“The absence of Albanian jokes about socialism, or Why some dictatorships are not

funny” in The Politics and Aesthetics of Refusal, edited by Caroline Hamilton, Will
Noonan, Michelle Kelly and Elcine Mines Cambridge Scholars Press, Newcastle, 2007.

The Absence of Albanian Jokes about Socialism

or Why some dictatorships are not funny.

It was through jokes that Albanians introduced me to their country. During the two years I
lived and worked in Albania, from 2003-2005, Albanians told joke to outline regional stereotypes,
play on the mountaineer/city-dweller dichotomy, and probe the ways Muslims, Catholics and
Orthodox adherents lived peacefully together. What I didn’t hear in Albania were jokes about
socialism or the socialist period; there were jokes about contemporary politicians, but no mention
of Enver Hoxha, the looming dictator of 40 years, or his regime of isolationism, chronic food
shortages and hard labour. The absolute lack of political jokes about Albanian socialism in post-
socialist conversations, memoirs, and academia, is striking in comparison to other post-socialist
European contexts, such as Romania, where jokes from the period of socialism were thick and
fast on the ground while Ceausescu was alive, and are still circulated in various formal and
informal circles today.
What makes Romania and Albania, two places often lumped together as the most repressive
communist dictatorships, have such radically different cultures of post-socialist joke-telling? As
Donna Goldstein has noted, humour is an important entry point to social analysis ‘because it
reveals ambiguity, contradiction, paradox, and inconsistency while encouraging multiple
1
interpretations of the world.’ In Romania, jokes set in the socialist period signpost how the recent
past functions in the post-socialist and EUropean present, yet in Albania it was the clear lack of
jokes about socialism that prompted me to explore how the past dictatorship was and is
understood and remembered.
In this paper I address the quantity, content and spaces of joke telling about Albanian
socialism that existed before 1992, and the ways in which socialism is excluded from popular
public discourse now, after fifteen years of (relatively) open borders.2 In conducting this research,
I have traced the contours of political humour on internet forums such as Albanian lists and chat
sites, and complemented this with formal and informal interviews with Albanian friends and
3
colleagues in Albania and survey the Albanian diaspora. Political jokes in anecdotal structure are
a particular form of humour that is relatively easy to collect and study for meaning, although this
has not been done at all in academic work about Albania, but they are clearly a limited
representation of the humour of a given period. While this paper analyses stylised political jokes
about dictators and socialism, it does not address the nature of humour in state sanctioned
4
newspapers and television programming, which, in the Albanian context, followed the state line.
Political jokes in socialist Europe transgressed borders, were translated, modified, published in

1
books and online after 1989, and even adapted again to suit the new world power players. In
Romania, anti-socialist-regime jokes were pervasive in food queues and on public transport, and
5
are still told for enjoyment amongst all classes of people. On the contrary, I have found very few
political jokes from and about the period of Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship in Albania, even though
6
there is a plethora of jokes about post-1992 politics.
In contrast to Romania, there is very little written about the history, recent or otherwise, of
7
joke-telling in Albania. Despite this lack of written information, it is clear from the traditions of
joke-telling in formal community rituals such as weddings and in coffee houses, and from the
currently circulating range of jokes that date from before World War Two, that joke-telling is an
established popular social event. The important divisions of Albanian regional identities, for
example, are articulated in and the subject of many jokes, such as the following:

There are three women in the doctor’s room waiting to give birth. The doctor goes to the
woman from Kor a and asks her to sing a beautiful song. She sings, and out pops the baby.
Next he goes to the woman from Shkodra and asks her for a joke. She tells a joke, and out
pops the baby. He goes to the woman from Vlora and she sings, then tells a joke, but still the
baby doesn’t move. In frustration the doctor says ‘damn you, and your mother as well!’ and
8
out pops the baby.

As the regional stereotypes go, southerners sing, Vlorans (Labs) fight, and joke telling itself is a
stereotype of the capital of the north, Shkodra. These were the stereotypes before the socialist
period, they were consolidated through joke-telling in the socialist period, and remain a primary
way of organising Albanian identity today.

‘We tell jokes that are funny, not about Enver Hoxha’

Considered as an independent case, it doesn’t seem surprising that the isolated and
repressive dictatorship of Enver Hoxha is incompatible with humour, but Albania is unique
amongst former socialist European societies in the lack of political joke cycles specifically
9
ridiculing the leader and the ‘‘new society’’ he aimed to create. Enver Hoxha ruled Albania
between 1946 and his death in 1985, and as historian Isa Blumi succinctly argues, Hoxha
developed a socialist state from the existing familiar and regional social structure, a dictatorship
10
of Tosk clans of the south over the Gheg clans of the north. Traditional networks of social
organization became the networks of state policing, utilizing pervasive social policing tools such
as family as primary over individual will, and the values of honour (nder, besa) and bloodline (fis).
In traditional Albanian society, shaming oneself brings shame to the entire family, and thus
under socialist law, the perceived violations of an individual resulted in the persecution of the
11
extended family, often with forced removal to another part of the country or imprisonment.
Albania is mountainous with a small population, numbering only 1.13 million in 1946, and 3.11
12
million by 1992. People were thus bound to their family’s history through familiarity, and also
by the low level of social and physical mobility possible in the small closed state under socialism.

