Wouldn’t it be amazing if Donald Trump, the most clownish politician in memory, was brought down by a man who was an actual comedian? And wouldn’t it be amazingly appropriate if this happened for the benefit of the American audience, which is more receptive to the image of a powerful and destructive humorist more than any other in the world? This, after all, is the country that has spawned Joker, Comedian from Watchmen and Pennywise the Clown. With Zelensky, life truly imitates art in more ways than one.
Yet much mystery and many misconceptions about the person of Ukraine’s president still exist in the Western media, which is not surprising, both because of the Americans’ general lack of thorough knowledge of Eastern European realities and because Zelensky’s previous career lies in the realm of esoteric post-Soviet TV culture which not a lot of foreigners know about. I have seen Zelensky called a stand-up comedian (not really his specialty), an actor (true, but not the primary source of his celebrity), and several people on Twitter have wondered what exactly he was known for before he got into the business of talking quid pro quo and Javelins with the least trustworthy person on Earth.
If you do want a quick and dirty analogy, you may think of Zelensky as the Ukrainian Jon Stewart, what with their shared ethnicity, somewhat similar physical built, the type of comedy they both became famous for and the forays into public advocacy, which one of them took way farther than the other.
To tell Zelensky’s story I must make an enormous detour and talk about a TV show called KVN. Both a brand of old Soviet TV sets and an acronym for “The Club of the Funny and the Resourceful”, it was founded in the early 1960s as an intellectual game show for college students who competed as teams representing their universities. Unlike similar trivia shows around the world, KVN had a quirk: sometimes, if team members couldn’t come up with the correct answer to a question, they were allowed to provide a witty or a silly one and, if both teams did so, they’d be judged on who was funnier doing it. Of course, since it’s always more entertaining to watch people be smartasses than plain smart, the show’s focus eventually became humor rather than erudition. A typical game between college teams would consist of several “events”, usually incorporating sketch comedy, improvisation and humorous musical numbers. A season would be played, in the playoff format, and a KVN Champion would be crowned at the end of it.
Having been founded in Khrushchev’s time, and being exclusively the realm of progressive youth, KVN became known for occasionally bravely foraying into satire. The improv part of the show was also fraught with surprises, since it was shown live (no videotaping technology existed in the USSR at the time), and there was no telling what competitive youngsters would blurt out in their desire to out-funny the opposition.
The show became enormously popular and hugely influential, so it was no surprise that Soviet officials were filled with steely resolve to cancel it as soon as they had a chance. Soviet officials were widely known for having a medical condition that made anything that was creative, youthful, fresh, interesting and good send them into toxic shock. But they were also slow movers, so it wasn’t until 1972, after 11 whole seasons, that KVN was finally cancelled. Reportedly, the Party boss responsible for youth programming used the premise of one of the KVNers’ wearing a beard while funny which exposed him to an accusation of being a living parody of Karl Marx. This isn’t a joke. The Soviet Union was a living parody of itself about 100 percent of the time.
Cancellation, however, didn’t make people forget their favorite show, and a decade and a half later, when Mikhail Gorbachev relaxed media censorship and began encouraging satire, KVN was reborn. To the people of my generation, watching KVN became a formative experience, since in it, the derelict Soviet system was being eviscerated, more and more boldly with each passing season, in a way that was readily absorbed, quickly understood and easily retransmitted to friends. It was perhaps one of the most influential vehicles of revolutionary thought in the dying years of the Soviet Union. All under the guise of a comedy team sport, no less.
KVN has since become an empire that encompasses several leagues and produces almost all of Russia’s top comedic talent. It is currently in the midst of its 33rd consecutive season since being reinstated, all under the governance of the franchise’s owner Alexander Maslyakov, who has also been the show’s host since the mid-60s. Today’s KVN, of course, bears little resemblance to either the intellectual comedy stylings of the Khrushchev era or the political satire battle of Gorbachev’s times. As Maslyakov has become one of Vladimir Putin’s media allies, most political jokes nowadays are directed at the Evil West and any utterances of the Russian president are of a distinctly lickspittle variety. Genuinely funny teams are somewhat of a rarity in today’s KVN and usually don’t win championships, but the show still maintains good ratings on the strength of being a cultural icon.
Volodymyr Zelensky, a member of a 1997 championship-winning team, is easily KVN’s most famous product. As a young man studying economics in college in his native Kryvy Rih, Zelensky was invited to join the local team, Transit, which at the time was competing in the KVN Top League (primetime TV product that determines the overall champion). Transit was a popular, seasoned squad, but it needed polish in its musical routines, and the youthful Zelensky, who was always quite a talented dancer, was invited to coach the players in this crucial area. Quickly, though, he came into his own as a comedic talent and was allowed to take part in sketches. By 1997, when Transit finally won the championship, he was already one of the team’s key players.
