Jires' film The First Cry (1963) helped usher in the Czechoslovak new wave; The Joke inadvertently marked its end. A bitter comedy about the arbitrariness of life under a failed communism (Czech-style Stalinism of the fifties), it was made all the more so by having been shot during the Prague Spring but released here after the chill of repression had returned in Czechoslovakia. Milan Kundera's hapless hero Ludvik Jahn (played by Josef Somr, the Don Juan of Closely Watched Trains) returns to the small town where he and other young revolutionaries grew up with slogans like "Strength Through Optimism" and where, in a moment of unguarded humor, he wrote in a teasing note to a particularly blue-nosed young lady, "Optimism is the opiate of mankind!" Turned in to the authorities by an ambitious Party member, he was incarcerated as a traitor and traded the rest of his youth for six years in a punishment camp. Now he plans to avenge himself on the dolt who turned him in by seducing the man's wife. Just how the joke turns back on Jahn is a measure of how drained of values personal life can become in a system (any system) that lacks both heart and humor.