2
The limited industrialisation and urbanisation in Albania did not provide anonymity or chances
for upward mobility to any extent as great as that which was possible in Romania. Hoxha broke
ties with Yugoslavia, Russia, and China successively, maintained a state of war with Greece, and
heavily militarised the nation, creating a constant state of fear that Albania’s very survival as a
nation was at stake. As Ramiz Allia, Hoxha’s successor, said, Hoxha became leader ‘when
Albania was at the crossroads of history, when the very existence of the Albanian people and
nation had been placed in doubt… he saw the essential need for the creation of the communist
13
party as the key link to save the homeland and bring the people into the light.’
Under Article 55 of the Penal Code, entitled ‘Fascist, Anti-Democratic, Religious, War-
mongering and Antisocialist Agitation and Propaganda,’ one could receive a minimum eight year
jail term for making a comment or joke interpreted as anti-socialist, or a maximum wartime
sentence of 25 years prison or death. According to the research of Agim Musta, the most prolific
activist for recognition of the crimes committed in socialist Albania between 1945 and 1992, there
were 5487 political executions, 19 250 people sentenced to prison, 59 809 people interned or
14
internally deported, and 11 536 families expelled from border regions. From a population of less
than three million, these figures highlight the pervasiveness of political persecution. A film made
in 1995, Vdekja e Kalit (The Death of the Horse), is one of the few films that depicts the brutalities of
15
the socialist regime. In this film, the protagonist is imprisoned for saving a horse against the
wishes of his boss, leading to the death of his wife after an illegal abortion and the deportation of
his entire family to a forced labour camp.16 As the family is removed at night, neighbours
watching from the windows speculate what he could have done to bring this fate on his family,
and someone whispers that perhaps he had told a joke at work. Indeed, while one could be
arrested for complaining or joking about the harsh realities of food shortage and repression in
Albania (as anti-socialist agitation), it was also widely believed that joke-telling was a convenient
premise for political persecution.
Northern Ghegs were consistently persecuted by the largely Tosk run socialist regime,
stereotyped as less developed, steeped in traditional culture and communal law, and more
17
religious (as Catholics) than the southern Muslims. The stereotype of Shkodrans as joke-tellers
was conflated with the discursive construction of Ghegs as the most likely enemies of the regime,
and it is interesting to note that although it was middle aged Albanians raised in Tirana with high
social capital who told me the most political jokes, they often specified that the jokes were
originally from Shkodra, displacing not only the scenarios of the jokes to Shkodra, but also the act
of anti-regime joke-telling. In response to my request for jokes, a friend from Tirana emailed me a
political joke set in Shkodra and said she didn’t understand why my Shkodran friends had not
18
told me this joke already. When I put this question to my Shkodran friends, one answered ‘we
19
tell jokes that are funny, not about Enver Hoxha.’
In preparation for the expected invasion of American and Russian troops, Albanian factories
produced 180 000 concrete bunkers by 1985, in addition to millions of six foot high concrete poles

3
 20
topped with iron spears to impale invading paratroopers. Underground factories manufactured
weapons. The port city of Durres had live ammunition invasion simulations every eight weeks in
which the entire city was evacuated overnight to surrounding villages. Fatos Lubonja, the
philosopher who was imprisoned for ‘propaganda and agitation’ between 1974 and 1991, points
out that under Hoxha's ‘isolated, totalitarian regime Albanians were raised to believe themselves
21
'the navel of the world', a paradise amidst demonic others.’ Lubonja recalls, for example, that
when he was a political prisoner and the news filtered through that President Bush and
Gorbachov were meeting for the first time, the inmates believed the two world leaders had
convened solely for the purpose of deciding what to do with Albania. ‘Both to be at the centre of
world attention and to exhibit paranoia about the ambitions of that outside world were integral
22
features of ideological socialisation.’ This intense paranoia about international invasion was
thus used to justify control of internal ‘dissidence’ for the benefit of ‘the nation.’ The vision of an
independent Albanian nation was a goal shared by ‘the Albanian people,’ including those in
prison, and Hoxha was thus perceived as a leader with interests of ‘the nation’ at heart, even
though the threat to this shared vision was itself a constructed terror.
The anonymity of large cities and populations provided a kind of freedom for joke telling in
Romania, a creation of a parallel and alternative group identity against the regime, the small and
tightly structured nature of Albanian society foreclosed similar spaces. The constant internal
deportations of families within Albania consolidated traditional distrust of outsiders, as people
closed themselves to association with strangers marked by the state as related to ‘enemies of the
people.’ Queues for food and crowded public transport were not the safe space for anti-Party
jokes in Albania that they were in Romania. In Romania, secret agents (securitate) were not likely
to stand in all night queues, and telling a joke to gauge the other’s laughter was a test of who to
23
befriend. In Albania, on the contrary, everyone had to stand in the queues including informers
(sigurimi), except for those in the guarded and closed centre of Tirana called ‘the block.’ One
respondent, when asked where one could tell jokes, said ‘you might tell a joke during a sports
game but only with a lot of fear, you might say something like ‘I am eating bread with butter’ or
‘I have no bread,’ and depending on how you emphasized what you were saying someone would
24
suspect you of propaganda.’

