[ Servant of the People is among the world’s great satires, and
Volodymyr Zelensky, who both writes and acts, is the most appealing
“little guy” since Charlie Chaplin. A belated review of Servant of
the People that may turn into an obituary.] [[link removed]]

VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY IS NOT A COMEDIAN — AND THAT’S NO JOKE  
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Barbara Garson
March 16, 2022
The Nation
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_ Servant of the People is among the world’s great satires, and
Volodymyr Zelensky, who both writes and acts, is the most appealing
“little guy” since Charlie Chaplin. A belated review of Servant of
the People that may turn into an obituary. _

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy holds a press conference in Kyiv,
Ukraine, on March 12, 2022., Photo by Emin Sansar // The Nation

 

Way before this terrible war, I used to groan when people referred to
the president of Ukraine as a “comedian turned politician.”
Comedian indeed!

_Servant of the People
[[link removed]]_ is among the world’s
great satires, and Volodymyr Zelensky, who both writes and acts, is
the most appealing “little guy” since Charlie Chaplin.

The show ran on Ukrainian TV for three seasons before Zelensky got
into politics. By the time I saw it on Netflix, he was already
Ukraine’s president. But in the United States he was primarily
known—if known at all—as the recipient of the “perfect phone
call
[[link removed]].”
That’s the call where President Trump threatened not to restore
Ukrainian military aid (he had already delayed shipments) unless
President Zelensky agreed to announce an investigation of Joe
Biden’s son Hunter.

_Servant of the People_ opens with three oligarchs who normally
choose Ukraine’s president deciding to give themselves a little
excitement. This year, they’ll each groom and bet on a different
candidate. That way no matter whose horse wins, they’ll still run
the country.

Meanwhile, unassuming high school history teacher Vassily Golborodko
is caught on camera delivering a semi-obscene screed against
government corruption. It goes viral. Without telling him, his
students crowdfund the registration fees to put their teacher on the
presidential ballot. Confusion among the oligarchs allows the little
guy to slip in.

And little he is.

Vladimir Putin, five foot seven, carefully avoids being photographed
standing next to other heads of state—except for Turkey’s Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, who’s also five foot seven. With equal calculation,
Volodymyr Zelensky (five foot six) shows the protagonist he plays
opening Ukraine’s parliament looking like the birthday boy who has
to sit on telephone books to blow out the candles.

Accidental President Goloborodko may be short and naive—but he’s
constitutionally unable to repeat the bullshit in the scripts he’s
handed. He doesn’t know quite how government works, but he knows
what’s right.

To choose a cabinet, he interviews a string of office seekers and
despairs of finding a qualified Ukrainian. “If he’s honest, he’s
a fool: if he’s smart, he’s a thief.” In desperation, he rounds
up a cabinet from among the misfits he met as a kid when they played
practical jokes together at Young Leninist Summer Camp.

[[link removed]]

Watch here [[link removed]]

You probably don’t know exactly what makes “Young Leninist Summer
Camp” a laugh line. Neither do I. But Ukrainians, part of the Soviet
Union until 1991, certainly do. Putin says that there is no nation of
Ukraine. It’s true that Ukrainians, both Russian- and
Ukrainian-speaking, were still shaping a modern identity. Zelensky
grew up in a Russian-speaking home; in his role as President
Goloborodko, he speaks Ukrainian. A terrific way to weld a common
identity is through in-jokes. Audiences crack up at allusions to
things they all recognize but have never heard mentioned aloud. “Oh
right,” we say. But to work, the allusions have to be exactly right.

Over its three-year run, _Servant of the People_ delivered hundreds
of “Oh right” moments that helped shape the sense of nationhood
Ukrainians are now defending with guns.

In each episode, the inventive oddballs from Young Leninist Summer
Camp (played by actors from Zelensky’s old comedy troupe) dodge
bribery, blackmail, and bullying as they claw back some—though
hardly all—of the national wealth that the oligarchs steal. Oddly
enough, they fare worst when they face oligarchs of the West.

When two tall and elegant women from the International Monetary Fund
stride in, the show’s comedic style changes. _Servant of the
People_ normally relies on verbal humor and sardonic reaction shots.
Zelensky doesn’t go in for slapstick. But the fearsome IMF enforcers
set off a Keystone Cops chase. It’s in-one-door-and-out-the-other
farce as Golobrodoko ducks behind pillars and palm plants to evade the
implacable creditors.

