ABSTRACT
Satirical comedy of the Brezhnev era relied heavily on the use of Aesopian language spurring the viewer to decipher seemingly harmless details as allusions to social or economic ills. What happened to the genre in the open atmosphere of glasnost and perestroika when other genres and other media were attacking the Soviet system in more uncompromising ways? Focusing on three perestroika-era comedies by El'dar Riazanov and Iurii Mamin, this chapter argues that these directors continued the Soviet tradition of mocking bureaucrats and cultural authorities, but also sought to make the genre more radical by employing at least one of the following three strategies: attacking Soviet bureaucracy as such, enhancing comedy’s allegorical potential and injecting moderately chernukha (‘dark’) elements so as to heighten a sense of urgency. None of these strategies was particularly successful, however, as all of the three comedies under discussion did poorly at the box office and still fell short of the unconditional openness and explicitness that were increasingly becoming the norm in Russian cinema.