Here he is in the 1997 final, playing the main role in a sketch about a CIA agent sent into Russia to defeat its pop music (don’t even fucking ask).
After winning the title, Transit, as is usually the case with champions, broke up so that the players could use their fame in pursuing personal glory and profit, but Zelensky decided to found a new team in Kryvy Rih, naming it Block 95 after the part of the city he grew up in.
Block 95 had a markedly different style from Transit and was centered around Zelensky’s considerable charisma and musical talents. The players wore all black, complete with leather pants, which you can observe here while Zelensky is doing a sketch about a man who can only communicate via interpretive dance. Stick around for the masturbation joke at 1:28.
And here is Trump’s future co-conspirator portraying a Bolshoi ballet dancer on the beach.
He also did a memorable sketch called Scum Man about a person with a super power of making everyone feel horrible and hate him. George Carlin and Chris Rock he was not, but in early Putin’s Russia this certainly was mainstream comedy.
KVN was and is a Russian TV product, and Ukrainian teams, including Block 95, were expected to show fealty to the master, especially after Putin began consolidating his stranglehold on Russian media. It’s not hard to search YouTube and find Block 95’s jokes, perfectly delivered by Zelensky, in which Ukraine is harshly criticized and Putin is lauded. It’s actually somewhat strange, even, that Zelensky’s political opponents didn’t use those clips against him during this year’s campaign.
Block 95 had never reached Transit’s glory as Russia became less receptive to Ukrainian humor. It spent four seasons in the Top League, its highest achievement a semifinal appearance in 2002. A year later, Zelensky made a decision that would define his character and shape his fate.
Maslyakov, who runs KVN with an iron fist, had always guarded his assets very jealously, going as far as forbidding active KVN players from appearing on any other TV shows or even doing private gigs in between official games. Consider the fact that Maslyakov has never paid the teams a dime (they subside entirely on the largesse of whatever sponsors they can find), and you can see how his tyrannical rule may have chafed proud Ukrainians. After Block 95 did a few unauthorized gigs to raise money, Maslyakov had them unceremoniously removed from the project, but offered the team captain to stick around in Moscow and join the show’s production team.
Zelensky, however, refused to abandon his teammates. Instead, he returned to Kryvy Rih and reformed Block 95 as a comedy production studio with the aim of creating content for Ukrainian TV. Simultaneously, he parlayed his KVN fame into hosting a cooking show, channeling all his earnings into Block 95. The gamble proved a success beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. In 2005, Zelensky and his teammates rolled out The Evening Block, a political humor variety show, incorporating a satirical news broadcast and sketch comedy. Zelensky was the heart of soul of The Evening Block, writing jokes, directing, acting in main roles and outlying the general ideology.
What made his creation different from Russian comedic content, which at the time dominated Ukraine’s TV, was its brazen, hard-hitting political lean. Zelensky mercilessly skewered both Ukrainian and Russian politicians, giving zero fucks and pulling zero punches, which in Ukraine, unlike in Putin’s Russia, was actually possible. Very soon, The Evening Block’s ratings in Ukraine left all equivalent Russian shows in the dust.
Not everything produced by The Evening Block is pure comedic genius, of course, but here is an absolutely brilliant sketch called “A Typical Ukrainian Family Through the Eyes of Russians”, which painstakingly rehashes all Ukrainian stereotypes shaped by Russian TV propaganda.
Zelensky, portraying the patriarch of the family, mercilessly presents “a typical Ukrainian” as a greedy glutton who bullies his wife and children, sucks up to America and lives in constant fear of Putin’s righteous wrath. He orders his son to forget the Russian language, happily allows his daughter to move to Moscow to pursue a career in prostitution and spends most of his time between Ukraine’s endless elections trying to steal Russia’s natural gas. The sketch is viciously funny. It’s what I’d call “third level comedy” as it makes fun not of the characters it presents and not of the people who present them, but of those who don’t appear in the sketch and aren’t even mentioned in it, the Russian audience, the gullible receivers of propaganda.
By now, Zelensky bears little resemblance to the fresh-faced prancer of his KVN fame. His voice is raspy after years of chain smoking, his comedy routine no longer relies on cheap showmanship, he looks and behaves as befits one of his country’s most famous and entertaining humans.
In 2014, when Ukraine deposed Viktor Yanukovych, its corrupt president installed by the Kremlin, and Putin retaliated by annexing Crimea and starting the war in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, anything and everything Russia became toxic in Ukraine. Despite having business interests in Russia, Zelensky unambiguously supported his native country. As a result, The Evening Block’s satire became ever more scathing.
In this 2014 sketch, Zelensky is portraying Alina Kabayeva, an Olympic champion gymnast and Putin’s rumored long-time mistress.
