A joke with totalitarian

Shahin Amin

Laiko, this unruly Cold War comedy leaves political correctness in the dust. In early 1957, the Soviet Union decides to give Hungary the honor of providing the first cosmonaut to orbit in space. The most suitable candidate turns out to be Lajos Serbán, known to all as Lajkó who is obsessed with space flight since childhood. Lajkó gets his wish when his torturers, Russian agents, reveal he has high tolerance for pain. Sent to the space program, he discovers that he and his fellow astronaut trainees, including Helga, an ex-Nazi who hates gypsies, were selected because they are expendable. No test candidate has survived the ordeal so far. Lajkó plans to beat the odds with the help of his mother’s ghost up in the sky, but the Russians have other plans for the official honor of first man in space. Laiko pokes fun at Yuri Gagarin’s journey into our space.From scatological humor (a rocket-propelled outhouse blasting off with Lajkó’s unlucky mother in driver’s seat, so to speak) to jokes and black humor (bushy-eyebrowed Leonid Brezhnev on the make amid a pack of elderly generals and a hick-town commissar), this is a knee- slapper with a bitter satirical undercurrent.