‘We’ll teach them what a real sense of humor is’. Russian senator and ex-space chief Dmitry Rogozin threatens to send comedians to war over TV joke

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Russian senator and former space agency head Dmitry Rogozin was the butt of a recent joke on the televised comedy competition KVN — and responded by threatening to send the comedians responsible to war. He later claimed not to have been serious, but the intimidation was so blatant that even some pro-Kremlin figures called it out. Here’s how the scandal unfolded.

Dmitry Rogozin, the former head of Russia’s state space agency Roscosmos and the current Russian-installed senator representing Ukraine’s occupied Zaporizhzhia region, threatened this week to send members of a comedy troupe to the military after they made a joke about him on national television.

The joke aired on June 14 during a quarterfinal episode of the long-running televised comedy improv competition KVN. In a sketch by the team Negoden (“Unfit for Service”), one member played a character preparing for a spaceflight who changes his mind after falling in love:

“Commander, I’m staying. I’ve met someone.”

“Man, you can’t ditch space for a girl!”

“Says who?”

“It was in Rogozin’s dissertation.”

On June 23, Rogozin reposted the clip to his Telegram channel, saying he had received it from followers via a feedback bot. He called the joke “lame, unfunny, and vulgar,” and issued a threat: the performers, he said, would be sent into military service.

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“I’ve already been told which draft office these two comedians are registered with,” he wrote. “We’re now in the process of identifying the talentless schmuck who wrote that material. We’re expecting the boys to report for duty — we’ll teach them everything, including what a real sense of humor is.”

He went on:

The enemy we’re fighting has a real ‘spark,’ as they say. So instead of the miserable shit that KVN has become, we’ll give them a proper show: KVN drones — Prince Vandal of Novgorod [a type of Russian drone] edition. We’ll get them to the front lines and wish them good luck in battle. And when they make it back, we can all laugh together about their lame, unfunny, and vulgar little joke that aired on Channel One.

The International KVN Union declined to defend the performers. “We won’t be making any statements and there will be no official comment,” a spokesperson told the outlet Podyom. “The team isn’t authorized to speak on this either.” Channel One, the network that aired the episode, also declined to comment.

However, one of the show’s judges, Valdis Pelšs, spoke out in support of the team. “What’s Mr. Rogozin’s problem — an overly sensitive sense of humor? Everyone has their own tastes. If he didn’t like the joke, he can just say so,” he told Podyom. “I’d guess his comment about sending the guys to war was a kind of joke, too. The question is how funny it was. Personally, I didn’t find it funny.”

Even some pro-government commentators criticized Rogozin. Marina Akhmedova, head of the pro-Kremlin outlet Regnum, wrote on Telegram: “The front line as punishment — again? So now every person in power can threaten conscription and deployment for telling a joke, or for voicing a fair criticism or ironic remarks?”

Stalina Gurevich, a lawyer and regular guest on the far-right Orthodox network Tsargrad TV, accused Rogozin of “discrediting our country over personal grudges and acting as if the law doesn’t apply to certain senators.”

Media personality and politician Ksenia Sobchak also weighed in, suggesting that Rogozin “flex his muscles somewhere else.” She noted that KVN is pre-recorded and edited, meaning “even the higher-ups think it’s okay to laugh sometimes.”

Rogozin holds two doctoral degrees, neither of them related to space. In 1999, he received a Ph.D. from Moscow State University with a dissertation on “National Security Issues for Russia at the Turn of the 21st Century.” In 2016, he earned a doctorate in technical sciences at the Kuznetsov Naval Academy, with a dissertation focused on “weapons theory, military-technical policy, and armaments systems.”

He served as Roscosmos director from 2018 until July 2022, a tenure marked by public spats with Elon Musk and, following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, by hostile posts against NASA and the European Space Agency after they severed ties with Russia. After leaving Roscosmos, Rogozin became heavily involved in the war, forming a military advisory group called Tsar’s Wolves, which provides support to Russian forces in Ukraine’s occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions. In 2023, he was appointed senator from the occupied Zaporizhzhia region.

After the media reported on his threat to the comedians, Rogozin made another Telegram post about the scandal. “I want to reassure members of the liberal public, lawyer Gurevich, sympathetic bloggers, and the rest of the agitated draft-dodging crowd: those two KVN jokers are of no interest to us whatsoever, given their intellectual immaturity,” he wrote on Wednesday. “They might be suited to telling dumb jokes — but not to defending the Motherland.”