

15
transformed into dancing shoes, he performs a perfectly delicate routine across the

table, whose humor abides not only in the wondrous animation of inanimate objects

but also in the sense of bodily disproportion, with the man’s head and shoulders

appearing as the oversized upper body of these tiny, dancing legs. Here, too, is pathos:

that the Tramp is dreaming all of this while having been stood up by his guests in the

waking world, who cavort about at a nearby music hall, registers visually on the gag

itself, with its foregrounding of Chaplin’s all too expressive face, and especially his

big, slightly effeminate, and monumentally sad eyes, which flitter about in gestural

counterpoint to the rolls’ fancy footwork. The Tramp only falls back in laughter,

sharing the delight with his company, once the routine is complete, but in doing so he

punctures the fantasy and awakens alone. Laughter thus serves as a quilting point

between two incommensurable realities.

What is most different from the early shorts – in which this scene was trialed –

is a shift, via narrative depth and into the close-up, to a more humanized figure, and

with that shift we encounter the full-blown realization of social lyricism: the felt

pathos of the scene; comedy tinged with tragedy. But the scene is no less politically

engaged than similar iterations from the shorts. The tabletop dance, with its

transformation of comestibles into footwear, knowingly recalls another scene from

earlier in the film, in which the Tramp and a gold prospector, Big Jim, devour the

boiled leather of the Tramp’s boot. If, in the New Year’s fantasy, food becomes

dancing shoes, here in reality an old boot stands in as food. Chaplin transforms it,

writes David Bordwell, “by turns into a fish carcass (by neatly filleting the sole), a

chicken (by sucking the nails as if they were bones), and a plate of pasta (by twirling

the bootlace as if it were spaghetti).” 35 While it is tempting enough to pursue a

properly Marxist reading of these two scenes as illustrative of labor’s ultimate

16
destination in commodity capitalism, according to which food and footwear are both

one and the same in their realization of exchange value, perhaps more strikingly

performed as comedy is the circumambient fact of rampant poverty, wherein the

hapless vagrant is forced to eat absolutely anything, even a filthy old boot. 36 Here

context is important. Although it is set during the Klondike Gold Rush, this film is

less about the 1890s as it is about the context into which it was released, on the eve of

the Great Depression. In the mid- 1920s, as the metropolitan population enjoyed the

orgastic splendor of a so-called Jazz Age, the vast rural workforce suffered their own

a decade-long downturn. “The roaring 1920s were not a golden age on the farms of

the USA,”37 reflects Eric Hobsbawn, and perhaps that is why in 1925 Chaplin sent his

Tramp – so frequently the urban laborer – to go prospecting on the rural peripheries,

where he would eventually eat his footwear. It is through this political sensitivity, not

only to poverty as such but to its realization through geographically uneven

development, that social indictment infuses social lyricism, without ever losing its

concrete intelligence, and therein obtains the real pathos of Chaplin’s laughter.

And yet, it’s not just that Chaplin was making films that communists might

have found appealing; he was also making films that knowingly appealed to

communism. Whilst Eisenstein’s enthusiasm for Chaplin was mutual – in 1926, after

its American debut, Chaplin hailed The Battleship Potemkin as “the best film in the

world”38 – it is also evident that an identification with the anti-capitalist if not an

affirmatively communist left shaded into Chaplin’s films. In an account of what he

calls the “Chaplin-machine,” an organic synthesis of the comedian’s body with the

industrial means of production in the Unites States, Owen Hatherley wonders about

the gracious reception given the Tramp within American cinema, and suggests this

has something to do with the evolving sentimentalism that came with his journey out

17
of the shorts and into feature films. “It is striking,” he insists, “given the relatively

benign figure the tramp becomes, how malevolent the earlier Chaplin is, even if this

malevolence is mostly presented as being accidental.” 39 While Hatherley is talking

about the way that Chaplin’s character is so frequently the hapless cause of bodily

injury, I want to suggest that such accidents, which seem to instinctively strike out at

the avatars and the structures of capital, betray the films’ ideological coordination,

acting as a kind of political parapraxis. If, in the early films, slapstick violence might

have acquired a degree of anti-capitalist force, it was during the so-called “red

decade,” the 1930s, that social indictment erupted into a declared anti-capitalism and

found its affirmative adjunct in really existing communism as much as it did in a

relatively apolitical communality. This is manifest nowhere more potently than in a

scene from Modern Times, Chaplin’s 1936 satire on industrial capitalism and its

attended disenfranchisement, in which the Tramp finds himself “accidentally” leading

a communist rally through the streets of industrial exurbia. When a red flag falls from

back of a flatbed truck, the Tramp tries to signal the oblivious driver, waving the mast

as he ambles toward the camera. Little does he realize that turning the corner behind

him is an army of unemployed workers, all carrying signs and placards of their own,

who together march onward with the Tramp as their leader, while the camera cranes

up overhead as though to emphasize the sheer size and collective strength of this

multitude.

