By Jacob Harper

Something’s different about Yakov Smirnoff today. At a Saturday morning show in his eponymous theater, he’s not telling jokes about Russia or using catchphrases or really doing anything that you expect to see at a Yakov “What a Country!” Smirnoff show. In the second half of the variety act, Yakov, clad in a white lab coat, gives the mostly seniors crowd relationship advice, using a magnet to demonstrate the rules of attraction and repulsion.

It turns out that Yakov had recently gone through a rough divorce, and while there are a few cursory jabs at the differences between men and women, Yakov is being incredibly earnest in his lecture… Wait, Yakov is giving a lecture? Here’s a comedian, changing the figurative horse midstream and giving advice on making relationships work. Yakov asks long-married couples in the audience what their secret is and what young people can learn from them. He is probing with somber questions and ideals. He wants to know “what did I do wrong, and why do relationships go wrong for so many people? Why weren’t jokes enough to make it work? And what can we do to fix this great problem?” It’s a strange new show, one that reveals a more intimate, odder side of the man. He seems so alien when juxtaposed with the smiling, grateful immigrant we know so well, this man who wears his heart on his sleeve when talking about his love of America. In a lot of ways, he is still doing the same thing: trying to make people understand.

Yakov has been operating a steadily growing theatre in Branson since 1991, and while the Russian jokes are still his bread and butter, including a few recycled straight from his early stand-up, the show has taken on a much more solemn tone. In the schmaltz of Branson, it sticks out as an honest attempt to use the forum to delve deeper. The first half of the Yakov show is pretty typical: dance numbers, songs, topical jokes about Hillary Clinton and Paris Hilton. But after intermission, it gets serious.

Yakov is incredibly candid about his divorce, as he is about several facets of his life: his unwavering, unabashed patriotism, his political attitudes and his belief in positivity. While comedians are often fond of using themselves as jumping off points in their routines, Yakov’s discussions about the breakup of his marriage dominate his attempts to understand who he is and what he’s become.

The show concludes with a pilot that Yakov is working on, with its first episode taking place on Missouri State’s campus. Yakov has a theory that relationships work best when one person is the “performer” and one person is the “audience;” ergo, if one person likes to drive the car, the other person should be supportive of that and ride in the passenger seat. We are introduced to a couple put together because they match up on every front except that neither one of them can cook. So a date is set up where they learn to cook together. The pilot is rough but has some promise. The focus is largely on practical skills. Laughter can keep us together, but there’s more to it than just that.

In talking to Yakov, it becomes clear as to why he is so unsure about how his message is perceived. This is a comedian who has gotten some rough treatment from the press, notably during his departure from Hollywood in the early ’90s, around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Yakov does have a message, and he knows how that message can get garbled in translation. He’s a comedian, but he is also a businessman who is very sure about what he wants to say and how he wants to be perceived. The pilot is merely a larger vehicle for that.

When I meet Yakov backstage immediately following the show, he shakes hands and smiles a tired smile, one of a man who does 200 shows a year, paints and still finds time to get a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. I assume he’s got an awful lot of things on his mind, like possibly a nap. Turns out there’s no time: They’ll be editing the pilot from now until the night gig. He turns to an assistant and discusses the pilot he is working on. This particular show concluded with a rough cut of the pilot, and utilizing a free test audience, he is putting the responses to work. “It’s good, but everything that wasn’t funny? Cut it,” he says. The funny business is still business, after all. He loosens his tie and looks resigned. “How do you want to do this, Jacob? Do you want funny? Do you want deep?” he asks. It’s an odd way to start an interview, but then again, Yakov is an idiosyncratic subject.

In his office, Yakov kicks off his shoes and curls up on the couch. We discuss his work leading up to his show right now: his rise, fall and rise.

In the long annals of typecast one-joke wonders, Yakov has often been thrown in, a little unfairly, with the likes of Pauly Shore and Carrot Top: one joke comedians whose fleeting fancy had long lost favor with America at large. In Yakov’s case, his original claim to fame is the Russian Reversal: for example, “In America, you catch a cold, but in Russia, cold catches you!” It’s what made him a moderate star in the ’80s, and it is how a lot of people liked to think he was still operating.

