Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about Comedy & Communism--under the banner of Middlebrow, we talk about the recent movie The Death of Stalin, but also about Milan Kundera's Joke & the plays of Vaclav Havel, about Solzhenitsyn & Leo Strauss, about the tragic movie The lives of others & about the black Soviet comedies of Ilf & Petrov... We talk about comedy as truth-telling & retrieval of nature under the threat of ideological tyranny, about comedy's relation to evil, & about how we in democracies can understand life under tyranny.