25. East Germans were famous for their satirical jokes
To cope with being oppressed by such a miserable dictatorship, East Germans turned to humor. ‘How can you use a banana as a compass?’, goes one common joke. ‘Place a banana on the Berlin Wall, and the bitten end will point East!’ But telling, or even laughing at, political jokes could land you in prison for 4 years. The last sentence for making jokes saw 3 engineers imprisoned for chuckling together at breakfast. West Germany’s intelligence service even launched Operation GDR Joke, which collected and analyzed East German jokes for wider implications.