(14 Jun 2022)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Kyiv - 11 June 2022
1. Wide of crowd watching and laughing at comedian at stand-up
2. Members laughing
3. Wide of crowd watching stand-up routine by comedian Anton Tymoshenko at the comedy club
4. Crowd member laughing
5. Mid of comedian Anton Tymoshenko performing his stand-up routine at the comedy club
6. Close of comedian Anton Tymoshenko performing his stand-up routine at the comedy club
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Anton Tymoshenko, Comedian:
"This is the only, this is the only way to save your mental health in war, I suppose. Because I don't have money for a psychotherapist. A lot of Ukrainians don't have money for psychotherapists and stand-up is a very cheap psychotherapy. You just, you like eight dollars or ten dollars - that's the price of the ticket - and you're laughing like an hour. That helps I suppose. So, yeah, it's totally, it's totally good to laugh at war."
8. Wide of comedian Anton Tymoshenko performing
9. Close of crowd member laughing
10. SOUNDBITE (English) Anton Tymoshenko, Comedian:
"None of the comedians use old material for now. Like everybody write new stuff, about war, about new experience. But now I start to feel that people are a little bit tired about jokes about war so they need something else and now people react not so bright about jokes about war, because it's, because we joke all the time about that, so people are a little bit tired about the same themes all the time. Because 'Russians are stupid,' it's not like a new idea."  
11. Close of comedian Anton Tymoshenko performing
12. Various of crowd laughing
13. Crowd member Yuliia Shytko (right) and friend laughing
14. SOUNDBITE (English) Yuliia Shytk, Audience member:
"Thanks to them we actually can gather together and, you know, experience and enjoy together as well. So it's really nice. And I bet it's really hard for them, of course, like to write down those jokes, you know. But it helps everyone. So it's really cool."
15. Crowd member laughing
16. Crowd members leaving at the end of the show
STORYLINE:
The war in Ukraine isn't remotely funny, but Ukrainians are learning to laugh about the awfulness of it all.
Not necessarily because they want to, but because they have to - to stay sane amid the brutality that's killed tens of thousands of people.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his troops, especially dead and wounded ones, are favourite targets of dark Ukrainian wartime humour.
But there are boundaries: Ukrainian dead aren't laughed about and the grimmest battles, among them the siege of Mariupol and the port city's Azovstal steelworks, are far too raw for jokes. The same is true of atrocities in Bucha and elsewhere.
Ukraine's most famous comedian is Volodymyr Zelenskyy, now the country's president, elected in 2019.
In the TV comedy series "Servant of the People," the former stand-up comic and actor played a lovable high school teacher who accidentally becomes president - before he later became president for real.
But Zelenskyy hasn't had much cause for comedy since the February 24 invasion thrust him into the role of wartime leader. His daily video addresses to the nation are often grim and forceful.
But while he works to rally international support, and soldiers fight with tanks, artillery and Western-supplied armaments, Ukrainians away from the front are using jokes and humour as weapons - against war-time anxiety and moroseness, against Russia and to feel as one, laughing and crying together in their sorrow and anger.  
AP VIDEO SHOT BY JOHN LEICESTER
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