The dictator as defender, and the starving ‘new man’

Enver Hoxha was not simply a dictator in the eyes of the people, but also a leader who
worked to maintain the shared goal of Albanian national survival. One of the taboos of post-
socialist scholarship is the genuine ambivalence of sentiment held by those oppressed by their
national defenders/dictators. As a historian I am interested in the relative silence and calm of
Albanians about the socialist past, especially when compared with Romania. While Romanians
fought in the streets and televised the footage of Ceausescu’s summary execution repeatedly in
1989 (and each Christmas thenceforth), Albanians mourned the passing of Enver Hoxha in 1985

4
and tolerated the continuing iron rule of Ramiz Allia until 1992. I was struck by the way that
Ramiz Allia still took his coffee in public in 2003, and Hoxha’s family was the subject of human
interest in the newspapers. In Romania, intellectual journals such as Dilema have recently
produced editions devoted to the theme of socialist period jokes, and blogs nostalgic for the
socialist period are abundantly produced by people who were children in 1989, as well as large
25
groups of Romanian nationalists. Expressions of nostalgia for the socialist past in Albania are
restricted to either the very old or a small faction of the Albanian Socialist Party who are present
in a website managed from Italy.26 When someone makes a joking reference to the past on
Albanian chat lists, the reference to the past is not a point to be taken up, or is even actively
circumscribed by another list user who directly states that comments about communism/prison/
persecution by the government are not funny. There is evidence, therefore, that the socialist past
is not considered a topic of humour, but is rather treated with sincere sadness.
The few political jokes I did find through direct solicitation in interviews have a recognisable
pattern in what it is that is humorous in them; not the antics of the dictator so much as the place
of regular (impoverished) Albanians under the gaze of Hoxha. As Bergson noted in his seminal
work on humour, contrasting the human to the machine is often comic, and in these Albanian
27
jokes, the human body betrays the ideological ‘new man’ of socialism with hunger. One original
joke that appears on a web site is a play on the Party slogan ‘we will eat grass before we ask the
enemy for help.’

A poor villager tells her husband, ‘Your family is starving, go down to Tirana and ask our
leaders for help. So the villager walks to Tirana, knocks on the door of the first house he sees,
and Mehmet Shehu, Hoxha’s right hand man, opens it. ‘Comrade Shehu,’ says the
villager, ‘my family is starving and I would rather eat grass than go to the enemy for help…’
Shehu says ‘you have done the right thing,’ gives him 100 lek, and closes the door.
Remembering the order of his wife, the villager goes to the house of Enver Hoxha and
knocks. When Enver answers he says ‘Uncle Enver, my family is starving and I would rather
eat grass than go to the enemy for help.’ Enver replies ‘Comrade, you have done the right
28
thing. Start on this side of the yard and if you’re still hungry you can go round the back.’

A similar joke to this last one was told to me by my friend in Tirana who advised me to seek
out Shkodrans for jokes:

One day Mr Xhemal Dymylja, the Mayor of Shkodra, saw a bunch of men eating the grass
around the base of the statue of heroes in the central square. He yelled at them ‘what are you
doing! Comrade Shehu will be visiting next week, and here you are eating the grass! Now
take 100 lek and go away.’ A week later Shehu arrived, and when he saw that there were men
on their hands and knees eating the grass at the bottom of the statue he said ‘Comrades! Next
week Enver Hoxha will be here! Here take 500 lek and go away!’ The next week a black car
pulled up in the square and Enver Hoxha stepped out. Noticing that there were men eating
the grass at the base of the statue, he walked up to them and said ‘Don’t eat it all now, we
29
have a long winter ahead of us!’

