The recent adaptation of Milan Kundera's TheUnbearable Lightness of Being prompts us to take a new look at this highly acclaimed, now rarely shown1969 film based on an earlier novel, The Joke. It was directed by Jaromil Jires, whose film The Cry helpedusher in the brilliant Czech new wave of the sixties. The Joke inadvertently marked the end of the newwave; a bitter comedy about the arbitrariness of life under a failed communism (Czech-style Stalinism ofthe fifties), it was made the more bitter by having been shot during the Prague Spring but released hereafter the chill of repression had returned in Czechoslovakia. Ludvik Jahn (played by Josef Somr, the DonJuan from Closely Watched Trains), Kundera's hapless hero, returns to the small town where he and otheryoung revolutionaries grew up to the tune of slogans like "Strength through Optimism"; and where, in amoment of unguarded humor, he wrote in a note to a particularly blue-nosed young lady, "Optimism is theopiate of mankind!" Turned in to the authorities by an ambitious Party member, he was incarcerated as atraitor and traded the rest of his youth for six years in a punishment camp. Now he plans to avenge himselfon the dolt who turned him in, with a plan to seduce the man's wife. Just how the joke turns back on Jahn isa measure of how drained of values personal life can become in a system (any system) that lacks both heartand humor.