It was really both. The Anekdot lampooning the pretenses of state puffery, incompetence, corruption, and other shortcomings were a facet of Soviet society throughout the duration of the USSR and soon spread to the rest of the Eastern bloc. These jokes served multiple functions, like humor does in any society, whether as social lubrication or to adjust to realities. Reagan took a personal interest in these jokes and directed the State Department to have its Soviet envoys collect them. Paul Goble, a head of the Baltic desk at the State Department, claimed to have collected around 15000 of these jokes. Reagan used these jokes not only as a social lubricator of his own, but to portray the Soviet system as an alien imposition on the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Naturally, Reagan tailored the jokes to fit an American audience, skipping for example jokes that relied on wordplay, folklore, or ethnic jokes at the expense of national minorities (there were a good deal of antisemitic anekdoty).

In this, the American president was making the jokes more subversive than they originally were. Despite its reputation as a totalitarian police state, joke-telling was a very low-risk activity for the average Eastern bloc citizen to engage in. Jokes tended to become dangerous to the teller in specific circumstances and contexts. An ill-timed joke during the Stalinist purges, for example, might be used as evidence of wrecking or subversion. But the veritable flood of anekdoty throughout the Soviet period shows that humor was pervasive. Ironically, Soviet joke-telling was becoming less of a danger when Reagan popularized them in the US. Prosecutions and investigations for anti-Soviet behavior, which usually included a joke at the wrong place or time, dropped off markedly during the Brezhnev era, and when the aged premier was informed of the massive number of jokes about him, he was alleged to have shrugged that it meant the people loved him in their own manner. Gorbachev sometimes used humor in his speeches, although he was by most accounts not nearly as good a joke-teller as Reagan. So while Reagan touted these jokes as evidence of Soviet repression, the reality was humor was losing some of its bite as a politically transgressive act under Glasnost.