5
 In both these jokes, the Albanian male protagonist remains a good socialist, literally
following the socialist prescription to eat grass before asking the enemy for help, while it is the
commitment of Enver Hoxha to the same doctrine that is highlighted, demonstrating the
willingness of the leader to sacrifice rather than support the Albanian socialist citizen. The
Albanian people will be eating grass before they ask anyone (and the whole world is an enemy)
for help. The comedic aspect of the joke is the supposition of Hoxha that the body must change to
accommodate the ideology, rather than the ideological system being able to alleviate the basic
human need for food; the incompatability of the ideological utopia with physical realities.
I told this joke to a group of Shkodrans in a social setting in Sydney and the response was a
general chuckle – they hadn’t heard the joke before - and then one man commented ‘yes, they
30
really wanted to kill us.’ It is interesting to note that the jokes were known in Party strongholds
and yet displace the action to Shkodra – which is both politically and culturally Othered, with a
necessarily paradoxical stereotypical reputation for both joking and anti-state resistance. I don’t
think this is a conscious political conspiracy, but simply that the Shkodran Other as joke-teller
functions to enable the displacement of anti-regime sentiment from the actual joke tellers to the
prescribed stereotypical location.
In contrast to Romania, where jokes about socialism were the primary educational tool
through which I was offered information about the past regime, in Albania I often asked
questions about how life was in the 1980s. In the context of a conversation with the mother of a
colleague about how the queue for milk would begin at 3am every morning, I translated the
following popular Romanian joke into Albanian and shared it:

A man had been standing in a queue for three hours without it moving and he suddenly says
‘I’ve had enough! I’m going to kill Ceauşescu!’ He leaves a bottle in his place and leaves.
When he comes back 6 hours later everyone asks him ‘Well?! Did you do it?!’ and he says ‘no,
the line was too long, but I left a bottle in that queue as well!’

No-one laughed, and the Albanian woman who had queued told me that it wasn’t funny because
no one would have dreamt of killing Hoxha. Indeed, when interviewing Albanians who were
children at the time of Hoxha’s death, they were eager to impress on me that they only remember
mourning, an atmosphere of sadness and fear. This is contrasts with Romanians who, despite
being too young to understand clearly what had happened, were told it was a good change, or
felt a relief and anger in the air. Fatos Lubonja writes that people were relieved at the death of
31
Hoxha, but silent even home after so many years of guarded silence.

Pali Veta – a case study of the temporality and mobilization of humour

In the course of this research I asked more than a hundred friends and acquaintances if they
remembered any political jokes in Albania, and a series of other questions about where jokes
were told, or whether they had been afraid to tell jokes. One friend emailed me an opaque
instruction passed on from his father, to ‘find Pali Veta.’ When I asked Albanians over 45 years

6
old who Pali Veta was, the response was a pause, then laughter, and then some jokes. Although
there were only four jokes told, it is clear that in a certain period, Pali Veta jokes spread
throughout the regions of Albania. Indeed, there were nodes of humour that were political in
content, but these were not jokes told in the political anecdote style known in other socialist
European countries, these were spontaneous and indigenous joke cycles.
In the jokes, Pali is a Party member. He loves to show off by riding his bicycle to Party
meetings, he has a big belly while others are hungry, and he knows nothing about sex or women.
One genre of jokes about Pali Veta have him supervising a building project and not knowing
from his orders what the actual finished product will be. In this way Pali is the typical fool
protagonist who throws the major flaws of the socialist system into sharp relief.
Interestingly, the origin of these jokes was remembered by everyone, and is not considered a
funny story. When a twenty year old Albanian Australian asked his mother if Pali Veta was real,
she became serious and explained that Pali Veta was a ‘poor fool’ whose daughter was
‘murdered by the Party’ (in a factory accident) and they made him a hero of the people for his
32
‘sacrifice.’ The real Pali Veta was from then on asked his opinion in newspapers and invited to
congresses and meetings, and was clearly considered a fool to be impressed by the same state
that had destroyed his family and thus his honour. What makes the jokes funny is certainly that
they highlight the uselessness and foolishness of Party procedure and members, and yet the
specific use of Pali Veta sets a unique context in which the ridiculed Party member is not willfully
evil, but rather pitiable, an unwitting administrator of evil only after his honor and family have
been destroyed by an impersonal system. In discussing Pali Veta with post-socialist Albanian
diaspora in Sydney, the switch from laughing at the jokes to serious explanations about the
‘shame’ (turp) of the real story highlighted that laughter about socialism is limited and mobilised
33
by very particular conjunctures in time and place.

Theorising spaces for the socialist past

The implementation of Hoxha’s notorious saying, that ‘we must not allow weeds to grow,
but must pull them out by their roots’ meant that if an individual was interrogated, imprisoned
34
or even suspected by the state, the extended family was also seriously or persecuted. Many
families tried to secure their survival by having at least one member of the family in the Party,
which could also mean they were required to police other community members. Overall, it was
vital to close ranks within one’s own family and to carefully consider how to signify allegiance to
the state in order to avoid both persecution, and the need to persecute others. Just as Hoxha built
on the existing social structures, so too did the structures developed and consolidated in half a
century of socialist government remain, especially as Albanian leaders facilitated a relatively
peaceful transition to an open democracy. Members of one’s family and community who were in
the Socialist Party remained relatives and acquaintances, and former Party apparatchiks became
prominent players in post-1992 new civil society and government structures, as in other post-

