Comedy is Hard Labour

Be careful with your intellectual comments; they might get you six years hard labour in a communist country as the protagonist of 1968's The Joke (Žert) discovers. Made during the Prague Spring, a brief period of freer speech, this film by Jaromil Jires employs a fascinating kaleidoscoping of flashback and present to create a sense of dislocated reality.

Ludvik Jahn (Jodef Somr) is a scientist. In narration he sounds bored and disaffected. Returning to his hometown, he offhandedly remarks on how he doesn't really like anyone there. We find he's being interviewed by an older woman called Helena (Jana Dítětová) who rapidly begins to adore him. Upon seeing a photograph of her husband, Pavel (Ludek Munzar), and recognising him, we see Ludvik's memories from years earlier. We see the hearing that resulted in his stint in forced reeducation. Shots of the panel of judges and crowd of people don't cut to reaction shots of Ludvik at the time but to Ludvik in the present, reclining on a sofa with his perpetually bemused expression. The impression this creates is of the airtight world of the communist moralists, a world living in a bubble of editing.

As the title of the film suggests, this is all over a joke. Ludvik made the mistake of falling for the beautiful and passionately communist young Marketa (Jaroslava Obersmaierova) to whom he quite wittily remarked that "Optimism is the opiate of the masses. A 'healthy spirit' stinks of stupidity. Long live Trotsky!" In this, Ludvik shows the not exactly difficult insight that the communists had truly traded one religion for another, even more dogmatic and restrictive, religion of gossip and resentment. In the hearing, Marketa confidently raises her hand when the vote comes to sentence Ludvik to hard labour.

It's not hard to see why Ludvik feels so isolated. How can he find meaning in human relationships? Even revenge holds little meaning and he barely manages the passion to pursue it. How could he feel any of his actions could have a meaningful impact? Maybe that's worse than having to swing a pickax in a quarry for six years.

The Joke is available on The Criterion Channel.