Yakov Smirnoff

Yakov Smirnoff (Ukrainian: Яков Смирнофф) (born January 24, 1951) is, according to his own description, a Ukrainian-born American comedian and painter.

Biography

Smirnoff was born Yakov Naumovich Pokhis in a Jewish family in Odessa, Ukraine--then part of the Soviet Union. He was an art teacher in Odessa and continues to paint. He came to the U.S. in 1977 and became an American citizen on July 4, 1986.

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. At the peak of his success, he also had a starring role in a 1986-87 television sitcom titled "What a Country". In that show, he played a Russian cab driver studying for the U.S. citizenship test. Since 1992, he has been a fixture in Branson, Missouri.

He is almost completely unknown in the former Soviet Union. The decline in his US popularity started after the collapse of the USSR, as nearly all of his signature material consisted of mocking the Soviet regime.

Although he has largely vanished from the comedy scene and lost his status as a superstar, references to him and his jokes still occur from time to time in popular culture, notably in many popular television series and he played himself in a King of the Hill episode entitled "The Bluegrass is Always Greener" which aired in 2002 . Smirnoff was also parodied in a skit on the short-lived Fox sketch comedy show The Ben Stiller Show, where Smirnoff (played by Stiller) has a meltdown on stage after all his jokes prove irrelevant after glasnost and perestroika, moaning "I just want freedom to go away. I am cold, I am frightened...what will the new world order bring for Yakov?" Stiller later expressed mild regret, deeming it "kicking a man when he's down." Smirnoff was also parodied on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in a 1998 episode where the crew was watching a film based on a Russian folktale. He was brought in as a supposed expert on Russia, but when asked complicated and scholarly questions about the movie, he would only reply with his signature America-Soviet Russia comparison jokes. He was played by staff member Patrick Brantseg.

In May 2006, Smirnoff received a master's degree in positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania . Yakov has taught classes at Drury University along with Missouri State University in this topic.

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!"

One Smirnoff joke is "Dissident Land," a play on Disneyland and an obvious off-shoot of Soviet prisons. Supposedly it's so fun there that no one ever leaves.

Another Yakov Smirnoff joke: "There are no Taco Bells in Russia. They didn't like the slogan, 'Run for the border.' " Similarly, he describes Visine as being prohibited in Russia because "it gets the red out".

Russian reversal

Russian reversal is a type of joke popularized by Smirnoff. The general form of the 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 the US, you catch a cold.

In Soviet Russia, cold catches you!

In the US, you can always find a party.

In Soviet Russia, the Party finds you!

All of Smirnoff's original “In Soviet Russia” jokes made use of formulaic wordplay that carried Orwellian undertones. For example, one well known joke of this type runs “In the US, you watch television. 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 been around 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, to specify that he was referring to the communist regime and not the present state.

The joke form has become a trademark of Smirnoff's, and is widely referenced in television parodies and references as well as many on-line communities, including Slashdot, reddit, Digg, Totse, and Uncyclopedia .

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 at Ellis Island.

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. Just prior to the first anniversary of the attacks, he paid $100,000 for his painting to be transformed into a large mural. Its dimensions were 200 feet by 135 feet (approximately 36.5 m by 41 m).

The mural, titled "America's Heart" , is a pointillist-style piece, with one brush-stroke for each victim of the attacks. 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.

See also

• Russian jokes

External links

• Official website
• Yakov Smirnoff at IMDb