HUMOUR RETURNS TO YUGOSLAVIA

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23201, 13 March 1950, Page 6

HUMOUR RETURNS TO YUGOSLAVIA

BELGRADE. Humour, confined in a strait jacket, as long as Yugoslavia belonged to Soviet Russia's satellites, is today coming back into its own here. Before the break with the Oominform, jokes and cartoons in humourous newspapers and magazines followed strictly ideological lines—with the bloated Wall Street capitalist as the chief target.

Now, no longer afraid to laugh at themselves, and still less afraid of humour at the expense of Russia or their East European neighbours. Yugoslavs include such things as Government red tape and the Soviet treatment af satellite Slates among their butts.

The Zagrcd newspaper “Kersmpuh devoted a whole page to a cartoon captioned “Bureaucracy at Work.” The cartoon could equally well have been regarded as an attack on Communist state control in general, but this was presumably not, at least openly, intended. ’One corner of the picture pilloried the district’s Housing Commission, as four families found themselves allotted the same fiat. Wives and offspring were shown trying to force furniture, radios and trunks through the front door and windows while’ husbands, waving possession orders at each other, squabble about whose flat it really is.

One family, more cunning than the others, has tied a rone round a chimney pot and is seen lowering its furniture on to the balcony of the flat from the roof.

“Bureaucratic genius for distribution” is the caption for a display of hats in a shop across the street marked shoes, and shoes in a shop marked hats. —Reuter.