Crocodile Laugh

Moscow suddenly realized last week that its prime funny magazine, the Crocodile, had not been seen for a fortnight. Nobody was greatly surprised. But the Crocodile had not been suppressed. Fact was its editors had laughed themselves weak, sick and hysterical, over a joke they had not even printed.

Several months back Crocodile editors got the Soviet high command's unofficial permission to put to the jocular test the knowledge and alertness of high Soviet bureaucrats. They invented a fanciful Academy of Plans for Transcosmic Sciences and a subsidiary Trust for the Exploitation of Meteoric Iron. But they needed that high sign of Soviet officialdom, a rubber stamp. So they advertised that they had lost their rubber stamp and promptly a bureaucrat gave them permission to have one made.

Under the sign of their rubber stamp Crocodile editors began to write the heads of Soviet iron-using trusts that a great meteorite, rich in iron, aluminum and even platinum, was due to drop soon near a non-existent city in Kazakstan. They intended, they said, to be on the spot. Their Trust was open for iron orders. Man after head man swallowed the bait, wrote back for details which the editors gleefully supplied as their sole stock-in-trade. Finally even the great Scrap Iron Trust gave them an order on the Trust's Kazakstan representative.

New ideas were popping into the editors' heads by the dozen. They dropped a few clues by signing their letters with the name of a famed Soviet comic character, "O. Bender," and with "William Tell, Trust Secretary." To soften the hardships of their Kazakstan expedition, they got special rates on extra food, phonographs, records, banjos and guitars. Then they asked the Scrap Iron Trust for 10,000 rubles for the expedition. The Trust passed them on to Constantine Maltsev, Assistant Commissar for Education. He, for one, did not bite, did not laugh. Instead he called the OGPU. One editor, arrested on a charge of trying to obtain money under false pretenses, was quickly released. But when the Crocodile set about telling the story of its hoax, the Soviet high command firmly shushed it.

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