Soviet-style humor is finding a new life in Venezuela, where joking can be a way to criticize the government. Photograph by Fernando Llano / AP

In late November, I found myself at an emphatically chic hotel bar in Caracas. I was there for a large gathering that had technically started an hour earlier, but I sat alone, a victim of my own near-punctuality. To fill the time, I began a conversation with the friendlier of two bartenders, a fellow who clearly preferred speaking to conversing and who, with a practiced spontaneity, segued seamlessly from taking my order to telling this joke:

An old man walks into a grocery store in Caracas. After waiting patiently in line, he asks the shopkeeper for a container of cooking oil, a jug of milk and, a quarter kilo of coffee. The clerk apologizes, saying that all three items are out of stock, and the disappointed patron walks off. Overhearing this exchange, the next person in line remarks to the proprietor: “Cooking oil? Milk? That stupid old man, he must be crazy.” The storekeeper considers this a moment and responds: “Yes, but what a remarkable memory!”

What struck me most about the joke was that I’d heard it before, over a decade earlier, in the Czech Republic, from a gruff reformed communist. I’d gone to Eastern Europe as an exchange student, to learn about transitions away from socialist economics—an invaluable skill set (or so I believed) for when Hugo Chávez’s revolution inevitably floundered, and my generation of foreign-educated Venezuelans was called upon to rebuild the country. This was 2003, when Chávez was still consolidating his power. Since that time, I’ve both endured and chronicled the entrenchment of the country’s misfortunes: its overnight arbitrage fortunes for the well connected, its rampant shortages and interminable lines for the rest. Yet the bartender’s joke was the most explicit echo of Soviet-era Europe that I’d experienced in Venezuela.

He soon told me another:

An Englishman and a Frenchman are at a museum, admiring a Renaissance work depicting Adam, Eve, and the apple in Eden. The Briton observes that Adam sharing the apple with his wife shows a particularly British propriety. The Frenchman, unconvinced, counters that the pair’s obvious comfort with their nudity clearly marks them as French. A passing Venezuelan, overhearing, remarks candidly, “Sorry to intrude, caballeros, but these are obviously Venezuelans: they have nothing to wear, practically nothing to eat, and they are allegedly in Paradise.”

This joke, too, has a Warsaw Pact pedigree. It can be found on the Internet in numerous iterations, with only the final character’s nationality changed—to Soviet, Cuban, even North Korean. (The Englishman and Frenchman, to their credit, remain largely static.)

These life-under-Marxism jokes, known as anekdoty to Russians during the Cold War, became an increasingly vital outlet for criticism during the period immediately preceding the collapse of the Soviet system. The genre has changed little since those days, but it has travelled, seamlessly transcending culture and geography to underscore certain commonalities of revolutionary Marxist systems (scarcity, triumphalist propaganda, bungling government bureaucracies) and, sometimes, to highlight the amalgam of cleverness, patience, indignation, and despair with which people respond to such conditions.

That these are features of life in today’s Venezuela is incontrovertible. Even the usually Panglossian government media no longer seems to deny Venezuelans’ hardships, having shifted from the official line that the C.I.A. is carrying on a “media war,” aimed at bringing down the revolution with lies, to the idea that the C.I.A. is carrying on an “economic war,” aimed at toppling the government through manufactured scarcity and fake lines full of agents provocateurs. The Venezuelan economy relies excessively on petrodollars, and the country’s government has been funnelling oil rents into imports of the food, medicine, and other basic goods that it is incapable of producing internally. Having neither diversified economically nor saved much during years of high oil prices, Venezuela was already in recession even before those prices collapsed last year. Loath to admit defeat and officially devalue its fixed currency, or to abandon popular subsidies such as penny-priced gasoline, the government has remained mostly solvent by printing money to cover its domestic obligations, enforcing onerous price controls, and being increasingly tight-fisted with access to foreign currency. This has come at the cost of stratospheric inflation and harrowing shortages of basic goods. The appeal of Soviet-style humor in the face of such problems is obvious.

In 2008, the documentary filmmaker Ben Lewis published “Hammer and Tickle,” a remarkable collection of jokes amassed from the former Soviet bloc. The book also provides a survey of the role humor played in European communism, building a case, albeit mostly through anekdotal evidence, that humor played a fundamental role in the downfall of that system. Alas, Lewis restricts himself almost entirely to the Soviet sphere. In a lonely paragraph addressing the rest of the world, he shrugs off the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodians, arguing that none of them “appear to have expressed their experiences of Communism this way”—presumably they did so by means other than joke telling. Cuban jokes, in his view, focus more on insulting Castro personally than on the bleakness of life within the system. Where true life-under-Marxism jokes exist in Cuba, Lewis writes, they are rehashed from the Soviet experience, and may not be “genuine expressions” of the citizenry.