There is plenty more to be said elsewhere about Chaplin’s transition through

sound and about the way his late works, including the three late comedies, are all

fogged by an unmistakable and overwhelming sadness; that their dreaming emanates

from what Edwin Rolfe would call, in a poem dedicated to Chaplin, “the melancholy

comus.”40 Here, however, we will leap forward to the final film in which Chaplin

18
starred as well as directed. In 1947, Chaplin was investigated on suspicion of being a

communist and was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

He was called because of his public campaign during World War II for a Second

Front through which to aid the USSR, because of his lack of American citizenship,

and because of his films’ emphatic critiques of capitalism. Made in Europe, A King in

New York is Chaplin’s vituperative satire on life in McCarthy-era America. With it,

Chaplin excoriates the anti-communist paranoia of McCarthyism in a way that makes

very clear the personal costs at which capitalism sustains its ideological integrity by

demonizing the political other, in this case destroying a working family and

devastating the son of two suspected reds. But, more than simply taking aim at the

stateside reactionaries, this film serves as a condensation of the political tendencies

running through a career’s worth of films. “One of the minor annoyances of modern

life is a revolution,” reads the opening intertitle, which is superimposed over an

Eisenstein-inspired shot of a palace stormed by the masses. King Igor Shahdov,

played by Chaplin, arrives in New York City having been ousted from his native

home in the generically European nation of Estrovia. Despite Shadhov’s hopes of

using atomic power to “revolutionize modern life and bring about a utopia undreamed

of,” which makes that initial revolution seem more like a reactionary coup against a

leftist politician, he is forced to sell himself on the market as an actor for garish

television commercials. What all of this amounts to is a fable of socialist-sounding

techno-utopianism corrupted by typically capitalist greed. While the story becomes

increasingly bleak, laughter acts therein as an ideological counterforce: one scene

involves Shahdov and a director of commercials trying to expunge the potential for

laughter from a television spot for whiskey, thereby suggesting an incompatibility

between commerce and comedy. Later, after undergoing plastic surgery for a different

19
commercial, Shahdov is physically “undone” by laughter when watching a slapstick

routine reminiscent of Chaplin’s own shorts. And, while the narrative culmination of

this film’s comedy, when Shahdov “accidentally” blasts the HUAC committee with a

high-pressure fire hose, can be read as Chaplin’s considered and deeply satisfying

response to his own treatment a decade earlier – as well as a riff on Eisenstein’s

phallic and ejaculatory imagery – elsewhere the film invites us to think further on that

doubling of filmmaker and character, and to do so specifically with regards to both

laughter and communism.

When invited to speak at a progressive school for gifted children, Shahdov

meets Rupert Macabee, a ten-year old firebrand and editor of the school newspaper.

Their introductory dialogue frames perfectly the scene to follow:

Shadhov: And what’s that you’re reading?

Macabee: Karl Marx.

Shadhov: Surely you’re not a communist?

Macabee: Do I have to be a communist to read Karl Marx?

Having these words and a subsequent lecture about industrial monopolization and

imperial jingoism mouthed by a finger-wagging ten-year old is pure genius: it allows

the film to deliver a serious critique of capitalism but to play that critique for laughs.

If the rhetorical cliché for such a gesture is having your cake and eating it too, the

scene seems to be thinking precisely on those terms, in that it ends with Shahdov

sitting on a strategically placed cake and so drawing the collective laughter of Rupert

and his peers, as though in generational solidarity. And yet, this scene also marks the

beginning of the film’s tragic subplot, for which Shadhov’s face-off against HUAC is

20
only a comic foil to Rupert’s more harrowing interrogation. This subplot retells one of

Chaplin’s much earlier fables of paternal surrogacy, The Kid, but with the appropriate

modification of contexts: whereas that earlier film presented a system that deprives

children the means of subsistence, this one forces a child to testify against his parents

and their friends precisely because they identified with a political program which

sought to overturn that very system and the deprivations contained therein. When

approached by Shadhov later in the film Rupert announces that he is, now, a

communist. “I’m so sick and tired of people asking me if I’m this, if I’m that, so then

if it pleases everybody I’m a communist.” Of course, the intended meaning of this is

that Rupert is genuinely exhausted by the relentless questioning of his politics, and

simply wants off the hook, but it also means that Rupert, who previously identified as

anarchist, has been pushed into a reactionary communism. This is something we

might also say about Chaplin’s films: despite always flirting with Marxism, they still

might not be affirmative expressions of communism, speaking to it instead via

political overtones and the occasional citation; however, in this reaction against anti-

communism, that positive identification seems stronger than ever. Finally, and most

importantly of all, that Rupert is played by Michael Chaplin – the director’s lookalike

son – only gives further weight to Chaplin’s inextricability from communism, and

with that the political coordination of his laughter.

Joseph Stalin and John Sullivan: Laughing in the Dark

“Chaplin,” Lenin is said to have claimed, “is the only man in the world I want to

meet.”41 Though Chaplin might be the best, the funniest, and the most engaging of all

21
Hollywood comedians, he nevertheless appeared at a moment in film history when

vaudeville stage comedy was finding itself reproduced on screen, with the animation-

like hijinks of an almost inhuman body augmented via the close-up and thereby

supplemented with the singular expressivity of the human face. Chaplin’s were a face

and a style absolutely unique, but he shared a cultural moment and an order of

magnitude with the considerable talents of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and the

Marx Brothers. Indeed, each had his own signature look, designed for both iconicity

and humorous effect, and each was a variation on the Tramp’s derby, toothbrush

moustache, walking cane, and wrong-sized garb: Keaton donned a pork pie hat; Lloyd

distinguished himself with wire-rimmed glasses; and Groucho Marx combined a

greasepaint moustache and matching eyebrows with a thick stogie. Despite

Eisenstein’s favoring of Chaplin, and while Keaton, Lloyd, and the Marx Brothers

were all relatively apolitical, their laughter harmonized with that of Chaplin in several

key ways: all of these filmmakers mined for comedy in societal apparatuses of their

interwar moment, and in this way all were drawn toward sites of capitalist

accumulation and the exploitation of labor; and, given this response to their context,

all of these filmmakers used laughter to rally affirmative energy against the

depredations of a prevailing culture. From within this milieu, wherein laughter

acquired a unique ideological surcharge, it might even prove unsurprising that one of

the first American diplomats sent to the USSR after Roosevelt’s belated recognition

of the revolutionary government was none other than Harpo Marx. 42 And, though

arguments could be made elsewhere that theirs is also a kind of communist laughter,

here we need only observe that, in making the very first Soviet comedy it was to this

moment in American cinema and to all of these figures collectively that Lev Kuleshov

turned in order to produce the kind of laughter Lenin embodied and Eisenstein

22
eventually theorized. Beginning with that film, what remains of this essay traces the

fortunes of communist laughter, as we have seen it in the films of Eisenstein and

Chaplin, as it was either utilized or suppressed in both Soviet and Hollywood film

after the 1920s.

