British actor Hugh Bonneville joined many others this week as surprised to learn of the talents of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “Until today,” he tweeted, “I had no idea who voiced Paddington Bear in Ukraine.” Other parts of Zelenskyj’s show business career have also been underestimated. When Zelenskyy was elected president in April 2019 at the age of 41, Russian commentator Sergei Parkhomenko said: “He is weak, he has no religion, he has no nationality.” All this was meant as criticism. But some of it just explained why people voted for Zelenskyy (who was born into a Jewish family during the Soviet era when practicing religion was discouraged). He’s not intimidating. He has no political background. He is a Russian native speaker from the middle of the country. But for Ukrainians, most of all, he was someone you knew and he was funny. The nice guy from the TV show “Servants of the People”. You know, the one where the weird history teacher becomes president overnight. The Paddington voice guy.
Outside of Ukraine and its closest neighbors, one would normally not have known about any of this. You probably wouldn’t even have heard of the TV series, even if Netflix eventually snapped it up. (It is now available on YouTube with English subtitles). Outside of Ukraine, until last week, Zelenskyy was referred to only as a “comedian-turned-president.” Initial coverage of his landslide election victory, in which he received 73.2 percent of the vote, was met with derision. What were the people of Ukraine thinking? Who was the man anyway? Hardly Ronald Reagan. What a joke.
But the term “comedian” is misleading. It suggests someone who is a) not serious and b) a solo performer. Selenskyj is neither. He was never a stand-up comedian. The tradition of “monologue comedy” is relatively new in the countries of the former Soviet Union. (Perhaps the only post-Soviet stand-up comedian known outside of Russia and Ukraine is St. Petersburg-based Igor Meerson, who performs in Russian and English and has toured with British comedian Eddie Izzard.) Also: As in shown in the viral videos about Zelenskyj’s life before his presidency, his career was in the entertainment industry. But he took her extremely seriously. He’s a workaholic, he’s always been serious and he’s a team player. These qualities – forged in the furnace of post-Soviet show business – are its assets.
As a teenager, Volodymyr Zelenskyy began performing improv in the Funny and Inventive Club
The “team player” aspect is particularly interesting – and perhaps the most difficult to grasp from a Western perspective. Thinking of the US or European model of show business – especially in comedy – comedians often start out in collectives (Saturday Night Live, Armando Iannucci’s The Day Today lineup), but they rarely stay together. They usually use the collective as a stepping stone to a career as a solo performer. Zelenskyj, on the other hand, was always part of something bigger than just himself.
He started as a teenager in 1995 with improvisational performances at the KVN competitions in his home region. KVN (Klub Vesyolykh i Nakhodchivykh or Club of the Witty and Inventive) is a popular institution known throughout the former Soviet Union. It became one of the longest-running shows on Russian television; their social media feeds have been inactive since February 27th. It grew out of a 1960s TV show translated as “Evening of Funny Questions,” in which performers competed against each other to find the funniest answers. The show was canceled in the early 1970s after conflicts with censorship, but was revived in 1986 during the era of glasnost and perestroika.
Zelenskyy was a passionate improviser and became part of the Ukrainian Kvartal 95 team, which consisted of about 10 members. They toured the then just dissolved Soviet Union, won KVN competitions and honed their Russian-language sketches. It was only much later that they began to do more sketches in Ukrainian: Zelenskyj’s story represents the fluid borders between Russian and Ukrainian cultural audiences. He is not and is not “one of us”.
Selenskyj als Elvis im rosa-Satin-Outfit
In 2003, Kvartal 95 established itself as an independent production company making TV shows and films for Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking audiences. The project received a strong boost when Zelenskyy won the dance casting show “Dancing with the Stars” in Ukraine in 2006, together with his dance partner Alena Schoptenko. She’s still one of 196 people he follows on Instagram. (He has 13.4 million followers.) Highlights included a jive to “Blue Suede Shoes,” which Selenskyj gave as Elvis in full pink-satin outfit, his pencil mustache for a tango to “Bigspender,” a rumba with blindfolded to Sting’s “The Shape of My Heart” and a quirky ballroom dance as Charlie Chaplin. His performances were characterized by energy and full commitment – and he was super fit. That was – and is – clearly important to him: until he became president, he regularly posted videos on social media showing him in the gym, or swimming, or jogging in New York.
He made more and more films. In 2008 he played Igor in the film “Love in the Big City”, a Russian dentist in New York. Igor is one of three friends who suffer from impotence and need to find the path of true love to regain their potency. (One might be mildly dismissive of this, but the film has grossed $9 million in theaters and, in fairness, Steve Carell’s “40-year-old virgin seeks…” goes in a similar vein).
