This morning, I spent the hours between midnight and 4 AM watching "Our Man Flint" and "In Like Flint." I know James Coburn won an Oscar for "Affliction," but he deserves a lifetime achievement award for these two films alone. They are spy- and Cold War- and society-spoofs extraordinaire. They've gotten funnier through the years, if only because society has changed so much from the mid-1960s when they were filmed.

But they got me thinking, where are the great comedies from National Socialism, or the Soviets, or the Cultural Revolution? Heck, where are the great comedies from Putin's Russia or Hu's New China?

It seems to me that only free societies produce comedies, but I don't understand why. Noel's First Law of Film (I really, really like that phrase, BTW) states that socialist films (National flavor or Communist flavor) will skew heavily toward propaganda. This is because entertaining arts present an irresistable medium for cultural message-making, which the socialists require. A central idea behind socialism is that the members of a "class" will choose to work for the betterment of their "class." In reality, of course, this founders on the free rider problem; a situation Olson discussed in 1965. Hence the propaganda film in statist societies....

But why not use comedy to make the point? Laughing together is a pwoerful tool for building community and solidarity. This is something the U.S. socialists understood. When the U.S. was engaged in its heavy-petting flirtation with socialism in the 1930s, the comeday of Will Rogers was very valuable at building popular support for the socialists' policies, even as (or especially because) he was poking fun at those very policies! By making fun of the WPA and the CCC, Rogers engendered acceptance of these programs.

So why didn't the Soviets, et al., get the memo? Perhaps I'm way off base; the Soviets and the Cultural Revolution eras produced boat-loads of comedy gold, but I simply haven't seen the movies. But somehow I doubt it.

Anyway, can't you just envision a sitcom like "The Honey-Mooners" set in 1950s Leningrad?

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