The first comedy produced in the USSR was The Extraordinary Adventures of

Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, directed by Kuleshov and released in 1924. In

it, John West travels to the socialist state to spread the idea of the YMCA. Upon

arrival in the USSR, his briefcase is stolen and he falls in with a group of thieves,

including a run-down countess. The countess is played by Kuleshov’s muse, the

gloriously weird-looking Aleksandra Khokhlov, a character actor whom Eisenstein

would announce as “screen’s first female eccentric,” and who in this film is

repeatedly shown laughing in close-up in much the same way we encountered it with

Marfa Lapkina.43 The difference, however, is that while Lapkina might have been a

vision of rural vitality, Khokhlov embodied the grotesque decadence of the old

aristocracy – “at once mannered and terrifying,” according to Jonathan Rosenbaum –

and her laughter is emblematic of this, taking the form of a toothy cackle. 44 The

thieves collectively play on West’s prejudicial fears and engineer his abduction by

crooks dressed up as caricature Bolsheviks, only to rescue the American and extort

thousands of dollars from him. Visually, this film is in all of the best possible ways

totally derivative of Hollywood comedies. The eponymous idiot, Mr. West, is a

replica of Harold Lloyd, and as Lloyd did one year earlier – in Safety Last! (1923) –

West is forced into a slapstick scene of high-rise acrobatics, dangling from a power

cable several stories above the street below. The caricature Bolsheviks look and

behave like the Marx Brothers. And Mr. West’s bodyguard – inexplicably enough a

cowboy in chaps and spurs – commits to several madcap chases modeled on the most

23
self-destructive sequences of Buster Keaton. All of this is put to work, however, not

only to satirize the western world’s misconceptions about socialism, but to show

communism as a process: socialism was yet to fully suppress the preceding mode of

production, which lives on in acts of superannuated villainy. It ultimately serves, in

demystifying the realities of the socialist state for the capitalist everyman, as an

affirmation of communism as such but one subtended by satire. So concludes the film,

with Mr. West being saved by the real Bolsheviks, touring Moscow, and telegraphing

his wife to burn their anti-communist propaganda and to hang a portrait of Lenin in

his study.45

If this Soviet film echoed a version of communist laughter emanating out of

Hollywood, and one that was mostly coherent with Eisenstein’s vision, such

resonance did not last. Kuleshov’s film, from 1924, can be instructively contrasted

with another, from 1934 – and between the two we are given perspective on the

changing shape of communist laughter in the revolutionary state at a time when

socialism was transitioning out of Lenin’s New Economic Policy and into Stalin’s

successive Five Year Plans. Directed by Eisenstein’s former assistant, Grigori

Aleksandrov, Jolly Fellows is a musical comedy about a herdsman who is mistaken

for an international concert star and who subsequently acquires fame as the leader of a

jazz band. While there is room for an interpretation that this film uses the integrated

musicianship of a jazz band to allegorize the functioning of a planned economy, the

film itself barely encourages such an reading, and instead keeps matters very light and

outwardly apolitical, injecting a romantic comedy with some genuinely funny

moments of slapstick. At its best, for instance, its slapstick satisfies a potentially

universal desire to witness a man play a piano using another man’s face. But, unlike

Mr. West, this film consciously seeks to distance itself from American comedy. It

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opens with a series of hand-drawn but familiar faces, all brought to life with

unsettlingly creepy animation. Chaplin winks, Lloyd smiles, and Keaton’s hat tips as

if by invisible hand. “Aren’t appearing in this film,” reads the subsequent intertitle,

before the actual actors are similarly announced. Interestingly enough, this animation

appears to be lifted from the 1927 short, One of Many, in which a young Soviet girl –

inspired by an encounter with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford – dreams of an

animated Hollywood, where she is then harassed and threatened by Chaplin, Lloyd,

and Keaton. Aleksandrov’s similarly reactive aesthetic, which owes more to the

choreography of Busby Berkeley than to Chaplin’s more anarchic styling, squanders

potential for both affirmation and negation – the dialectic of communist laughter – so

as to enact something far tamer. Unlike the female leads cast by Eisenstein and

Kuleshov, its lead is played by Lyubov Orlova, often billed as the first Soviet film

star, who by contrast to Lapkina’s liberated sexuality and Khokhlov’s all-out

lasciviousness seems to embody a more wholesome beauty. “There is nothing

seductively languid in the Russian star’s representation,” writes Susan Buck-Morss,

