Perestroika puns: CIA declassifies collection of Soviet jokes

The CIA doesn’t just deal with serious stuff — the intelligence service has declassified a document containing an extensive collection of Soviet-era jokes in English.

Given that the jokes refer to Mikhail Gorbachev, who was head of state of the Soviet Union from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991, it is thought that these jokes belong to the perestroika period of the second half of the 1980s.

Quite why the jokes were included in the material prepared for the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence has yet to be revealed.

Here’s a taste of that sharp Soviet wit:

“A man walks into a shop. He asks the clerk, ‘You don’t have any meat?’ The clerk says, ‘No, here we don’t have any fish. The shop that doesn’t have any meat is across the street.’”

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