The shortest Soviet joke was the famous real slogan that you could see on many Soviet billboards, “Fly Aeroflot!” The two words still put me in stitches every time I hear them. We, the last remnants of the USSR, use this slogan in a variety of situations to transmit a meaning only we understand.
Riddle: why is the Soviet slogan “Fly Aeroflot!” so funny?
P.S. N reminds me that there was another very short Soviet joke, “A Jewish janitor.” But this one is hardly a riddle.
I don’t know. What’s the joke?
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Aeroflot is an inflatable raft company?
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It’s the Soviet airline. THE Soviet airline. 🙂
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“It’s the Soviet airline. THE Soviet airline.”
-Then the joke must be related to that fact–if it’s the only airline, there’s obviously no need to advertise for it.
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And we have a winner! :-))))
We still use this phrase in situations where it seems like there is a choice but there is really none.
The slogan sounded like a total mockery of the Soviet people. There was another one that was even worse: “Buy Soviet steel!” As if a regular citizen could just buy steel.
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Because Aeroflot lost 152 aircraft in the 1980s to various mishaps and accidents (i.e., it wasn’t safe).
I’d hate to cite Wikipedia, but I found it relatively quickly there (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_accidents_and_incidents_in_the_1980s).
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Yes, as everything else Soviet, it was of abysmally low quality.
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If you lose aircraft often enough and over water you become an inflatable raft company by default. 🙂
How to survive Aeroflot -Why dude? Why?
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State-run airlines Airlines in India and Pakistan (Pakistan International Airlines) were always a rich source of humor for us.
PIA = Panic in Air, Perhaps I Arrive, and my favorite: Please Inform Allah
AI (Air India): Already Informed
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I took Aerflot from Bishkek to Moscow and then directly from Moscow all the way to Los Angeles in December 2008 because my flight on another airline lost an engine at Manas. I sat next to a Ukrainian woman and her cat from Moscow to LA. The cat had a Ukrainian passport.
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I thought it would have somethin to do with Aeroflot being a state-enforced monopoly or something to do with unreliability. I never knew the Soviets actually advertised it, tho’… that’s kind of weird.
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There was quite a bit of advertisement in the USSR, which is definitely very weird because what’s the point?
The most famous ads were “Keep your savings in the Savings Bank!” (which was the only bank in existence) and “Drink tomato juice!” The purpose of the ads is a mystery.
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A French man, a British man, and a Russian are admiring a painting of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. The French man says, “They’re naked and eating fruit in a garden. They must be French.” The British man says, Observe how politely the man is offering the woman the fruit and how they avert their eyes. They must be British.” The Russian says, “They have nothing to wear, all they have to eat between them is one lousy apple, and they think this is paradise. They must be Russian…”
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Funny. 🙂
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Saw this post in “Related” and got interested in what the joke was. 🙂
Well, I did “Fly Aeroflot!” and won’t likely ever forget the experience. When the plane started rising from Ben Gurion airport to Russia, I felt the smell of smoke, saw it entering the aircraft cabin and thought we were all about to die. (Remembered the title of a short story now “YOU AND I ARE ABOUT TO DIE…”; I truly expected that already.)
A Russian-speaking woman sitting near us did say it was OK, but would you be completely calm anyway? Have you ever experienced this staff on Russian planes or do you wisely take only planes from first-world countries? I would expect Latin American planes f.e. to be also dangerous.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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