7 cartoons about Zelensky's bravery in standing up to Russia

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CNN

Volodymyr Zelensky played Ukraine's president on TV. Now it's a reality | CNN

". . .To narrate Volodymyr Zelensky’s ascent is to slip into the plot of a postmodern novel that mocks the distinction between reality and entertainment.

There is, remarkably, a fictional version of Zelensky’s rise, the one he tells in Servant of the People, the sitcom in which his character unexpectedly becomes the president of Ukraine.

He plays a teacher lifted from obscurity after a student surreptitiously records him ranting about the prevalence of corruption and his vituperative monologue goes viral. Against all expectations, and despite the fact that he doesn’t campaign for the job, the teacher is elected president. Because he doesn’t trust stalwarts of the old ruling class, he surrounds himself with his oldest friends, appointing inexperienced chums to the most important posts in his government. . .

Zelensky was elected president with no previous political experience. Before that, he played a television character who was elected president with no previous political experience. (Aleksandr Gusev / Pacific Press / LightRocket / Getty)

. . .One of the privileges of post-Soviet freedom that arrived during Zelensky’s adolescence was the right to make fun of politicians. A show on Russian television called KVN—an acronym that roughly translates to “The Club of the Funny and Inventive”—pitted teams from across the old U.S.S.R. against one another in improv and sketch comedy. This format, which had originated on a hit show in the ’60s and was revived at the height of perestroika, captured Zelensky’s imagination.

As a 17-year-old, he earned a spot on the Kryvyi Rih squad. In the mid-’90s, Zelensky, Pikalov, and their friends created their own troupe. They named it after a neighborhood in Kryvyi Rih, the 95th quarter—or Kvartal 95.

Zelensky’s comedic style is vulgar and adolescent. In one sketch, he pretends to play the piano with his penis. (Sergii Kharchenko / NurPhoto / Getty)

Zelensky’s mother wasn’t terribly pleased with his pursuit of comedy. After visiting a rehearsal, she stealthily pulled Pikalov aside and said, “He’s going to be a lawyer … Isn’t he?”

Television success didn’t translate into wealth, at least not initially.

It took Zelensky years to parlay his fame into an entertainment empire of concert tours, films, and televised variety shows.
(Because his movies were in Russian, he profitably exported his work to much of the old Soviet empire.)

In 2012, Forbes Ukraine reported his company’s income as $15 million. Zelensky was rich enough to purchase a 15-room villa in Tuscany (a property he neglected to declare during his presidential campaign).

In a BBC interview, Zelensky credited Monty Python as a primary comic influence, but he’s also said that his style is more Benny Hill.

Vladislav Davidzon, the editor of The Odessa Review, told me, “His comedy was puerile, vulgar, and working-class—what the Russians call ‘bazaar humor.’” In one signature sketch, Zelensky pretends to play the piano with his penis. (Here’s the YouTube footage, if that’s your thing.)

On the show Evening Kvartal, actors would impersonate politicians and oligarchs, who would sometimes bray for the cancellation of the program. (Zelensky should have been more sympathetic: According to Pikalov, he now gets annoyed by televised jokes made at his expense.) The most savvy politicians would invite satirists to play at elite gatherings, in an attempt to dull the comics’ bite.

One oligarch told me that he watched Zelensky headline a birthday party for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president, who would later be ousted from power during a revolution in 2014.

That year, after Putin’s annexation of Crimea, Kvartal 95 cut its lucrative ties with the Russian market.

Le Monde

For Volodymyr Zelensky, politics was a fiction that became his reality

“I don’t want to have anything in common with Russia,” Zelensky told a friend.
The company donated 1 million hryvnia to the ragtag Ukrainian army—a contribution that earned him splenetic denunciations from politicians in Moscow.
A year later, Zelensky began creating Servant of the People.

The new show exuded sincerity and idealism, but in retrospect it was a campaign announcement spread over three seasons. . .