Two sequels followed. In “Office Romance: Our Time” (2011) he played the financial analyst Anatoly, who has a difficult boss. While trying to get a promotion, he falls in love with her – after many entanglements with a cable car, a motorcycle and other, uh, comical vehicles. Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon (2012), starring Jean-Claude Van Damme (he waived his fee) and Xenia Sobchak (the daughter of former St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak, who is said to be Putin’s godchild), was one of Zelenskyj’s am least successful cinema films. It’s definitely bizarre to watch today. Zelenskyj plays a triumphant Napoleon just as he has conquered Moscow and is marching towards St. Petersburg. (Putin is not known to be a big movie fan, but one has to wonder if he has seen this film.)
Four men in crop tops and leggings
Selenskyj’s comedy style is in the spectrum of Steve Martin or, yes, Steve Carell: exaggerated characters, with many punchlines and puns, but always within the framework of the charming. The films themselves are classic post-Soviet comedies: Western audiences would likely perceive them as naïve, dated, and at least a little politically incorrect.
His sketches with Kvartal 95 are similar to those of Saturday Night Live: varying degrees of joke scenes that take on Shakespeare, poke fun at influencers, or feature men dressed up as babushkas (old women). Some of their best stuff is visually compelling. The Beyoncé-style video that was widely shared this week is a great example. Four men in leather crop tops and leggings attempt salacious acrobatic moves while touting Ukrainian delicacies: “Borsch! Salo (soup! pork fat)!”
Selenskys licks his lips as he looks into the camera: “Tzybulya (onion)!” Penis jokes abound (think British comedian Benny Hill rather than Monty Python, although the latter is cited as inspiration for Zelenskyj) and a common feature of the future president’s characters is an “untimely coming” erection. Maybe “inconvenient” is the wrong word, too, given the sketch where he plays Hava Nagila hands-free on the piano, pants down the ankles.
Volodymyr Zelenskyj as the hapless history teacher Wassyl Petrovich Holoborodko is an integral part of Russian-language comedy
But the evolution from raunchy comedy to the presidency wouldn’t have happened without a TV hit: Servant of the People. The show is owned by the Kvartal 95 team. Its three seasons ran from 2015 to 2019 with Zelenskyj as writer, producer and star. The last of the 51 episodes aired on March 28, 2019; on April 21 Zelenskyi won the election. A year earlier, Kvartal 95 had registered Servants of the People as the name of a new party.
In the series, Zelenskyi plays the hapless history teacher Vasyl Petrovich Holoborodko, who is accidentally catapulted into the presidency after a video in which he berates the government goes viral. The tirade that gave Holoborodko victoryhas become a staple of Russian-language comedy, a bit like Ricky Gervais’ robot dance in British series The Office, but peppered with beeps (because every other word is a swear word).
The choice of language in “Servants of the People” is interesting. The series is in Russian and Holoborodko is a Russian-speaking Ukrainian. However, some of the characters speak Ukrainian. The famous tirade, on the other hand, is in Russian—and it’s a master lesson in the fact that swearing is a language of its own (a firm belief of many Russian speakers). Underneath the beeping one can make out the Russian words for “fucking”, “bitch” (usually used for “damn it”), “pederasts” (used to mean “bastards”) and cunt. The rant ends with, “I wish every teacher lived like the President. And the President – beep – like a teacher. I tell you this as the history teacher that I am. Even if you don’t give a damn. Pederasty!“
Selenskyj can really swear
Millions have seen this film clip since 2015 and associate Zelenskyj with it – in a positive way. There is an ironic parallel between the real viral videos currently coming out of Ukraine that are peppered with the exact same words. As Ido Vock wrote in the British weekly New Statesman, a Russian friend asked him this week: “Why are we fighting people who swear just like us?” can swear.
But the trump card that is now showing is Zelenskyj’s status as a team player. In his speech to the Russian people last week, he urged them to question official propaganda. Why would he support a war attacking cities he knows and loves? “To shoot who? To bomb what?… Lugansk? The home of my best friend’s mom? The place where his father is buried?”
The best friend he speaks of is Yevgeny Koshevoy (you can see him dancing in the Beyoncé video), whose family is actually from Lugansk. The two have worked together for 18 years and shared the stage in the spring of 2014 when Kvartal 95 performed in front of soldiers at the front after the start of the war in Donbas. Koschevoi once recounted from this time: “People told us that they smiled at our jokes that evening – the first smile in weeks.” but he still came on stage for a concert. We had to carry him onto the stage.”
British political commentator and comedian David Baddiel tweeted this week: “One thing about Volodymyr – I don’t think he looks back on his life (which I hope will continue for many years to come) and thinks he hasn’t had enough drunk from the cup of life.” The show must go on.