Zelensky’s Kabayeva is chiding Putin for never having sex with her anymore, and then the situation escalates with the discovery of Yanukovych in the closet. This is what they in the comedy business call “subtle but effective”, I guess.
In 2015, Block 95, already a producer of pretty much all comedic content on Ukrainian TV, had launched a new project which can only be viewed as Zelensky’s long-awaited fuck-you to Maslyakov. As Ukrainian teams were no longer welcome in KVN, or indeed willing to participate (a team from Odessa had infamously withdrawn from the 2014 semifinal over the Russian invasion), Block 95 decided to produce its own version of a team-based comedy competition, called The League of Laughter. Zelensky, in a nice bit of shade, became its host, the Ukrainian version of Maslyakov. But, unlike the imperious original, who is a domineering control freak reveling in his subjects’ slavish praise, Zelensky was a stylish, happy-go-lucky facilitator who allowed pretty much any type of humor, up and including being himself ridiculed by the competing squads. The League of Laughter became a case study in how different degrees of creative freedom can influence comedy. The Ukrainian knock-off, despite still being mostly low-brow and amateurish, is imminently more watchable than KVN, which labors under the suffocating constraints of Putin’s state TV.
Zelensky’s rise to power in Ukraine is well-documented by now, but, as you can see from the the above, it constitutes maybe 1% of his career. Yes, it was meteoric and largely unprecedented, but if one had to imagine a celebrity who becomes a political force of nature in a country where everyone already knows their name, someone like him would have been an ideal candidate. Well, that, or an unprincipled, idiotic crook, but that could only happen in a nation with a terribly uninformed electorate choking on its hatred, right?
Anyway, Zelensky’s foray into politics did indeed begin with Servant of the People, a political comedy series produced by Block 95 that premiered on Ukrainian TV in November of 2015. By then, Zelensky had already established a reputation as a serviceable big- and small-screen comedic actor, even appearing in the role of Napoleon in a Russian comedy.
Servant of the People is a story of a public-school teacher who crusades against government corruption and, through a crazy and barely-believable chain of event, becomes the President of Ukraine. Zelensky played the main role. The show’s marketing slogan was “The Story of the Next President.”
Life is crazy as fuck sometimes, folks. The show’s second season was titled “From Love to Impeachment.” Honestly, you couldn’t make this shit up if you tried.
Everything about Zelensky’s entrance into politics screamed “populism” and “PR project.” The Ukrainian TV channel, 1+1, where Block 95’s shows are aired, is owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian Jewish businessman with plenty of political connections. On December 31, 2018, when Zelensky announced his intention to imitate art and run for President, his speech was aired by 1+1 just before the New Year, pushing the traditional address by then-President Petro Poroshenko to a later time. Even though the channel denied it, it was widely assumed Kolomoisky ordered the switch.
His campaign was at first laughed at and ridiculed. Even League of Laughter teams, with Zelensky himself standing on the same stage, saw it as their solemn duty to have a knee-slapper at the expense of the host. But, amazingly, inexplicably (well, if you don’t believe the run-of-the-mill All-Conquering Jewish Money conspiracy theories) he rose in the polls until his election became inevitable. The populist streak in world’s politics is undoubtedly one reason, but one shouldn’t discount Zelensky’s own self-promotion genius and easy charisma.
Even now, it is impossible to tell what to make of Zelensky the politician. He ran an anti-corruption campaign, fueled by the image of his TV character. He went so far as to disperse the Ukrainian parliament on day one and call for a new legislative vote, saying he wanted politicians who “would think of the next generation, not the next election.” Yet some of his advisors are well-known shady movers and shakers (to be fair, there is no other kind of mover and shaker in Eastern European politics), and Kolomoisky’s support is most definitely behind him.
Zelensky ran as a patriot who wished to return the Russia-occupied territories, yet Poroshenko’s supporters view him as a traitor who might sell the country out to Putin. The new President’s shaky command of the Ukrainian language (like many Eastern Ukrainians he grew up speaking Russian) and his considerable investments in Russian TV are also easy targets.
His populism, his showmanship, his uncertain political leanings (his party, appropriately named Servant of the People, has only recently decided it was going to be, like, libertarian or something) smack more than a little of Trumpian politics. In fact, his phrase from the now-infamous phone call about Trump’s being “our great teacher” is probably not drawing enough attention. There is a very high degree of probability that Zelensky himself doesn’t quite know what to do with the power that has fallen into his lap. The notorious Russian-Ukrainian journalist Arkadi Babchenko, who has never met a punch he wanted to pull, describes Zelensky’s presidency as “a dilettante playing grand piano with his dick.” Perhaps he is right.
But, in the end, if this accidental President really did become the unintended catalyst of Trump’s downfall, it would probably be the most eerily appropriate thing to happen in this absolutely bloody insane world we are living in now.