7
socialist countries. While there have been waves of retribution for the crimes of the past, very few
of the formerly persecuted have pursued revenge, and there is no institutional path through
which justice or retribution can be sought in post 1992 Albania.
It is striking that there is not a pronounced performance of any Albanian discourse claiming
that ‘the people’ were duped by external forces and are thus blameless victims, or discourses of
self-recrimination for not recognising ‘what was really going on’ under socialism, such as one can
hear in Romania. When I asked one woman who had been a schoolteacher in Durres how she felt
about the past, she said ‘we were scared they were coming here, we knew nothing of the outside,
35
we couldn’t have done anything else.’ In comparison to the predominant discourses of
victimisation and lament in Romania, what is striking about the Albanian discourse exemplified
here is that there is no vocalised shame or recrimination of particular people, but more accurately
a common explanation that things were how they were then, and it was bad. This is not to say
that people forget who was responsible for which crimes, but rather that people are aware that
the same families and individuals compose the social matrix today.36 In addition, there is popular
resistance to the removal of the unsightly and useless ubiquitous military bunkers from public
space, and a unique trend amongst people to keep their Enver Hoxha volumes, because these are
the physical reminders of what everyday Albanians suffered in order to survive as an
independent nation. I don’t think that these ways of relating to signs of the past in the present
condones atrocity, but rather constitutes a discourse that is unique in Europe of continuing to
accept that Enver Hoxha and Albanian national existence were closely related in the view of
everyday people at the time. But how are we to understand the different identities being invoked
by Romanians who enjoy telling the same jokes they told under socialism, and post-socialist
Albanians who rarely mention Hoxha, especially in jest?
Renata Salecl has theorised how the socialist state relied on the socialist citizen who publicly
obeyed and privately criticized the regime, as this duplicity meant that citizens were aware of
their own failure to be either ‘good’ socialists, or ‘good’ dissidents.37 Moving between the parallel
spheres of the socialist public world of slogans and self-criticism, and the alternative theatre of
anti-regime jokes and curses, the citizen was bound to silence through his/her awareness that
they themselves could very well be the next to be denounced. In addition, the enjoyment of
constituting a communal sense of identity against the regime, through joke telling in public buses
or talking with the tap running, relied upon the assumed gazes of an oppressive state that
monitored citizen behaviour in the name of an ideal socialist utopia. Post-socialist Romanian joke
telling is enjoyable as it invokes the strong community identity constituted in opposition to and
within the gaze of the former socialist state.
In Albania, an alternative theatre of Albanian anti-regime shared identity did not exist until
1990. Socialist leaders and bureaucrats intensified family and regional traditional divisions
through the institutions of the state, and controlled the movement of people. The small
population made both anonymity and class segregation impossible, and the concept of an
Albanian ethnonational state, introduced formally only in 1912, was largely constituted under the

8
socialist regime; there was not a strong discursive or institutional history of a modern ‘Albanian
38
people’ pre-existing or outside of Hoxha’s state. Everyday Albanian people were thus closely
bound to the state as manifestation of an independent Albanian ethnonational identity.
In a 1994 article entitled ‘Privacy Under a Totalitarian Regime,’ Fatos Lubonja argues that
Albanians under Hoxha were not only deprived of the privacy for introspection, for individual
culture and belief, for critical thinking, and for a culture of community, but that there was also an
enforced lack of closeness to the community identity.39 This lack of closeness to the ideal
community identity of socialist utopia was exacerbated by the primary goal of maintaining an
independent Albanian nation, which citizens believed Enver Hoxha shared with them. The
awareness of people that they did not fulfil the ideal identity of socialist society, even as they
endured harsh physical suffering in attempting to fulfil this identity, perpetuated the fear that
indeed the Albanian people could not survive as an independent nation. The lack of jokes about
Enver Hoxha during his rule can be read as the lack of a space for an alternative theatre of
community identity based around suffering under Enver, as the overwhelming goal of citizens
was to be able to fulfil Hoxha’s ideal social identity thus to ensure their national survival. In the
few jokes that do exist, the Albanian protagonist is on his hands and knees eating the grass,
attempting to fulfil the national community ideal, rather than queuing to assassinate Hoxha the
national leader and defender. Hoxha didn’t become funny after 1992 because people had
genuinely identified with the goal of national survival encouraged by Enver Hoxha.
The usefulness of this reading can be explored through the writings and experiences of those
who were politically persecuted under Hoxha. One of only two jokes about the socialist period
that I was told without solicitation was from a man who had served 23 years in prison on the
charge of anti-socialist propaganda (for telling a joke). He had ordered a steak in a pub by asking
40
them to bring him ‘Mao’s face.’ As part of an oral history project, I travelled with this man to
the prison in Spa where he had spent his young adulthood. He had clearly spent a lot of time
considering how he related to the charge of being an ‘enemy of the people,’ and he differentiated
between himself as an individual, as a committed member of an independent Albanian nation,
and as a victim of the socialist regime. Prisoner memoirs highlight the space of the prison, despite
vast differences between the perspectives of internees, as a community identity distant from the
community of ‘the Albanian people’ upheld by the regime. In my observation, prisoners took
pride in the work they did as testimony to their commitment to Albanian national existence,
proving in material culture that they were not the ‘enemies of the people’ the state branded them.
Former political prisoners Uran Kalakulla and Agim Musta also write at length about their
experiences and their friends in the prisons, and the central role that humour played in ‘keeping
41
the soul healthy.’ Prisoners used humour to laugh at the political characters of the regime who
were considered Other to those performing forced labour for the love of their ideal Albanian
nation, thus discursively separating Enver Hoxha and the prison guards from ‘the Albanian
people.’ Yet even in the prisons, jokes about politicians were told guardedly amongst friends, for
42
the use of torture as punishment was widespread and cruel.

