GABROVO, Bulgaria - The sign leading into town was as I remembered it: “Welcome and good riddance.” Gabrovians pride themselves on their sense of humor. And this hardluck but endearing city at the foot of the central Balkans was once regarded as the Communist capital of humor.
The town’s most distinctive cultural landmark remains the House of Humor and Satire, a dour hulk from the early 1970s. Black-and-white photographs from the day the House opened in 1971 show mobs of smiling Gabrovians jamming the square outside the building, then a spanking new Modernist box with a metal statue of Don Quixote in front, where apparatchiks wearing plaid leisure suits greeted Todor Zhivkov, Bulgaria’s strongman leader.
“There’s nothing funny in the picture but everybody’s laughing,” is how Galina Boneva analyzed the image one recent day. In charge of media affairs for the House, Ms. Boneva added, “That’s the joke,” as if Gabrovians had pretended to be uproarious for the purpose of being collectively satirical.
Or maybe Ms. Boneva was kidding. Laughter is said to be the universal language. But that must be a joke itself. Humor seems the clearest illustration of the greater truth that not everything translates from one society or era to another.
Officials at the House of Humor and Satire talk about becoming popular again, if only they could come up with the money and a good plan. Across the former Communist world, museums like the House have been repurposed as ironic attractions for tourists. Funnily, the House of Humor and Satire isn’t one of these. It lacks irony. It’s a family attic of oddball art, historical installations, satirical drawings .
It once functioned as a cold war crossroad and propaganda tool. The House’s biennial humor festivals were conceived by Communist officials to cultivate an image of Bulgaria, and by extension the larger Soviet realm, as open to outsiders. The House became a window between worlds.
In those festival days busloads of Soviet-bloc tourists waited each morning for the doors to open. A large staff published satire and humor, held a film festival, staged plays, brought in writers from humor magazines like Punch and The National Lampoon, handed out literary prizes to the likes of Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut.
The BBC made a documentary about the House. The New Yorker magazine wrote a profile of the town. Now, the House has trouble paying a skeletal staff’s meager salaries. “It was not an overnight success becoming the humor capital of Bulgaria,” Ms. Boneva said.
She stood before a tatty display tracing the source of Gabrovian wit to a certain Old Minyo, a 19th-century local philanthropist of fabled abstemiousness who was said to have carried his shoes on long walks, so as to spare their soles .
In the 1970s local leaders proposed creating the House of Humor. Tatyana Tsankova, the House’s longtime director, recalled that Communist officials saw this as an ideological opportunity “to show that humor could prosper here under Communism, within limits of course.” For abstract and religious artists in the Soviet sphere, the House was also one of the few Communist institutions that agreed to exhibit and collect their work. A crucifixion given an ironic title passed as satire.
Ms. Boneva gestured toward a large sculpture of a cat . A donation makes the cat cluck like a chicken. It happens that I had visited the House of Humor and Satire before, during the early 1980s. My parents, loyal Communists, stopped here one sunny summer day on the way to the Black Sea.
I remember being taken around by a guide who might well have been the younger Ms. Boneva. My father roared at the assortment of what seemed to me to be humorless art. My takeaway message: that the House of Humor exemplified cold war politics and the sort of misbegotten dreams that could cause a humane American physician with a scientist’s penchant for logic to laugh at what seemed unfunny. But history, like memory and the effectiveness of satire, changes with age along with one’s perspective.
Gabrovo comes across differently on second glance, more sympathetically, precisely because it has been fossilized. In a climate of blinkered, polarized politics, especially to a young smartalecky New Yorker, the museum could appear to be a crude instrument of cold war propaganda. But in the more fractured reality of a global age, it came to seem special, something actually to be treasured all the more for its flaws and as an anachronism.
I heard myself laughing, exactly as my father had done. I laughed out of politeness and slight embarrassment at the earnestness of the exhibitions. I laughed because I felt touched by Ms. Boneva’s devotion. And I laughed because the world is precious and heartbreaking for being complicated.
My father may well have had the same reaction when he visited. He wanted to be nice when he got to the House of Humor. He wasn’t being a good Communist, just a good man.
MICHAEL KIMMELMAN/ESSAY
