ABSTRACT
Laughter liberates not only from external censorship but first of all from the great interior censor. As a plethora of thinkers encompassing such diverse figures as Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stanislaw Lem have argued, laughter possesses extraordinary subversive power. Freud's theory is useful for an examination of humour in a society straitjacketed by a strict censorship, the broader, socio-political version of individual psychological repression. A strategy of courting laughter contrasts with the humourless, overt and sometimes violent means by which such groups as Voina and Pussy Riot generally operate. Blue Noses is the Urals native Aleksander Shaburov and the Siberian Vyacheslav Mizin, who readily expose their far-from-ideal bodies and their outre imagination in absurd acts of what they call 'hooligan improvisation'. According to Joseph Conrad, a caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth. Their differences notwithstanding, works by Blue Noses and Sergei Elkin fall into the capacious categories of humour and irony.