9
Conclusion

In 2006, and especially from a life in capitalist democratic Australia or Albania, it is hard to
critique one’s own belief in an honourable cause (national survival from international invasion)
that was proven overnight to have been a tragic and absurd deception. The nature of the shared
national belief in the goals of Hoxha’s regime and the resulting ambivalent relationship with the
dictator was taboo before 1992 because of the lack of space – physical and psychological - for
people to express negative feelings they may have had about Hoxha, and taboo after 1992
because of previous positive identifications with him as sharing a popular dedication to national
survival. It was the shared goal of an independent Albania, albeit in an environment moulded by
paranoid illusions and terror that made political jokes about the dictator simply not funny, then
or now. In the absence of post-socialist jokes about socialist Albania, I read a collective refusal to
simplify or reject the popular intense identification with Enver Hoxha as national leader and
oppressive dictator. The sincerity of this refusal is unique in post-socialist Europe.

This paper was researched with the help of many patient Albanian friends in Australia, Albania and
America. Special thanks to Xhulieta Harasani, Luljeta Ikonomi, Ariel Ben-Amos, Donika Xhixha, Nevila
Gremi, Ilir Kalemaj, Murat, Valentina and everyone at Rozafa in Sydney, I promise only funny jokes from
now on.

10
1
Donna M. Goldstein, Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003), 6.
2
Indeed, one Albanian contributor to a popular list entitled his contribution ‘Jokes from after the death of Enver, since
before it wasn’t possible,’ romii tironc kapil [author name], ‘barcaleta mas vdekjes enverit,se para nuk kishte :)))’ [message
title], Forumi Shqiptar > Argëtim & zbavitje > Humor shqiptar > Humori i mënçur i Tef Palushit!,
http://forumihorizont.com/shortthread.php3. Thread id 3207. Posted 4 December, 2003, last accessed 30 July, 2006.
3
For major Albanian websites hosting humour and joke lists, and also blogs about Albanian history, see
http://shqiperia.com/humouri/index.php, http://www.kokoshka.com,
http://www.dallavere.com/dallavere/index.php, www.albforumi.com, www.veriu.org, www.durresi.it,
www.korcavizion.com, and www.shkoder.net. ‘Albanian’ in this paper refers to ethnic Albanians from the Albanian
state. Albanian from Macedonia, Kosovar and Monte Negro will be specifically referred to as such. This is in no way a
political decision, but a recognition of the historical specificity of Albanian experiences in Former Yugoslavia and the
former People’s Socialist Republic of Albania.
4
In other European socialist societies, the question of how much dissidence one can read between the lines of officially
sanctioned print and television humour is a deserving subject of debate, but Albanian comedy performed on television for
New Years Eve was watched by everyone and considered the yardstick of what the regime permitted as the subject of
humour. Print media also used jokes and caricatures, but in line with the regime’s politics of the day. For example see
Alfred L. Lorenz, Albanische Karikaturen: Katalog zur ersten albanischen Karikaturenausstellung in der Bundesrepublik
Deutschland und West-Berlin (Munich: Deutsch-Albanische Freundschaftsgesellschaft, 1987) and Bardhyl Fico, Përralla për
gogot dhe me gogot treguar nga gaztorët eurokomunistë dhe dy të vërteta që nuk i thonë (Tales for dupes about dupes told by the
Eurocommunist jesters and two truths which they don’t tell) (Tirana: 8 Nëntori, 1983).
5
I base this claim on my personal experiences between 1997 and 2006 at unprompted anti-Ceausescu joke-telling sessions
with all classes of Romanians above 25 years of age.
6
Compared to almost fifty Romanian joke books published post 1990 and held by the Library of Congress, there are only
approximately seven published collections of jokes published in Albania in the same period, half of which are written by
comedians who also worked under the socialist regime, and few of which contain more than one or two jokes about
socialism. See for example Ahmet Banushi, Gomari me pasaporte : fabula, mikrofabula, epigrame, epitafe (Tirana: Glob, 1994),