“which is more about theatricality than sexuality.” 46 Without denigrating this

genuinely funny film, which Graham Greene was surely right to call “a picture of

almost ecstatic happiness,”47 we must nevertheless insist that its laughter belongs not

to Lenin but to Stalin, and if we have been correct in attributing communist laughter

to Lenin, then Stalin’s laughter must be something else entirely. We hear that

laughter, without the critical edge of social indictment and without much in the way

of communitarian affirmation, again in Aleksandrov’s subsequent two comedies,

Circus (1936) and Volga-Volga (1938), the latter of which was reportedly Stalin’s

favorite film.48

While this comparison between a film from the 1920s and a film from the

25
1930s might have drifted away from the visual form of laughter and into the realm of

comedy in general, it nevertheless speaks to that form’s cooption and corruption as

part of official ideology. Boris Shumyatsky, who took over the newly centralized

Soviet film industry in 1930, famously insisted that communist cinema needed to

abandon its youthful avant-gardism in order to connect with the masses, and that

comedy would be the perfect genre for achieving this end. “Tsarist and capitalist

Russia,” he claimed in 1935, “were not acquainted with happy joyful laughter in their

best works. The laughter of Gogol, Shchendrin and Chekhov is accusing laughter,” he

said of those figures named by Eisenstein, “laughter derived from bitterness and

hatred.”49 By contrast, Shumyatsky advocated for “joie-de-vivre, optimism and

cheerfulness,” or so he insisted when defending Jolly Fellows to the press:

In a country building socialism, where there is no private property or

exploitation where the classes hostile to the proletariat have been liquidated,

where the workers are united by their conscious participation in the

construction of socialist society and where the enormous task of liquidating

the remnants of the capitalist past is being accomplished by the Party even in

people’s consciousness – in this country comedy, apart from its task of

exposure, has another more important and responsible task: the creation of a

cheerful and joyful spectacle.50

A shift, then, from the laughter of Eisenstein’s sexually liberated peasants to

something far more moral and, on the face of things, something politically detached

or at least hubristically bombastic. “The victorious class wants to laugh with joy,” he

concludes. “That is its right, and Soviet cinema must provide the audience with this

26
joyful Soviet laughter.”51 Beyond announcing the conservatism that attends a move

from Leninist internationalism to Stalin’s socialism in one country, Shumyatsky’s

decidedly unfunny account of laughter also betrays a morbid subtext, in that

ideological victory is claimed here at the cost of “liquidation” – the euphemism for

mass murder is repeated – from which comedy serves as spectacular distraction.

Ecstatically happy though Aleksandrov’s films might be, their superficially apolitical

comedy should be marked as suspicious. Their laughter, to be sure, is trying to hide

something – it is absolutely escapist in the most dangerous sense. This transformation

in laughter, from the irony and satire and the warmth and exuberance to the

apparently victorious and ultimately excapist laughter of the Stalin-era has been

described accurately enough by Slavoj Žižek with reference to the show trials, and to

what he calls “the Kafkaesque quality of the eerie laughter that erupted amongst the

public during Bukharin’s last speech in front of the Central Committee on February

23, 1937.”52 The bitter irony, totally absent from Shumyatsky’s defense but preserved

and redoubled historically, is that he too would be liquidated: three months after

Bukharin’s trial, Shumyatsky was arrested and executed by firing squad.

This modulation in tenor – away from the affirmative joy of communist

laughter and toward something either socially disengaged or just plain moribund – has

as much to do with international film distribution as it does with political ideology.

While American films screened in the USSR during the NEP period – in which parity

between Soviet and imported film was finally achieved in 1928 – after 1929, under

the rule of Stalin, imports ceased almost entirely and the avant-garde filmmaking that

typified the early 1920s was suppressed as bourgeois formalism. 53 Ironically, then,

whilst distancing itself from the most politically radical strands of American comedy,

exemplified in Chaplin, Soviet cinema would come to approximate or even preempt

27
the type of superficial comedy Hollywood began churning out during the McCarthy

era. And yet, there is a second layer of irony with this, in that such Hollywood

comedy nevertheless contained, at least in some exemplary cases, episodes of

communist laughter the likes of which had been extirpated from Soviet cinema.

Donald Crafton is especially lucid in describing this historically peculiar tendency in

in American cinema, using terms as appropriate to the films of W. C. Fields and Jerry

Lewis as they are to the silly symphonies of Walt Disney. “The aggregate crazy

laughter produced by all the bizarre plot twists, mindless gags, goofy characters,

peppy music, and unbridled optimism during this era in the movies,” he argues, “must

have seemed manic as well as poignant, considered the unemployment, race riots,

strikes, starvation, and general misery outside the theatre doors.” 54 Even though this

laughter has the outward appearance of and may well be escapism – of the type

peculiar to Stalinist comedy, or what Crafton described as “a desirable distraction to

facilitate social forgetfulness” – we can nevertheless locate an alternative way of

laughing by following Crafton to reappraise that form’s most earnest defense,

rendered as an object lesson from within the narrative space of cinema.

The narrative begins in Hollywood, a decade into the Great Depression. The

American landscape is dotted with ramshackle Hoovervilles. Roosevelt’s New Deal is

yet to fix anything. Against this backdrop, our playboy hero, John Sullivan, directs

profitably populist though altogether shallow sex comedies – indeed, desirable

distractions. His box-office hits are all manifestly trivial, with directorial credits

including So Long, Sarong, Hey, Hey in the Hayloft, and Ants in Your Pants of 1939.

