Yakov Smirnoff
He was popular in the 1980's for comedy performances in which he used irony and word play to contrast life under the Communist regime in his native Soviet Union with life in the United States, delivered in heavily accented English. Yakov is also a professor at Missouri State and Drury universities where he teaches The Business of Laughter.
Life
Smirnoff was born to a Jewish family in Odessa, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.
Smirnoff spent a portion of his early days in this country working as a bartender at Grossingers Hotel in the Catskill Mountains of New York and living in the employee dormitory.
He was a roommate of comedian Andrew Dice Clay and has appeared in several motion pictures, including Buckaroo Banzai and The Money Pit. Among his numerous appearances on television, he was featured many times on the sitcom Night Court as "Yakov Korolenko".
In that show, he played a Russian cab driver studying for the U.S. In the late 1980s, Smirnoff was commissioned to provide educational bumper segments for Saturday morning cartoons, punctuated with a joke and Smirnoff's signature laugh.
He has continued to amass accomplishments including books, CD’s, movies, T.V. appearances, a successful Broadway show, As Long As We Both Shall Laugh, and is currently working on a humorous self-help book.
Yakov is a featured writer for AARP magazine, the world’s largest circulation magazine with a distribution of 39 million.
Yakov gives readers advice (and a few laughs) in his column entitled, “Happily Ever Laughter”. He also guests at the Skinny Improv in Springfield, Missouri on occasion.
Yakov envisioned the concept for the television show nearly ten years ago and has been developing the pilot for about two years.
Comedy style
The largest part of the humour of Yakov Smirnoff falls into two wide categories:
"America: What a country!"
Misunderstanding of American life and custom through the eyes of a new immigrant.
For instance, reading employment announcements of "Part-Time Woman Wanted": "What a country! Even transvestites can get work."
Upon being offered work as a barman on a "graveyard shift," he remarks “A bar in a cemetery! What a country! Last call? During Happy Hour the place must be dead."
At the grocery store: "Powdered milk, powdered eggs, baby powder. what a country!"
"The first time I went to a restaurant, they asked me 'How many in your party?' and I said 'Six hundred million'."
Bizarre comparisons between the U.S.
and Russia.
"We have no gay people in Russia—there are homosexuals but they are not allowed to be gay about it. The punishment is seven years locked in prison with other men and there is a three-year waiting list for that."
He once told Johnny Carson, "You have such nice things in the U.S.—like warning shots!"
Russian reversal
Russian reversal or "In Soviet Russia" is a type of joke originated by Arte Johnson on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, and popularized by Smirnoff, and is an example of antimetabole.
The general form of the "In Soviet Russia" joke is that the subject and objects of a statement are reversed, and “In Soviet Russia”, or something equivalent, is added. For example:
In America, you catch a cold.
In Soviet Russia, cold catches you!
In America, you can always find a party.
In Soviet Russia, Party finds you!
In an episode of Family Guy, Peter gets a car with different voices for the navigation system.
what? Smirnoff says it.
All of Smirnoff's original "In Soviet Russia" jokes made use of formulaic wordplay that carried Orwellian undertones. In Soviet Russia, television watches you!" The joke alludes to video screens that both reproduce images and monitor the citizenry, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
At the peak of Smirnoff's celebrity in the mid-1980s, he did not say "Soviet Russia"—he said simply "Russia", as the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic had existed since 1917, was still extant, and showed no signs of imminent collapse.
Smirnoff added the Soviet qualifier after the fall of the USSR, long after his fame had faded, presumably to specify that he was referring to the communist regime and not the present state.
The joke form has become a staple of Smirnoff's humor, and is widely referenced in television parodies and references as well as many on-line communities. The widespread reference to the jokes has led some linguists to consider the phrases to be Snowclones.
9/11 mural
Smirnoff is also a painter and has frequently featured the Statue of Liberty in his art since receiving his U.S.
citizenship there.
On the night of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks he started a painting inspired by his feelings about the event, based on an image of the Statue of Liberty. Sixty volunteers from the Sheet Metal Workers Union erected the mural on a damaged skyscraper overlooking the ruins of the World Trade Center.
The mural remained there until November 2003, when it was removed because of storm damage.