Ahmet Banushi, Kali në asistencë : fabula-epigrame (Tirana: Omsca, 1998), Filip Çakuli, Kur qeshim me politikanët (Tirana,
Hosteni, 2000), and Ferdinand Radi, 11 raunde humor (Tirana, Iliria, 2003). Zef Gjeta, Barcaleta pa fund (Tirana: Hoktari,
2005), has a small chapter (pp.295-316) entitled ‘Wisecracks from Times Passed,’ but these are not jokes from socialist
Albania. Albanians that I showed these jokes to pointed out evidence of importation in small details like the assumption
in a joke that everyone has a car, when there were very few cars in Albania before 1992.
7
For Albanian studies of humour see Jakup Mato, Paradokset e satirës dhe të humorit (Tirana: Toena, 2000) and Naum Prifti,
Dasmë pa nuse : komedi (Tirana: Naim Frashëri, 1969).
8
CS interviewed by Ariel Ben-Amos in Vlora March 23, 2006. Interviews conducted about joke- telling by myself or Mr
Ben-Amos are dated and coded to protect the respondents identity. Original transcripts of the coded interviews are held
by the author.
9
Many studies of humour in socialist countries begin from the Orwellian phrase that jokes are ‘mini revolutions,’ which
of course then leads to a forgone conclusion that if jokes are revolutions, they are impotent. See Robert Cochran, ‘”What
Courage!”: Romanian “Our Leader” Jokes,’ Journal of American Folklore 102.405 (July-Sept. 1989), 259-274. This approach to
studying humour in relationship to structures of power in socialist society could be greatly enhanced by taking into
consideration studies of how the state was perceived and constructed by socialist citizens, such as Sheila Fitzpatrick,
Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Renata Salecl,
The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism after the Fall of Socialism (London; New York: Routledge, 1994).
10
Isa Blumi, ‘The Politics of Culture and Power: The Roots of Hoxha's Postwar State,’ East European Quarterly 31.1 (Sept.
1997), 379-99.
11
For studies of prisons in Albania see Agim Fusta, Burgjet e Shtëtit burg (Tirana: Tona, 2000), Gjemat e kommunizmit në
Shqipëri (Tirana: Geer Publishing House, 2001) and Burgjet e Diktatures Komuniste në Republike e Shqipërisë 1944-1991
(Tirana: Mirgeeralb, 2005); Susan Greeley Murati, A cultural psychological study of the narratives of the ex-politically persecuted
people of Albania: Toward a national narrative (Unpublished Thesis, Alliant International University, California School of
Professional Psychology, San Diego 2003 UMI database number AAT 3082503). See also publications available through
the Albanian Rehabilitation Centre for Trauma and Torture Victims at www.arct.org, and the documentary about
Albanian prisons directed by Roland Gjoza, Të Zhudukurit (Tirana: Studio Albafilm dhe Departmenti i filmit artistiki
ATSH, 2002).
12
Republic of Albania Institute of Statistics of population history at
http://www.instat.gov.al/graphics/doc/tabelat/Treguesit%20Sociale/Popullsia/POP%202004/pop1.xls, last accessed
November 4, 2006.
13
Ramiz Allia, ‘Enver Hoxha: Banner of struggle for freedom and socialism,’ in National Conference Dedicated to the
Immortal Work of Comrade Enver Hoxha, 15-16 October 1985 (Tirana : 8 Nëntor, 1985), 6-7. To compare how the same people
described Enver Hoxha ten years later, see Agim Musta and Mexhit Kokalari, Kush ishte Enver Hoxha (Tirana: Apollonia,
1996).
14
Musta, Burgjet e Diktatures Komuniste në Republike e Shqipërisë 1944-1991, 4.
15
Other Albanian post-socialist dramatic films about socialism include Gjergji Xhuvani Slogans (France/Albania: 2001)
and I Dashur Armik (Albania/France/Germany: 2004). Television programming is, however, heavily weighted towards
socialist realist films from before 1992 more so than to post-socialist Albanian films.
16
In fact this film is well known in the Albanian Romani community as a positive representation of the ethnic group; the
film’s protagonist hides the saved horse in a Romani community, which is interpreted as an accurate reflection of the
courage of Romani communities to act outside the law of the dictatorship. The self-identity of Romani minorities in
Albania in relation to the socialist state would be a valuable contribution to understanding the heterogeneity of
communal identities articulated from within an ethno-national dictatorship such as Hoxha’s.