The studio looks forward to a follow-up, Ants in Your Pants of 1941, starring Bob

Hope, Mary Martin, and maybe even Bing Crosby. And yet, Sullivan wants to pursue

a different line. A Steinbeckian portrait of the American underclasses. “Tramps,

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sweatshops, and people eating garbage in the alleys,” or so the pitch is summarized

back to him. “An epic about misery.” We are shown, along with Sullivan’s producers,

a scene in which two men fight to the death on a moving freight train. Rapid jump-

cuts. American night. Gunshots. The men tumble from an open boxcar off of a bridge

and into water. “You see,” shouts Sullivan, “you see the symbolism of it: capital and

labor destroy each other. It teaches a lesson, a moral lesson, it has social

significance.” The producers want nothing of the sort, even if this film, whose title

remains unknown, is said to have played for a fifth week at the music hall. “Who goes

to the music hall?” accuses one. “Communists!” Indeed, the only audience interested

in this ham-handed allegory will comprise the dull votaries of Marx and Engels; for

everyone else, stick to the Marx Brothers. Not to be dissuaded, Sullivan stubbornly

prepares for his project by donning the garb of a vagrant and submerging himself in a

life of the collectively downtrodden, albeit whilst followed around the countryside by

a fully staffed trailer. After fleeing the studio flunkies, hitchhiking along the West

Coast, and falling in with a down-and-out actress who bears a striking resemblance to

Veronica Lake, things take their inevitable turn for the worse. A case of mistaken

identity coupled with temporary amnesia lands Sullivan in a labor camp, for six years

of physical toil.

This is, of course, to summarize the first two acts of Sullivan’s Travels, a

masterful comedy directed by Preston Sturges and released by Paramount Pictures in

December 1941, just three days prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. All of that,

however, only establishes the conditions of possibility for one of the most brilliantly

reflexive scenes in all of popular cinema: the epiphany in which our eponymous

filmmaker is given cause to reassess his values. Sullivan’s chain gang is taken to the

Sunday night picture show held in an old church for its African-American

29
congregation. As the workers shuffle in, manacled together, the camera holds low and

looks back at them from the forefront of the pews, capturing the leaden movements of

weary bodies and shackled feet. The minister leads his flock in song: “Go Down

Moses,” whose resonant timbre serves as an apt score to the barely audible clattering

of chains. “Will those nearest the lights kindly rise and dim them, please?” Projected

above the altar and on a white sheet is the iconic cartoon mouse, Mickey,

accompanied by text proclaiming the copyright of Walter Disney Productions. For the

remainder of this scene, the church organist plays in jaunty arpeggios, a counterpoint

to her harmony with the negro spiritual, and the camera cuts primarily between two

kinds of shot: close-ups on the working men’s faces, all covered in dirt and sweat and

visibly weatherworn; and a remediation, which takes up the entire screen, of a cartoon

from 1934, “Playful Pluto,” wherein the animated bloodhound crashes about a kitchen

while glued to a strip of flypaper. The audience erupts into laughter, and that is what

the close-ups show repeatedly and with affectionate detail. Sullivan, who has

remained stony-faced, looks around at his brethren and eventually chuckles, only

briefly, before asking the man next to him: “Hey, am I laughing?” The reply is more

laughter, to which Sullivan responds in kind, just as the scene opens out to a medium-

shot of Sullivan roaring merrily and surrounded on all sides by men doing likewise.

On this image the scene ends, fading out to the church exterior.

The transition is striking, from the resolute solemnity of “Go Down Moses” to

the madcap delight of “Playful Pluto,” and affective in a way for which Sullivan

seems completely unprepared. We can see as much by watching the contortions of his

face, the way his gradual surrender looks so involuntary, an observation reemphasized

by the punchline in which he has to ask if he really is laughing. While the laughter

evidently causes internal dissonance for its embodying subject, the potential source of

30
that dissonance – an aesthetic tension, between mindless comedy and social realism –

finds its adjunct in two of the more tempting ways for responding critically to this

scene. Perhaps we should love it, because anything that makes life bearable for an

immiserated underclass is surely a good thing. Because there are few pursuits more

noble than easing the burden of exploited laborers. Unsurprisingly, the film endorses

this interpretation, conspicuously enough with its paratextual dedication. “To the

memory of those who made us laugh,” reads an opening intertitle: “the motley

mountebanks, the clowns, the buffoons, in all times and in all nations, whose efforts

have lightened our burden a little, this picture is affectionately dedicated.” But then

again, perhaps we should resist such levity. Perhaps we should approach the scene

with suspicion, because – notwithstanding the cartoonists’ strike of 1941 – the brutal

formalism of the dog is potentially there to teach the congregation and the chain gang

to accept the exploitation that befalls them on a daily basis. As Esther Leslie has

argued, Disney cartoons like “Playful Pluto” are, at their core, “object lessons in the

actuality of alienation,” which only acclimatize their viewers to “a world of

impoverished experience, sadism and violence.”55 Humanist warmth, on the one hand;

icy skepticism, on the other. And so it is that the political amphibology of this scene,

and of the film as a whole, speaks to one of the principal dialectics in modern

aesthetics, complicating any straightforward answer to the question posed clearly and

influentially by Henri Bergson in 1900 but which takes on a whole new resonance in

the 1930s and 40s. “What,” asked the philosopher, “does laughter mean?” 56 In this

scene, we learn that laughter might either be a tool for ideologically bludgeoning an

already exploited source of labor into seemingly inescapable subject positions; or it

might be a countervailing force of liberal good, a vital grace enjoyed by those who

need enjoyment the most. My sense, however, is that what we are witnessing from the

31
pews of an old church in neither of those two things. What Sullivan learns, and we

learn it with him, is that (in Crafton’s phrase) “movie laughter can create a

community.”57 That lesson is taught through a moment of solidarity, of communion

between men and women – of laughter, to be sure, as an affirmatively communitarian

and actively collectivizing phenomenon, rallied against the powers that be. In short:

communist laughter.

Coda: Garbo Laughs!

