Politics as a Joke: The Case of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Comedy Show in Ukraine

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the Ukrainian comedy show Vechernii Kvartal, whose star and co-producer, Volodymyr Zelensky, won the Ukrainian presidency in 2019 despite having no previous experience in politics. As a long-running and popular television program, it likely contributed to shaping Ukrainians’ attitudes toward politics and political elites, their understanding of politics, and their propensity to participate in it. In order to assess the Vechernii Kvartal’s potential impact on viewers’ political knowledge and engagement the study examines how Ukrainian politics is covered in the show’s political sketches and how the country’s politics and politicians are framed.

Acknowledgements

This work has benefited from useful feedback from Paul D’Anieri and Peter Gross.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Indeed, when not only Zelensky but also some other Ukraine’s popular personalities were included in opinion polls before the election, they also got high ratings, as was the case for rock star Sviatoslav Vakarchuk (see, for example, KIIS 2017b). The latter, however, decided to abstain from running for the presidency two months before the election.

2. DIF (2019).

3. The majority of extant research on political comedy was conducted in the United States and focused on the American shows.

4. Another important factor is that the effects of political comedy on viewers can differ depending on the type of audience (in particular, people of different age, education, and so forth) (Cao 2008).

5. David Letterman’s The Late Show first appeared on TV in 1993 and was aired till 2015.

6. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, now Trevor Noah, was launched in 1999.

7. Jay Leno started on The Tonight Show in 1992 and hosted it till 2009, when Jimmy Fallon took over the show.

8. The Colbert Report, hosted by Stephen Colbert, aired on Comedy Central from 2005–2014. Since 2015 Colbert has hosted The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

9. The campaign unofficially started on June 2018 when one of the major candidates, Yulia Tymoshenko, publicly announced that she was running for presidency. Earlier, in April 2018, Zelensky’s name appeared for the first time in surveys measuring the support for potential candidates.

10. The whole history about Saakashvili’s appointment, resignation, and stripping of citizenship found resonance in Ukrainian media. One of the reasons is that before Saakashvili’s appointment to the post of Odesa regional governor he was already widely known in Ukraine. He was presented by the media as an incorruptible enemy of corruption who had managed to carry out successful reforms in another former Soviet republic (Georgia). Saakashvili efficiently promoted this image of himself in the media, and once he even headed the list of Ukraine’s most popular politicians. This happened in September 2015, four months after his appointment (Rating Group Ukraine 2015).

11. On March 22, 2018, Savchenko was arrested on charges of plotting a terrorist attack in Kyiv. This event did not become material for the content that is investigated in this study; the last episode we analyzed was released on March 24, 2018, and it included not a single joke about Savchenko or the incident itself.

12. The embezzlement scandal around the “backpack case,” in which Avakov’s son Oleksandr was reportedly involved, erupted in 2015 and spectacularly developed in autumn 2017.

13. These topics were not the topics of separate sketches, but they were recurrently addressed in individual jokes.

14. Petya is a diminutive of Petro.

15. Surzhyk—the mix of Ukrainian and Russian.

16. Razumkov Centre (2017).

Additional information

Funding

This research was financed by Collegium Civitas in Warsaw, Poland (research grant PB/S/12/2019).