. . . David Frum recently posted a long series of Soviet jokes, just for old-times’ sake, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. One of the jokes (about the plumber coming 10 years from now, in the morning) I’d actually heard myself in the Soviet Union. Another one:

Question: How can you tell when the stores have run out of toilet paper? Answer: Because people are lined up around the block to buy the new edition of Pravda.

was probably made up in the West, because when I first arrived in the Motherland of Socialism in 1984 I tried to use Pravda for this purpose, just for the principle of the thing, and it was too brittle — even their newsprint was inferior.

David’s final post on the subject quotes a reader asking for the genre to be updated with anti-Islamist jokes. But please send them to him, not me.