Here we can approach some more extensive conclusions. Taking our definition of

communist laughter from an interpretation of Lenin’s character, it was suggested that

laughter is communist when it is simultaneously communal and critical – when it

seeks to marshal an affirmative community against the cultural logics and affective

tendencies of capitalism. Defined in that way, communist laughter was heard to echo

between the films of Charlie Chaplin and Sergei Eisenstein. Laughter in these films,

and in their surrounding theorizations, harmonizes with that of Lenin and also

establishes a common sensibility between those two mutually familiar filmmakers.

From the standpoint of Soviet cinema, this laughter – peculiar to the 1920s – is very

different from that which we hear after Lenin’s death and in the subsequent ascent of

Stalin. Whereas the laughter of Lenin was dialectical, affirming and negating together

and at once, the laughter of Stalin and of Stalinist cinema is cheerful and joyful, but

only insofar as cheer and joy conceal the horrors of a revolution betrayed. In other

words, while communist laughter was heard loud and clear in Soviet films from the

1920s, such as those we looked at from Eisenstein and Kuleshov, during the 1930s

32
that laughter would modulate into something very different: the hysterical and eerie

laughter of the show trials. There are two readily observable ironies in this. The first

is that, whilst this transformation in laughter is responsive to nationalist cultural

policy made in the name of communism, the resulting films were not only far less

radical than those produced earlier in the USSR but they might also be politically

conservative in comparison to those made contemporaneously in Hollywood. The

second irony is that, whilst communist laughter was all but silenced in Soviet cinema,

in Hollywood it would persist, not least of all in the late films of Chaplin as well as in

that exemplary episode from Sturges. That said, this essay rounds off by looking to

one last and potentially improbable site for communist laughter in Hollywood cinema.

The ideological premise of Kuleshov’s film was to insert an American within

the socialist state and, despite his initial resistance, have him eventually convert to

communism in the manner of born again spiritualism. This narrative would see itself

remade several times over during the McCarthy era, and most frequently as screwball

comedy, into so many variations all of which invert the original polarities of political

belief. That is what we encounter, for instance, in King Vidor’s Comrade X from

1940, in which a Russian streetcar driver played by Hedy Lamer agrees to a sham

marriage with Clark Gable, but only in order to export socialism to the United States.

And again in Silk Stockings from 1957, in which Fred Astaire introduces several

Russian comrades to the bourgeois lifestyle via champagne, romance, and killer

dance-moves. These films, however, are only knock-offs of the truly wonderful

Ninotchka. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch – who honeymooned to Moscow in 1936 –

scripted by Billy Wilder and released by MGM in 1939, this film is about a Soviet

attaché played by Greta Garbo who is sent to collect three errant and incompetent

Bolsheviks from Paris. The Parisian setting is appropriate to the story, and not only

33
because Paris is the clichéd city of love. During the 1930s, Paris was also a principal

site of emigration for the socialist state’s ousted aristocrats and bourgeoisie and also a

point of departure for non-Russian socialists on pilgrimage to the USSR. While the

US and the USSR had each become increasingly statist, either under the influence of

McCarthy or under the rule of Stalin, Paris would serve as a mediator between the

two. Indeed, Ninotchka is not the first Lubitsch film in which we meet a communist in

Paris. In Trouble in Paradise, from 1932, a disheveled man is given cause to berate an

heiress for her decadence in the form of a diamond-encrusted handbag. “Any woman

who spends a fortune in times like this on a handbag, phooey, phooey, phooey, and

phooey. And as Leon Trotsky said, ‘kashdaya damitchka…’”58

Set within this context, the first half of Ninotchka derives its humor from a

steely Garbo mocking bourgeois excess in the spirit of that unnamed communard

from the earlier film. “I am ashamed,” she tells her hosts, “to put the picture of Lenin

in a room like this.” The story is simple enough, and holds loosely to the original idea

delivered to MGM by Gottfried Reinhardt in 1937: “Russian girl saturated with

Bolshevist ideals goes to fearful, capitalistic, monopolistic Paris. She meets romance

and has an uproarious good time. Capitalism not so bad after all.” While the film itself

is nowhere near so clear-cut as that might suggest, here I want to approach a final

conclusion by looking closely at the its best-known scene, one of the most celebrated

laughs in all of film history, when that infamously impassive “face of the century”

erupts into brilliant and beautiful laughter. The title character, played by Garbo,

chooses to eat alone at a workers’ café, but is cornered there by the film’s male lead, a

bottom-rung aristocrat turned swindling businessman, the Count Leon d’Algout,

played by Melvyn Douglas. The two sit across from one another at a small table with

a checkered cloth. “I don’t like you following me,” her first words to him. “This is a

34
place for working men.” He flirts at her and she threatens him as “a man who employs

business methods which in Russia would be punished by death.” The two sit at a right

angle, with their sartorial difference redoubled by the black-and-white cloth on their

table: Ninotchka, in a dark gray jacket, and Leon in a tweed suit, rounded off with a

flower in the lapel and a bowtie. “I won’t leave yet,” he insists, “not until I’ve made

you laugh, at least once.” His strategy is to tell a series of bumbling jokes, which she

punctually interrupts with deadpan interjections and thereby ruins:

Leon: Two Scotchmen met on a street, and I don’t know the name of the

street. It doesn’t matter anyway. One’s name was Magillicutty, the other’s

name was Macintosh. Magillicutty said to Macintosh ‘Hello Mr Magillicutty’

Magillicutty-Macintosh said to Magillicutty Hello Mr Mac-Magillicutty’.’

Then Magillicutty said to Macintosh ‘How’s Mrs. Macintosh?’ and Macintosh

said to Magillicutty ‘How’s Mrs. Magillicutty?’

Ninnotchka: … I wish they’d never met.