11
17
Albania was the only socialist state to declare atheism and open a museum to religion.
18
XH personal communication 31 March, 2006.
19
MR Notes 13 February, 2006.
20
See Michael Kaser ‘Economic Continuities in Albania’s Turbulent History,’ in Europe-Asia Studies 53:4 (2001) 627-637,
629.
21
Fatos Lubonja, in an interview with Pawel Smolenski ‘O czym marza Albanczycy,’ in Wyborcza (27 June 2002), 15.
22
Lubonja, Wyborcza 15.
23
The willingness to risk arrest in order to tell a political joke in socialist Europe was also a popular subject for jokes. See
Bruce Adams, Tiny Revolutions in Russia: Twentieth-Century Soviet and Russian History in Anecdotes (New York: Routledge
Curzon, 2004), 48.
24
FCV interviewed by Ariel Ben-Amos in Vlora March 23, 2006.
25
For recent blogs about socialist Romanian history see http://www.fanclub.ro/showthread.php?t=17521 and
http://cyberculture.ro/blog/?p=131.
26
And yet one of the two dominating political parties in Albania remains, in name at least, the Socialist Party.
27
Henri Bergson, Laughter : an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic in Comedy (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 64.
28
I say original because I haven’t seen this joke with the name of another dictator, and because after I read it I asked
people directly if they knew any jokes with this slogan and there were multiple city specific time located responses.
Posted by romii tironc kapil ‘Enveri dhe populi’ [message title] http://forumihorizont.com/shortthread.php3? Thread id
3207, posted 4 December, 2003, last accessed 30 July, 2006.
29
XH personal communication 31 March, 2006.
30
Personal notes 3 March, 2006.
31
Fatos Lubonja ‘Privatesia ne Regjimin Totalitar,’ Perpjekja 20 (2005), 102-12, 112.
32
VR interview 12 May, 2006.
33
The Pali jokes are not told by post-socialist Albanians as a way of remembering socialism; my reminding people of them
did not provoke their re-inclusion into everyday life. Jokes clearly function in a particular way at the location of their
inception that isn’t necessarily relevant in Australia, and joke telling is an inclusive social performance where everyone
should be able to contribute a joke and share in the laughter. Having to stop and explain why something is funny to
younger generations or non-Albanians ruptures the flow and thus the practice itself, making it into an educational
conversation rather than a circle of joke-telling.
34
For one example of this statement, see Enver Hoxha’s speech ‘25 years of Struggle and Victory on the Road to Socialism’
delivered on 28 November 1969, in Enver Hoxha, Speeches: On Further Revolutionizing our Party and the Life of our Country as
a Whole (Tirana: Naim Frasheri, 1974) 57-140, 58. For an unpublished summary of 300 testimonials from Albanian refugees
of political persecution in Albania 1945-1952 see National Committee for a Free Albania, Testimony on Slave Labor Conditions
within Albania, Presented to the United Nations in 1952, held at the United States Library of Congress, Washington DC. Note
the testimony of Mr Zil Sylejman regarding the imprisonment of the wives and daughters of men who fled the country
and their ‘forced promiscuity’ at the prison of Gjirocaster, 23.
35
Conversation with M.K. Durres, 31 December, 2005.
36
The relationship of Romanians and Albanians with their past could also be read through the vastly different ways in
which public apologies for the communist past have been demanded in the two countries. This would highlight a very
different claim to relationship with the state as represented citizen engaged in a political structure both then and now.
37
Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom, 47-49.
38
Of course there were serious class differences; between those who lived in the bloc and those who didn’t, between
southerners and northerners, between people in Tirana and those sent to the villages, between families who were in
positions of influence before communism and those who came to power with the communist party. But it was a scandal
that Mrs Hoxha had 24 pairs of shoes, and that a diplomat sent to England also had to stand in queues.
39
Lubonja, ‘Privatesia ne Regjimin Totalitar,’ 2005.
40
This was a political joke as Maoist China was at this stage the only international ally of Albania. A combination of
difficult living conditions (lack of steaks available in pubs), an overload of Chinese cultural programming on the radio
and television, and a generalised racist resentment against being a European country with allies in Asia, led to an increase
racist ‘jokes’ against the Chinese. The other unsolicited joke from the period of socialism was also related to ethnicity and
was proferred to me as a way of explaining that under socialism it was a punishable offence to note that Romani
Albanians were an ethnic category.
41
This quotation comes from Uran Kalakulla, 21 Vjet Burg Komunist (1961-1982: Kultime, Mbresa, Portrete dhe Refleksione)
(Tirana: self-published, 2001), 358. See also Agim Musta, Mjerim pa fund: shkrime publicistike (Tirana: Toena, 1998), 99. It is
also interesting to note that many Albanians I interviewed recommended that I seek out former political prisoners in
order to ask them for jokes, based on the assumption that those who were in prison had a reason to hate Hoxha enough to
joke about him. This understanding of joking as born of hate, rather than ambivalence and identification, highlights the
need to consider also the Albanian cultural belief in the power of the evil eye, that saying something allowed, such as a
joke about killing Hoxha, has the power to invoke the actual action.
42
For details of the tortures used in Albanian prisons see Agim Musta, Gje mat e komunizmit ne Shqipe ri (Tirana:
Geer, 2001) 264-267. It is interesting to note that non-politically persecuted Albanians often recommended that I seek out
those who were persecuted by the regime to find jokes, based on the assumption that joke-telling about Hoxha would be
based on hate. There is not only a lack of academic interrogation of the historical facts of political persecution under
Hoxha and how prisoners dealt with their experiences, but how non-persecuted communities perceive the persecuted.

12