ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: There's a well-known Russian fairy tale about a princess who never smiled. A Russian journalist now living in exile has come up with a comedy routine that plays on this theme. It's called the realm that never smiled, and it has Russian-speaking audiences laughing at their own history. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Vladimir Rayevsky has been thinking a lot about his birthplace and laughing about it.
VLADIMIR RAYEVSKY: There is this enormous empire, and it never smiled on itself. And we started making a show about the country that is not used to smile at itself.
(APPLAUSE)
RAYEVSKY: (Non-English language spoken).
KELEMEN: His stand-up routine is all in Russian. And at this show in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, he incorporates a lot of research. He tells NPR that he's been digging into stories from the czarist era, the Soviet era and Vladimir Putin's Russia.
RAYEVSKY: I was always looking at this history, full of these inflated figures, full of these people who thought they were great, but they were not. These ridiculous documents, ridiculous orders - I was just looking at it and, like, asking why nobody looks at it as a comedy.
KELEMEN: Take Czar Paul I, the son of Catherine the Great, who waited for years to ascend the throne in the late 18th century. Rayevsky calls him a one-man legislative fire hose because he knew he had little time to rule over the Russian Empire.
RAYEVSKY: He decided that every word of his is now a law. So he stumbled at the ball dancing waltz, and he banned the waltzes the next day.
KELEMEN: The next order was to ban shoelaces, which may have caused the czar to stumble. The 40-year-old Rayevsky was also fascinated by Ivan the Terrible, who wrote letters to Queen Elizabeth I to try to form a military alliance. Since Rayevsky now lives in London, he went to the archives to pick them up and read them.
RAYEVSKY: The way he writes here is hilarious.
KELEMEN: What was so funny about them?
RAYEVSKY: Because he was approaching her like on a dating app.
KELEMEN: His jokes mix modern-day references to Russian history, and that was a highlight for Rostislav Tsiomenko, who met NPR producer Daniel Ofman after the show. Tsiomenko calls it an intergenerational show, though he says an older gentleman next to him didn't seem to understand some of the modern references.
ROSTISLAV TSIOMENKO: And I was quite sure that he got some of the USSR jokes that I did not understand. And at the same time, we both, like, laughed a lot. So I came away with, like, a really amazing impression of what he's able to, like, tie together so many different things.
KELEMEN: Also in the audience was Olga Nekrasov, who says she's been following Rayevsky on Instagram. She says Russians need humor more than ever.
OLGA NEKRASOV: I'm glad we still can laugh. This is what will save us, probably, although it's harder and harder every day to laugh.
KELEMEN: Harder because of Russia's war in Ukraine, the war that prompted Vladimir Rayevsky to go into exile. He says it was impossible to work as a journalist in Putin's Russia. And in a way, poking fun at history is a way to counter Putinism.
RAYEVSKY: Putin has weaponized Russia with history with creating this myth, again, grand and serious. And I think we have to weaponize ourselves with laughter.
KELEMEN: He doesn't target average Russians for these jokes, but rather figures like Joseph Stalin, who's revered in patriotic Russian histories for winning World War II but who also oversaw the Great Terror in the Soviet Union and a forced famine in Ukraine. Rayevsky paints Stalin as a nervous micromanager who hand-wrote instructions to the authors of his biography.
RAYEVSKY: I found little comments written by Stalin. So he advises his authors to insert a phrase that Stalin never had any trace of self-admiration or vanity.
KELEMEN: This is the kind of show that Rayevsky can only do in exile. He can't return to a country that has labeled him a foreign agent for his past reporting. But he's getting an online following and hopes Russians inside the country can eventually watch his show on YouTube, the show that's based on the old fairy tale "The Princess Who Never Smiled."
RAYEVSKY: Whenever we teach ourselves to be self-ironic, to laugh at ourselves and to laugh at our history, maybe that will be the time for change for Russia, and maybe that will be the end of the fairy tale.
KELEMEN: A happy ending, he hopes. With reporting from NPR's Daniel Ofman, I'm Michele Kelemen in Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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