He continues, chuckling away at his own wit, while she refuses to laugh and instead

stares ahead, busily tearing apart and devouring a bread roll as though to underscore

an oblique homage to Chaplin in The Gold Rush. He becomes increasingly agitated,

telling jokes with more force, shouting through them, murdering his own punchlines.

“You have no sense of humor. None whatsoever. There’s not a laugh in you.” With

that outburst his chair punctually collapses. He falls backward, taking out a nearby

table on the way down, and lands flat on his ass. The shot cuts to nearby workers, all

roaring with laughter, and then back to Garbo’s character, framed in medium close-up

as she too laughs, uproariously and inelegantly, banging fists on the table. After a

35
medium shot of him – “what’s so funny?” – we are shown in a wide-angle lens the

entirety of the café’s interior, wherein all patrons are united in laughter. And Leon,

the last to laugh, is not only the butt of a collective joke; by the scene’s closing fade-

out, he too is laughing, as though recruited into some new sociality, with the

communist and the workers. While this is the narrative moment at which Garbo’s

character effectively softens, loosening up on her political values and falling in love

with her seducer, the scene itself operates conversely. In its laughter, this scene mocks

bourgeois impotence, the aristocrat’s absolute failure to draw even a smile by his own

volition, and simultaneously allows for its heroine to find solidarity with the workers

at a nearby table and then throughout the café as a whole. The shots themselves, the

widening view of the social space, reinforce the collectivizing force of laughter. And

so does the narrative. Leon has indeed been recruited, even if only temporarily. “Ever

since you met that Bolshevik lady,” reports the Count’s butler, “I’ve noticed a distinct

change in you, sir,” which is said to have become manifest nowhere more decidedly

than in his choice of reading material: “It was with great amazement that I found a

copy of Karl Marx’s Capital on your night table, sir.”

“In spite of its extreme beauty,” Roland Barthes once described Garbo, “this

face, not drawn but sculpted in something smooth and fragile, that is, at once perfect

and ephemeral, comes to resemble the flour-white complexion of Charlie Chaplin, the

dark vegetation of his eyes, his totem-like countenance.”59 With this scene, which may

indeed be referencing Chaplin’s own dinner festivities, that mask is let slip to reveal

an otherwise concealed human warmth. It would be tempting to read this as the

descent of Garbo’s arch-modernist “gestural excess” into “bourgeois intelligibility.” 60

This may be the case, but even so: that need not necessarily mean the domestication

of her aesthetic power or the selling out of her character’s political values. Rather,

36
Garbo’s laughter retains the memory of its communist prehistory, and especially of

that aesthetic relay between Moscow and Hollywood and the values these two places

are supposed to represent. In it, we can hear the laughter Lenin shared with the

fishermen in Capri and again at a London street theatre. We can hear Eisenstein’s

eruption in Paris at the charge of his and the Bolsheviks’ apparent humorlessness. We

can hear – and even see – the laughter of the Tramp, and of the various clowns both

American and Soviet. With all of that coming to bear, this scene and its film –

released after Stalin’s seizure of power in the USSR but years before the rise of

McCarthyism in the USA – have thus preserved communist laughter, ensuring its

permanence in a cinema for which it would appear and reappear as both a critical and

a collectivizing force, even while geopolitical history was eradicating the utopian

promise of communism from its embattled realization in socialism. Such is the

laughter whose loudest echo can be heard only two years later when John Sullivan

finds himself in spiritual communion with a black congregation and an exhausted

chain gang, gathered together in an old church, which for just a few minutes is

transformed into a movie house.

