Humor, counterpoint... like weapons of massive deterrence to fight against the horrors of war?
Perhaps because on the stage of a "
comedy club
" in Kiev, in front of an audience won over to his cause, Anton Boldyrev tests his latest jokes.
His Russian-speaking girlfriend, his twin brother in the army or his mother's reaction to the arrival of a missile, everyone takes it for their rank.
"
You too, your parents call you during the air raids?"
“Launches the comedian.
"
Honestly, I think their only purpose is to say how badly you're hiding.
My mother calls me one day, she asks me: “Where are you?”
I tell him: “Metro Arsenalna (the deepest station in kyiv, editor’s note)”.
She replies: “You have to go even deeper”.
I ask her: “And you, mom, where are you?”
She finally replies: “I am in the village, the connection is bad, I went up to the attic”
.
To discover
SERVICE: Book your comedy shows on Le Figaro Billetterie
Read also “Compact.
Jock.
Easy to park": with humor, Ukraine asks France for Leclerc tanks
Card full: the room laughs.
In Ukraine, a country which elected former comedian Volodymyr Zelensky as president in 2019, the stand-up scene did not take long to restart after the invasion launched by Vladimir Putin in February 2022. From
May , Ivan Jornokley, producer of the "
Ukrainian Stand-Up Agency
", has started to organize parties again across the country.
"
We didn't know if people were going to come.
Is it appropriate or not?
Is it time or not?
But it was the right timing (…) We show that we laugh, so we don't surrender
, ”recalls the dynamic thirty-something, wearing a t-shirt on which is written “
Words are our weapon
.
Today, he organizes about twenty parties a month, part of the profits of which is donated to the army.
Some took place in underground shelters.
For others, it was necessary to equip themselves with generators in order to avoid power cuts, which were frequent when the Russian army began to bombard Ukrainian energy sites.
humor, a catharsis against misfortune
Anton Boldyrev's sketch finished, it's Marina Voïtsekhovska's turn to go on stage.
Her tongue-in-cheek tone hits the mark: the young woman has only two years of stand-up behind her, but her videos have accumulated hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.
If the young woman evokes the war at times, it is only in the background.
“
All my humor is built on my personal experiences.
And since right now our life is focused on war, so my humor revolves around that,
” the 26-year-old artist says.
Then she adds:
For example, I say that since I speak Ukrainian very well, and seem nice, people rarely ask me for my papers at checkpoints.
The only time it happened was when I came back to my village.
It was my ex-husband, he wanted to know if I had changed my name after the divorce!
For
others, however, stand-up should allow Ukrainians to ignore the fighting.
Ramyl Yangoulov thus explains avoiding the subject, preferring to remind his audience “
that there is still life
” after the war.
Otherwise, “
people withdraw into themselves.
In Ukraine, they are not used to going to see a psychologist when they have a problem
, ”adds the 33-year-old comedian.
One thing is certain: in a year of war,
has become more adult
,” says producer Ivan Jornokley: “
We don’t just want to laugh for laughs anymore.
We want to share our pain, our concerns
.
Making fun of the Russian army
At the start of the war, Ukraine put the laughers on its side.
His "
same
" images diverted on social networks and the countless montages making fun of the Russian army, shared by politicians themselves, have been a hit.
But if Kiev won the war on Twitter, it did not win it on the ground and the Russian threat weighs on the minds of the customers of the huge bar where the evening is organized, in an anonymous district in the south of Kiev .
A hundred spectators, young active people in their twenties or thirties, came as a couple or with friends, sharing beers and pizzas while waiting for the show.
Finally for Tetiana, 30, who came out of curiosity to “
spend a romantic moment
” with her husband, “
it's an opportunity to hear something else, to talk and laugh about something other than war.
Humor encourages life.
At least this way we can put all our problems on hold and take a breather
.”
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/KMEYMJKESBAZBE4MRBAM4TGHIQ.jpg)
