Ostensibly a duo of clowns were arrested in 1918 for mocking the Bolsheviks, and Lenin himself was a serious man. But comedy was permissible under Lenin's rule, and several significant satires as well as more quotidian comedies were produced before 1924.

There are several very early Soviet comedic films, though as many of them are lost it's hard to consider exactly what barbs they presented. At any rate, Chudotvorets was produced in 1922, while The Extraordinary Adventures of Mister West in the Bolsheviks' Land and The Adventures of Oktyabrina were produced shortly after Lenin's death. Mikhail Zoshchenko published satirical, and sometimes acerbic, feuilletons, often centered on shortages, anti-socialist behavior, and the absurdity of life in the earliest Soviet Union. By the late 1920s Zoshchenko was a household name, and only under Stalin did he face repression. And, rather remarkably, the commissar of education Lunacharsky even sought to write a joke book!

But when we turn to Stalin-era comedic films we do see a contrast between genuinely humorous moments and constructed ones: Circus, for example, is a wonderful Soviet propaganda film that purports to be a comedy, but is, at the very least, insincere (the film mocks American racial prejudice, rather than any flaws of the Soviet Union). As Iain Lauchlan notes, a character from Zamyatin's sci-fi utopia We claims ‘I simply can’t make jokes – because the default value of every joke is a lie.’ Lauchlan goes on to say that "The repression of comedy in the Soviet Union became a deliberate policy in the wake of Stalin’s disastrous Collectivization campaign of 1929–32," which doesn't necessarily challenge Lenin's particular view of comedy as subversive, bourgeois, and so on, but in the 1920s comedy was at least permissible (and, rather significantly, Harpo Marx travelled the Soviet Union in 1934).

Lauchlan, Iain. "Laughter in the Dark: Humour under Stalin", in European Laughter, Perpignan UP, 2009.