We thought we heard the last of Russia’s most feared and dangerous asset, but we were wrong. Yakov Smirnoff is about to make headlines again. Oh, and Vladimir Putin also brought back the KGB. No biggie.
In a surprising move that political analysts are calling, “What the… what?” Putin has reinstated the KGB as Russia’s secret police and espionage unit in order to bring back Soviet Russia’s greatest weapon against American’s trust, happiness and security, Yakov Smirnoff. While his jokes about life in communist Russia have grown stale and old, the mother country does not forget so easily, especially when the jokes about the KGB hit so hard. Putin wants to bring him home, retrain him, give him some new jokes and send him back over and see how much damage he can do.
How will a newly polished and energized Yakov Smirnoff do in the American stand-up comedy circuits that now award more self-referential and observational humor about American society? Will he be able to tell jokes about xenophobia in the modern America as well as he used to make jokes about waiting on line for toilet paper, getting jeans for free and collective farms? It’s going to be a tough battle for him, but with a resurrected KGB to power him through, they might actually be able to get him to kill. Yakov Smirnoff killing on stage in 2017 is way less expected than Yakov Smirnoff dying on stage doing comedy.
Outside of re-hatching the comedy of Smirnoff, the KGB doesn’t seem to have much of an objective in its rebirth. Entire floors of the Lubyanka Building will be dedicated to the craft of joke-smithing and the subtleties of modern, American humor. As for Yakov, he remains in hiding in the USA, hoping not to be brought back home to Russia and working on furthering his comedy from the cold war, concentrating on humor about doomed relationships and sex over 40. That sounds like another kind of cold war, all together.