Anton Tymoshenko is exhausted. Ukraine’s most famous standup comedian – Volodymyr Zelenskyy doesn’t count, since he is the president – has just returned from a gruelling European tour, involving 36 shows in 50 days. He played in Berlin, Paris and London. And Birmingham, where Tymoshenko tried unsuccessfully to buy Peaky Blinders merchandise.
His audiences were made up of Ukrainians living abroad, many refugees. The tour raised nearly half a million dollars, all of which will go to Ukraine’s armed forces.
As well as being tired, Tymoshenko is angry at the situation his country finds itself in after Russia’s invasion. “War is very funny for the first couple of years. Then it becomes not so funny,” he says, speaking in Kyiv’s popular comedy venue, the Underground Standup club.
He quotes Mark Twain’s observation that humour is tragedy plus time. “We have tragedy plus tragedy plus tragedy,” he says, after a week in which Moscow has pummelled Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with hundreds of kamikaze drones and missiles.
The war has transformed Ukraine’s once small standup scene. A decade ago most comedians spoke in Russian. The well resourced Kremlin flooded Ukrainian channels with Russian programmes and music. In 2022, when Russian tanks arrived, all comedians switched to performing in Ukrainian.
In the weeks after Russia’s attack they met online, told jokes, and shared content, with some beaming in from enemy-occupied territory. “The war gave us a cultural boost,” Tymoshenko says. “Russian comedy isn’t really comedy since they don’t tell the truth, especially about politics.”
Since those difficult early months, standup has become enormously popular. In 2023, Tymoshenko filled Kyiv’s 3,000-seat Palace of Ukraine. Last year, he toured North America, performing for the first time in English – a challenge that forced him to test out punchlines with friends.
His New Jersey set involved gags about bomb shelters (“even if you tell a bad joke, people will stay”) and weapons (“I understand you can’t send them all. You need to keep some for your schools.”) And Joe Biden (“He’s very similar to Ukrainians. He looks like he can die at any second.”)
He acknowledges a debt to Zelenskyy, whose comedy studio Kvartal 95 was highly successful in Ukraine and noughties Russia, during Vladimir Putin’s first years in the Kremlin. Long before he went into politics, Zelenskyy was celebrated as an entertainer and actor. “Without him we would have had Russian stuff,” Tymoshenko says.
At some point, however, the studio developed a “monopoly on humour”, producing dozens of TV shows and films, including the drama Servant of the People. In it, Zelenskyy plays the president, a role that propelled him in 2019 to a real-life landslide election victory. “They tried to be everywhere and it became bad,” Tymoshenko says.
He prefers Zelenskyy as a wartime leader. “It’s cool to have a guy like him in power. You get pretty strong Black Mirror vibes. It’s not normal but the world is not normal, so it fits,” he says.
Tymoshenko describes his own style of humour as “pretty dark”. He jokes about death: “Some people lost nothing. Some people lost everything. The challenge is to find a direction that works for everyone. People are tired of war. You have to find an original way to make them laugh and to not depress them.”
Svyat Zagaikavich, the founder of the Underground Standup club, began performing in 2012 in a flat and cafe. After Putin’s annexation of Crimea two years later, the club moved to new central premises in a subterranean former Irish pub opposite the Golden Gate, a Kyiv landmark.
In Zagaikavich’s view, Ukrainian standup has come of age: “It’s really dark humour. There are a lot of jokes about dead Russians. Before, some comedians would show stupid people by talking in Ukrainian. Now they do it by speaking Russian. You joke and do everything in life like it’s for the last time.”
For those stressed by war, comedy has an important social function, he says. “We get a lot of feedback, like, ‘You saved me from my mental problems.’ Earlier we thought we comedians were doing cool work. Now we have a mission. It’s to stop people from going crazy,” he says.
Zagaikavich presents Ukraine’s version of the humorous British quizshow QI. Its ex-host Stephen Fry was in Kyiv in 2022 for a conference on mental health, invited by Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenska. He visited the club and gave Zagaikavich a signed photo with the words: “Stephen Fry died here.”
On a Sunday in mid-July, 100 people came to Ukraine’s QI show, which was recorded in a theatre on Kyiv’s much-bombed left bank. “It’s like therapy for us. It brings us together. We’re tired of being serious about the war. You need to relax and chill out,” one fan Angelina Gromova, says.
Another, Anna Prudii, says she watched Russian comedy before dumping it in 2014 for Ukrainian acts. “It has helped me a lot. It cheers me up. In the last three years it became very popular,” she says. About Zelenskyy, she was diplomatic: “I watched his show with my parents. It’s of its time.”
Comedian Nastya Zukhvala says that when she began doing standup organisers would give one token slot to a female performer. Now comedy is more equal, she says: “We have more masculine men, running around doing rat-tat-tat. At the same time there is a lot of work for women. Sexism isn’t the most effective way of fighting.”
Zukhvala, who is a regular QI panellist, says her feminist brand of comedy has become “rougher” and more patriotic because of the war. “It’s about everyday life. Everyone who lives in such crazy times and who prefers to resist becomes funnier,” she says.
She is one of a dozen comedians who have done international tours to raise money for Ukraine’s army. Zukhvala visited the UK. It was a mixed experience: there was a low point in Glasgow, she says, when the owner of a fish and chip shop told her to go home and “kill Putin”.
Tymoshenko and Zukhvala have performed all across Ukraine, including in the southern frontline city of Kherson. Russian soldiers and drone operators are camped out just across the Dnipro River. “The city is almost empty. It’s a very intense feeling. It wasn’t a standard show. There were a lot of old people,” she says.
After three years in Kyiv, Tymoshenko says his parents have recently returned to their home village outside Nikopol, another frontline city under regular artillery and drone fire. He grew up there in the countryside “playing with sticks”, before moving to Kyiv to study political science.
The authors he read – Plato and Aristotle – do not reflect the non-ideal world today, a place of “brute power and money”. He believes there will not be much to laugh about when the war finally ends: “I’m sure Ukraine will win and Russia will burn. But we’ve lost so many people. You can’t imagine Victory Day as ‘Wow!’.”
In the meantime, he suggests things are looking up for Ukrainian female comedians. “We will only have female ones because we men will all have died,” he says blackly.