| Yakov Smirnoff | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Yakov Naumovich Pokhis |
| Born | 24 January 1951 Odessa, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union |
| Medium | Stand-up, television, Art, Books |
| Nationality | Ukrainian, American |
| Years active | 1983–present |
| Genres | Irony, Word play, Transpositional pun |
| Subject(s) | Ukrainian-American culture, race relations, racism, immigration |
| Notable works and roles | Yakov Korolenko/Yakov Kovlenko on Night Court Nikolai Rostapovich/Nikolai Rostopovich on What a Country! Shatov in The Money Pit |
| Website | www.yakov.com |
Yakov Naumovich Pokhis (Russian: Яков Наумович Похис, Ukrainian: Яків Наумович Похис; born 24 January 1951), better known as Yakov Smirnoff, is a Ukrainian-born American comedian, painter and teacher. He was popular in the 1980s for comedy performances in which he used irony and word play to contrast life under the Communist regime in his native Soviet Union with life in the United States, delivered in heavily accented English. He has a theatre in Branson, Missouri, where he performs year-round. Smirnoff is also a professor at Missouri State University and Drury University where he teaches "The Business of Laughter."
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Smirnoff was born in Odessa, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. He is of Jewish descent.[1] He was an art teacher in Odessa and continues to paint. He came to the United States in 1977 and became an American citizen on 4 July 1986. Smirnoff spent a portion of his early days in the United States working as a bartender at Grossingers Hotel in the Catskill Mountains of New York and living in the employee dormitory.
He appeared in several motion pictures, including Buckaroo Banzai and The Money Pit. Among his numerous appearances on television, he was featured many times on the sitcom Night Court as "Yakov Korolenko". He also had a starring role in a 1986–87 television sitcom titled What a Country. In that show, he played a Russian cab driver studying for the U.S. citizenship test. In the late 1980s, Smirnoff was commissioned by ABC to provide educational bumper segments for Saturday morning cartoons, punctuated with a joke and Smirnoff's signature laugh. Since 1993, he has been a fixture in Branson, Missouri.
He has continued to amass accomplishments including books, CDs, movies, T.V. appearances, a successful Broadway show, As Long As We Both Shall Laugh, and is currently working on a humorous self-help book. He is a featured writer for AARP magazine and gives readers advice in his column, “Happily Ever Laughter”. He guests at the Skinny Improv in Springfield, Missouri on occasion.
In (May 2006), Smirnoff received a master's degree in positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught classes at Drury University along with Missouri State University on this topic. He is reportedly developing a new talk show that is based on the important role that laughter plays in healthy relationships, a concept which he had envisioned years earlier and has been developing the pilot.
He once told Johnny Carson, "I enjoy being in America: it's fun, you know, because you have, you have so many things we never had in Russia — like warning shots."[4]
Russian reversal or "In Soviet Russia" is a type of joke originated by Smirnoff, and is an example of antimetabole. The general form of the "In Soviet Russia" joke is that the subject and objects of a statement are reversed, and "In (Soviet) Russia," or something equivalent, is added, and the verb is often left unconjugated and articles are omitted, mimicking perceived Russian-accented speech. The original was:
Other examples include:
All of Smirnoff's original "In Soviet Russia" jokes made use of formulaic wordplay that carried Orwellian undertones. For example, two common jokes of this type run "In America, you listen to man on radio. In Soviet Russia, man on radio listen to you!" and "In America, you watch television. In Soviet Russia, television watch you!" The joke alludes to video screens that both reproduce images and monitor the citizenry, as in the novel 1984. Smirnoff's use of English allowed him to smooth over grammar differences in transitioning from the setup to the punchline. For example, he omits the articles "a" and "the" in the first reversal joke above, to better preserve the congruence. Also, verbs are often left unconjugated.
In 1985, Smirnoff appeared on a Miller Lite commercial featuring Russian reversal jokes.[5]
At the peak of Smirnoff's celebrity in the mid-1980s, he did not say "Soviet Russia" — he said simply "Russia", as the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic had existed since 1917, still existed, and showed no signs of imminent collapse. Smirnoff may have added the Soviet qualifier after the fall of the USSR to specify that he was referring to the communist regime and not the present state, although the phrase "Soviet Russia" has seen occasional use in the West since the beginning of the Soviet Union.
The joke form has become a staple of Smirnoff's humor, and is widely referenced in television parodies and online communities, especially in the form of double entendres. The widespread reference to the jokes has led some linguists to consider the phrases to be memes.[6]
Smirnoff is also a painter and has frequently featured the Statue of Liberty in his art since receiving his U.S. citizenship.
On the night of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, he started a painting inspired by his feelings about the event, based on an image of the Statue of Liberty. Just prior to the first anniversary of the attacks, he paid US$100,000 for his painting to be transformed into a large mural. Its dimensions were 200 feet by 135 feet (61 m by 41 m).
The mural, titled "America's Heart,"[7] is a pointillist-style piece, with one brush-stroke for each victim of the attacks. Sixty volunteers from the Sheet Metal Workers Union erected the mural on a damaged skyscraper overlooking the ruins of the World Trade Center. The mural remained there until November 2003, when it was removed because of storm damage. Various pieces of the mural can now be seen on display at his theater in Branson, Missouri.
The only stipulation he put on the hanging of the mural was that his name not be listed as the painter. He signed it: "The human spirit is not measured by the size of the act, but by the size of the heart."