37
1
James Agee, Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments (New York: McDowell, 1958), 6-7.
2
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1947), 5-6.
3
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana UP, 1968), 94
4
For the best of those politically committed histories, see the work of Lars T. Lih, primarily in Lenin
Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context (London: Haymarket, 2006) as well as in the
introductory and altogether more biographical text, Lenin (London: Reaktion, 2011). See also Tamás
Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015)
and Tariq Ali, The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution (London: Verso,
2017). For a completely reactionary text, which should probably be avoided, see Robert Service,
Lenin: A Biography (London: Pan Books, 2000).
5
Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (London: Verso, 2009), 92.
6
Ibid., 90.
7
Maxim Gorky, Lenin, The Revolution, Peace: Stories (Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1986), 14.
8
For a brilliant take on “infectious laughter,” which will be discussed at some length later in this essay,
see Donald Crafton, “Infectious Laughter: Cartoons’ Cure for the Depression” in Daniel Goldmark and
Charles Keil, eds. Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011), 69-92.
9
Leon Trotsky, On Lenin: Notes Toward a Biography, trans. Tamara Deutscher (Edinburgh: Harrap,
1971), 165.
10
Gorky, 14.
11
Trotsky, 165.
12
See, for instance, Victor Shklovsky, Mayakovsky and his Circle (London: Pluto Press, 1972), 118-9.
13
Gorky, 17.
14
Ibid., 21.
15
Ibid., 11.
16
Ibid. This term, “eccentricity,” will recur throughout this essay but will not become an argument of
its own. For a thoroughgoing account of eccentricity within the sphere of modernist aesthetics, see
Justus Nieland, Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2008).
17
Gorky, 12.
18
See Paul Flaig, “Brecht, Chaplin, and the Comic Inheritance of Marxism,” The Brecht Yearbook 35
(2010): 3-22.
19
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975),
1200. For a detailed though different investigation of the dialectic as a narrative form within the type of
cinema discussed in this essay, see the work of Lisa Trahair, especially these two essays: “The Comedy
of Philosophy: Bataille, Hegel and Derrida,” Angelaki 6.3 (December 2001): 155-69; “Short-circuiting
the Dialectic: Narrative and Slapstick in the Cinema of Buster Keaton,” Narrative, 10.3 (2002): 307-
325.
20
Sergei Eisenstein, Writings, 1934-1947, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (London: I. B.
Taurus, 2010), 68.
21
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (London: Continuum, 2005), 181.
22
Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), 385-
6. See, for an extension of Lacan’s claim, the brilliant appendix to Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In:
On Comedy (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2008), 183-219.
23
Ronal Bergman, Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict (London: Warner, 1997), Ebook.
24
Parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston), 315. Underestimating that humor is part of what derails Peter Greenawas’s Eisenstein biopic
from 2015, which is at its most Eisensteinian when playing phallocentrism for laughs, and which
descends into stale melodrama by circumscribing that phallocentrism within a bourgeois narrative of
artistic individualism v. an authoritarian state.
25
Eisenstein, Writings, 1934-1947, 72.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., 70.
28
Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 2, 1927-1930, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard
Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 2002), 224. While this claim is abstractly
theoretical see, for a book-length reworking of its premise from the standpoint of materialist film
history, Rob King, The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
29
Robert Payne, The Great God Pan: A Biography of the Tramp Played by Charles Chaplin (New
York: Hermitage House, 1952), 74.
30
Julian Smith, Chaplin (London: Columbus, 1986), 31. I take this citation from Owen Hatherley’s
book, cited below. Interestingly enough, Payne also compares Chaplin’s supposedly algebraic method
for producing laughter with Marx’s formula for capitalist accumulation. “Such were the conclusions of
Chaplin’s algebra,” he reflects after a page of equations. “They are no worse than the conclusions
which Karl Marx reached in his study of differential calculus.” Payne, 205.
31
Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (London: Penguin, 1964), Ebook.
32
We know as much from the films Eisenstein chooses to cite as well as by the more generic
descriptions afforded Chaplin’s cinema.
33
See Chapter 10 in David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (London: Penguin, 1985). Ebook.
34
See Matthew Solomon, The Gold Rush (London: Palgrave, 2015), 100-101.
35
David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997), 32.
36
See, for an excellent rendition of that reading, Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature,
Media, and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 192-3.
37
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (London: Abacus,
1994), 89.
38
Richard Taylor, Battleship Potemkin: The Film Companion (London: I. B. Taurus, 2000), 117.
Eisenstein and Chaplin would eventually become familiar on a more personal level, discussing
communism over tennis in Hollywood. See, for Chaplin’s version of their friendship, chapter 20 in
Chaplin’s Autobiography.
39
Owen Hatherley, The Chaplin-Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde
(London: Pluto, 2016), Ebook.
40
Edwin Rolfe, Collected Poems, ed. Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1996), 173. Nevertheless, as Angelos Koutsourakis phrases it in an essay on Chaplin’s
late style, these films maintain and even develop “relentlessly the concept of the individual as a
historical and social product,” and specifically as an embodiment of the relations of production.”
Angelos Koutsourakis, “The Crisis of the Individual as a Precept of Political Cinema: Kuhle Wampe
(1932) and Monsieur Verdoux (1947),” Film Criticism 39.3 (Spring 2015): 38.
41
This claim appears in numerous Chaplin biographies, but I am yet to find “official” documentation of
Lenin having said or written it. The earliest recitation of these words is by Waldo Frank in a 1929 issue
of Scribner’s, attributing them to Argentinian writer, Arturo Mom. The accompanying text points up
that, true or not, the claim makes perfect sense. “It is a story readily believed. Chaplin’s art expresses
the germinal seed of the revolt – tender and ruthless, romantic and realistic – which Lenin’s technic
attempted to fulfill. Chaplin and Lenin – they are probably the two most potential spirits of our age.”
Waldo Frank, “Charles Chaplin: A Portrait” Scribner’s Magazine 86 September 1929: 243.
42
See chapter 18, “Exapno Mapcase, Secret Agent” in Harpo Marx and Rowland Barber, Harpo
Speaks! (New York: Limelight Editions, 1962), 299-337.
43
Eisenstein, Writings, 1922-1934, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London and New York: Tauris,
2010), 71-73.
44
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010), 60.
45
For an alternative account of this film, which is attentive to the many-levelled ironies of its ending,
see Vlada Petric, “A Subtextual Reading of Kuleshov’s Satire” The Extrordinary Adventures of Mr.
West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924)” in Andrew Horton, ed., Inside Soviet Film Satire: Laughter
With A Lash (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 65-74.
46
Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 161.
47
Graham Greene, Graham Greene on Film (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 24.
48
See, for instance, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Phoenix,
2014), 528. There is, of course, a self-contained branch of scholarship dealing with Stalin, comedy, and
laughter. See, for a good example of this scholarship, Jonathan Waterlow’s wide-ranging article,
“Sanctioning Laughter in Stalin’s Soviet Union” History Workshop Journal 79.1 (2015): 198-214.
49
Boris Shumyatsky, “A Cinema for the Millions” in eds. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, The Film
Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 368.
50
Ibid., 368-9.
51
Ibid., 369.
52
Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 233.
53
For the best history of cinema during this period, see Denise J. Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the
Silent Era, 1918–1935 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985).
54
Crafton, 74.
55
Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde (London:
Verso, 2004), 83.
56
Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (New York: Cosimo, 2015), 1.
57
Crafton, 72.
58
My colleague, Greg Dogopolov, translates this phrase as the pejorative casting of a feminine noun.
59
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 2000), 56.
60
Paul Morrison, “Garbo Laughs!” Modernist Cultures 2.2 (October 2006): 153-169.