“My comedy normally reflects what I’m going through in my normal life,” Yakov says. “At first, I talked about moving to America, then getting married, then having kids. A logical part of the American dream. Then two people who had no major vices just kind of drifted apart. It was very disturbing to me because I believed that once I had committed to marriage it would be forever.” (Yakov told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2006 that he’s on good terms with his ex-wife, Linda, and their two children, Natasha and Alexander.)

Yakov has performed a one-man show on Broadway similar to the new direction he’s taking. Called As Long as We Both Shall Laugh, the show tackled Yakov’s divorce and his bewilderment as to what went wrong. He has expanded it greatly in light of his growth from that.

“It’s not just ‘why did this happen to me;’ it is ‘why does this happen to so many people?’ I feel like I did everything by-the-book, and the book said you would live happily ever after, the end. But then I said, where’s the next page?”

It’s a question that he never fully answers, but perhaps that’s the point. “I like to be an entertainer, but I’m also a messenger,” he says. “So those things are difficult to face, but they have to be a part of the show. But not all the time—not at the Skinny Improv.” He’s referring to the Springfield improv comedy club where he went on stage that night. “I try to be balanced, and I think that’s what separates me from a lot of people here [in Branson],” he says. “I also try to bring a message in.”

That message is how we keep ourselves happy, and how we stay together. Yakov’s master’s degree is in a new branch of the field called positive psychology that focuses on mental well-being. A common criticism of psychology is that it focuses so much on mental illness that there is very little discussion of mental well-being. “When I went into school, I looked to see what studies had been done on the effects of laughter and happiness,” he says. “And there were none.”

This concerned Yakov greatly, and through mediums like his act and his pilot, he is exploring how couples work. When I point out that his test audience was largely composed of people who are old enough to be the grandparents of the pilot’s subjects, he is unfazed. “There is a lot of wisdom that can be gained from them,” he says. “And this is a rough cut. Maybe one day you can say, ‘I saw the pilot for America’s No. 1 show!’”

His optimism is infectious. It reminds me of the ever-positive, fish-out-of-water characters he portrayed in ’80s movies such as Moscow on the Hudson and shows such as Night Court. Except now, Yakov has been an American citizen for 20 years and a resident of the Ozarks for 16. He has new problems to tackle. The new territory is that of the established father and reconciling that nuclear-family optimism with the realities of divorce.

In a roundabout way, this permeates his attitudes towards everything he tackles in life. “We have our blind spots we have to check when we drive; this works the same way in life,” he explains.
He always viewed his relationship with his homeland in a similar matter. Now it is the relationship between men and women, and the family in general. This idea of the mythical family—the one that can work, that can be work—is of great appeal to Yakov. Yakov mentions that he is thinking of getting a dog, and when I bring up that I have two dogs—a brother and sister—he is intrigued. “I never thought about doing that,” he says. “How do they work together? Are boys or girls better?”

There’s still a familiar air to the comedy of Yakov Smirnoff. But even his signature material has become more serious. Yakov is still as patriotic as ever. There is less bashing of his country’s native Communism but more jabs at terrorism. While his comedy used to focus on the differences between the freedoms of America and the repression of the Soviet system, he has grown more and more attuned to the heartland, saying a thank-you to this country through his paintings. Cloying but sincere, his visual art is a saccharine answer to the more serious themes of his lectures. Adorning his theatre are several of his paintings, including a piece that was at Ground Zero for 18 months. When telling a story about how he personally bankrolled the project, Yakov gets teary-eyed. The colors are light and the themes easy and straightforward, but they are still part of Yakov as a whole; nothing here deviates from the message. There is a lightheartedness to the whole thing that is undeniable and unabashed.

His themes are the same, but the business has gotten serious. While on the surface Yakov is gladhanding and smiling, there is something underneath it all, a questioning uncertainty that belies the funny immigrant we all think we know. But Yakov has never apologized for what he has done and what he has become. He is still trying to make sense of how he got to be here today: American citizen, divorcee, father.

When I am being walked out of the theatre, I tell Yakov that I think people will see him for how light and funny he is in this story. “You’ll do what you want with it,” he says. He isn’t malevolent or spiteful, but rather tired and hopeful: He has a message, and he wears it with pride. While it can be mocked, misconstrued or misunderstood, he’s still out there, trying to make people understand him.