Hammer and Tickle: Jokes under Communism

I was browsing around the Moving Picture Institute's website today. This is the organization that supports the production of movies and documentaries that have a pro-liberty theme. I noted one of their productions in this earlier blog post, namely the very provocative movie Mine Your Own Business.

But the main reason for this posting is that I followed a link from MPI's site and found this very well-written item from May 2006 in Prospect magazine, Hammer and Tickle. Here Ben Lewis tells the story of jokes under Communist rule in the Soviety Union and elsewhere. Read the article to not only laugh at the many example jokes he gives, but to also be amazed again at just how ridiculous and terrible communism and socialism are. I mean... people in the thousands put in jail for telling jokes? Hundreds of thousands? I could quote many very nice passages from this article, but I prefer to just recommend that you read the entire thing.