AllMovie

Hammer & Tickle: The Communist Joke Book is a 2006 documentary film about the nature of Russian political jokes under the powerful and socially restrictive Communist regime of the Soviet Union and its satellite nations. The film's name exemplifies the kind of mockery or criticism of the regime that the Soviet government would have found to be disagreeable by playing on the symbol of communism itself, the hammer and sickle. The film tells the story of the power that jokes had to enable social and political change and advance personal freedoms from within the USSR - the film's opening scene uses a quote from George Orwell's 1984: "Every joke is a tiny revolution."