International: THE STORIES THEY TELL, Dec. 6, 1948

Behind the Iron Curtain last week, the business of being funny had struck a depression. Moscow's leading humorous weekly Krokodil had been called on the Kremlin carpet for "not fulfilling its purpose." In Poland, a Satirists' Congress was told sternly that jokes involving sex and mothers-in-law were no longer considered funny, though humor could still be drawn from the petty bourgeoisie, the bureaucrat and the speculator. Elsewhere, however, people swapped yarns just as they had before. Here & there TIME'S correspondents paused to listen.

Athenians were regaling each other with the tale of an encounter between a U.S. Army engineer and a...