So I watched "The Death of Stalin"

[snowlight]

To quote Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at the AV Club:

But as someone who grew up with its wiseass cynicism, I’ve never completely bought the prevailing Western academic notion of Soviet humor as a subversive element, an act of resistance, a survival mechanism, etc. Because totalitarianism, a state of absurdity and terror, has a way of co-opting its own ridicule. One learns an essential truth about the totalitarian state in recognizing its grotesque comedy—and another in recognizing the fact that the gallows humor may be part of the state itself. That’s the thing that I’m still wrestling with: the Stalin joke as an inbuilt element of Stalinism. Because when you’re laughing in the face of death, isn’t death still laughing, too?