I couldn’t help thinking about that IMF episode when one of the
Trump/Giuliani strong-arm team complained that it was so hard to make
Zelensky commit to smearing Joe Biden. Every time they thought they
had the guy pinned down, he seemed to disappear. (Maybe they should
have looked behind the potted palm.)

The real President Zelensky stalled and outlasted Donald Trump. (May
he live to play himself in a skit of the “perfect phone call”
on _Saturday Night Live_!) The fictional President Goloboroko sees no
way around the IMF. Besides, he believes an honorable nation should
pay its debts. (In the real world, that means signing an IMF austerity
agreement to cut back on things like education, medicine, food, and
transportation subsidies, until the banks recoup every penny they
loaned to the crooks.)

Volodymyr Zelensky is not Vassily Goloborodko.

Goloborodko was plunked down in the president’s chair without even
knowing he’d been nominated. Zelensky created the Servant of the
People Party after playing Ukraine’s president for three years on
the nation’s most popular TV show. The title of both the show and
the party comes from a question Goloborodko asks the parliament: “If
this is a democracy and we are the servants of the people, how come
the servants live better than the masters?”

The man who writes, directs, and produces a top TV show, then starts a
political party and wins the presidency is a determined individual. A
friend of his has described Zelensky as a person who means to win and
never gives up. He’s also a rational man who can calculate odds.

When the Russians invaded, Zelensky must have understood that Ukraine
would inevitably lose and he would die. Is he willing to die? So it
seems. What about his responsibility to other Ukrainians?

In _Servant of the People_, the little president objects to hanging
portraits of the leader (i.e., himself) in government offices. “Hang
pictures of your own children,” he tells officials, “and look at
them when you have to make decisions.” As long as Ukrainians resist,
their children will continue to die.

So what’s the right time for the doomed to surrender? To achieve the
greatest good for the greatest number, Ukranians would optimally
resist until they’ve caused Putin enough pain that he won’t try
this again soon. America’s “Vietnam Syndrome” deterred invasions
for almost two decades. Then again, a thin-skinned strongman like
Putin might feel the sting of humiliation so deeply that he’d need
to relieve it soon. What awful calculations for a comedian to have to
make!

Once in battle, Zelensky had to forget the odds. As a wartime
president, he demands weapons. He calls for volunteers. He just
announced a one-year moratorium on small-business taxes, to start on
the day Russians are driven off Ukrainian soil. He can still be
epigrammatic—“I need ammunition, not a ride”—but never
equivocal. He’s the leader of a nation that’s going to win. How
easily a sophisticated satirist gets swept into primitive patriotism.

What about me? When I saw the 40-mile Russian tank caravan, I
remembered the military truism that a stalled tank is a death trap. So
I made a demonstration sign that said “SEND JAVELINS
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(US anti-tank weapons). Am I so swept up in Ukrainian nationalism that
I’m raring to see thousands of young Russians roasted alive?
Apparently, yes. I never carried my sign, but I see that Javelins have
been delivered. Good!

How did I become a bloodthirsty Ukrainian partisan? People naturally
root for the plucky underdog. Zelensky is a master at playing the
little guy, and Putin is cast perfectly as the bully. But anti-Assad
Syrians were bombed by the same cold-blooded villain. Yet my
impression of the Syrian civil war was of “some kind of factional
struggle.” I pitied the refugees, but I didn’t feel the need to
have a side.

It may be partly my racism—or “Europeanism”—that makes it
easier for me to identify with Ukrainians. But perhaps a part of what
made the world line up with Ukraine is their president’s dramatic
skill. Frankly, I preferred Zelensky’s earlier work. I hope he
survives to write about more nuanced conflicts than war. But I doubt
he’ll ever again create anything as light, wry, and simply brilliant
as _Servant of the People._

_Editor’s Note: On the day this article went to press, _Servant of
the People_ returned to Netflix. You can watch the first season here
[[link removed]]._

_[BARBARA GARSON is the author of several books about work,
including All the Livelong Day. She’s also the playwright
of Macbird!
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and many almost exactly right entertainments for demonstrations and
meetings.]_

_Thanks to the author for sending this to xxxxxx._

_Copyright c 2022 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission. Distributed by PARS International Corp.
 
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* Ukraine [[link removed]]
* Volodymyr Zelensky [[link removed]]
* Russia [[link removed]]
* Russian invasion [[link removed]]
* war and peace [[link removed]]
* armed conflict [[link removed]]
* Servant of the People [[link removed]]
* television [[link removed]]
* comedians [[link removed]]
* comedy [[link removed]]

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