Q: Why, despite all the shortages, was the toilet paper in East Germany always 2-ply?

Q: Why, despite all the shortages, was the toilet paper in East Germany always 2-ply?

A: Because they had to send a copy of everything they did to Moscow.

Communist jokes are the strangest, funniest, most enchanting and meaningful legacy of the 80 years of political experimentation in Russia and Eastern Europe, known as Communism.

The valiant and sardonic citizens of the former Communist countries - surrounded by an invisible network of secret police, threatened with arrest, imprisonment and forced labour, confronted by an economic system that left shops empty, and bombarded with ludicrous state propaganda - turned joke-telling into an art form. They used jokes as a coded way of speaking the truth.