Somehow Everyone Forgot That Zelenskyy Is A Comedian
Superpower unleashed
So this Oval Office meeting went much better than the previous one. Brian Glenn, the Real America’s Voice reporter who gave Volodymyr Zelenskyy a hard time about his military garb in February, noted the Ukrainian leader’s black ‘suit.’ Zelenskyy noted in response that Glenn was wearing the same suit as before, causing Donald Trump to laugh. Laughter is Zelenskyy’s superpower.
When discussing all things Ukraine, I find too many people have no idea what the voters of Ukraine saw in him. They are surprised to find out that he was comedian, and if they know that he was a professional joker, they have never watched his comedy. As I searched YouTube for clips of Zelenskyy cracking jokes, I noticed that none of them has been viewed more than a few hundred to a couple of thousand times. They ought to draw more interest, because they tell us a lot about him.
Start with the penis jokes. Here is a scene that Zelenskyy did with three other comedians in which they pretend to use their penises to play a piano. His comic timing is perfect. A viewer does not need to understand Ukrainian to laugh at his performance because his humor is very physical and expressive, and therefore transcends language.
In this sketch, Zelenskyy and three other comedians send up Russian elections. They ask what would happen if there was one voting precinct in Russia where voters didn’t choose Putin. My favorite line: Putin’s closest competitor “is in sixth place.”
Then there is the show that probably made him president: Servant of the People. The basic plot is that the oligarchs running Ukraine decide to make a high school history teacher into their puppet president, only to find out that he has an independent mind.
In this dream sequence, Zelenskyy played out the political revenge fantasy of most Ukrainian voters at the time. His candidacy was very much in the populist mold of this character. While it is listed as a drama, the show is quite funny.
In this clip, Zelenskyy takes on Vladimir Putin directly, turning his own words against him and bringing the house down in the process. No wonder Putin wants this man dead: he is very, very good at unwinding the Kremlin’s most ridiculous talking points. It is almost effortless.
In this sketch, Zelenskyy satirizes the Russian propaganda image of Ukrainians as pork-eating rubes who somehow also have the power to rewrite history. The sketch references Stepan Bandera, a World War II Ukrainian fascist that Russian propaganda has built up to be the most important person in the history of Ukraine. As seen in the sketch, Bandera is instead a source of comedy for Zelenskyy, a Jew.
Finally, here is a clip of Zelenskyy reading a ‘letter home’ from a Banderite fighting in the east of Ukraine. Again, he is sending up Russian propaganda talking points here, for example by claiming to have a gay marriage, referring to “our president, Barack Obama,” and pretending to do Nazi salutes.
After making Trump laugh, things got serious. Zelenskyy and European leaders gathered around the resolute desk to watch Trump prank call Viktor Orbán. A good time was reportedly had by all.
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