Balkan humour finally has a museum of its own

There is now a museum in Slovenia dedicated entirely to bullshit, which feels less like a strange new cultural institution and more like someone finally admitting what museums have been collecting all along.

The BULLSHiT Museum opened in Ljubljana earlier this year as what the city’s tourism organisation calls the world’s first museum of Balkan humour. Inside are more than 500 jokes, visual gags, everyday absurdities and pieces of regional satire, drawn from a much larger archive reportedly containing tens of thousands of jokes collected by founder Borut Kokelj. The museum’s problem was apparently never finding enough material. It was deciding what could possibly fit inside.

This is a part of Europe with quite a lot to work with. The former Yugoslavia lived through socialism, economic crises, political upheaval, war, break-ups, bureaucracies and the particular experience of having several neighbouring countries disagree passionately about things while still understanding one another’s jokes. It would be odd if all of that produced a culture known mainly for tasteful restraint.

Instead, Balkan humour tends to be blunt, self-deprecating and very comfortable with things going badly. The joke is often that nothing works, everyone knows nothing works, and somehow everyone has found a cousin who can fix it by Thursday.

The museum turns that attitude into an exhibition. There are jokes about relationships, drinking, bureaucracy and the differences between neighbouring countries, alongside interactive installations and visitors’ notes that become part of the walls. Ljubljana Tourism describes the whole thing as a way into local sarcasm and everyday irony that you are unlikely to find in a history textbook, which is fair because history textbooks rarely tell you what people were saying at the bar afterwards.

The more interesting idea is that humour might actually be one of the better ways to understand a place.

Traditional museums tend to preserve the things a culture has decided are important enough to keep: paintings, uniforms, documents, ceremonial objects and very old chairs behind glass. Jokes usually disappear. They get told at dinner, repeated badly at work, adapted for whichever politician is currently annoying everyone and eventually replaced by another version.

They are also full of information. What a place finds ridiculous tells you who has power, what people are worried about, who they think they are and which subjects have become so familiar that the only reasonable response left is to laugh.

That is especially true of dark humour. The museum leans heavily on the idea that Balkan comedy developed not despite difficult history but alongside it, with laughter becoming a way to puncture authority, deal with uncertainty and make ordinary life feel slightly more manageable. The creators are careful around political and ethnic material, but the broader attitude remains intact: when the situation becomes absurd enough, sometimes the joke is the most accurate description available.

There is a useful Slovenian and Balkan expression sitting somewhere near the middle of all this: jebiga, or versions of it depending on where you are. There is no perfect English translation, but “fuck it”, “what can you do?” and “well, there we are then” all get reasonably close.

It is not quite defeat and not quite optimism. It is the thing you say when the bus has not arrived, the government has done something stupid, the plumbing has failed again and carrying on is the only remaining option. The Guardian’s visit to the museum described that spirit as central to what it is trying to capture.

This is where the Bullshit Museum stops being a funny tourist attraction and becomes a genuinely good idea. Most countries are very good at presenting the respectable version of themselves to visitors. Here is the palace, here is the national hero, here is the battle we won and here is an extremely serious plaque explaining why the building matters.

The jokes are messier. They show how people actually talk about themselves when nobody is writing the tourism brochure.

There is something appealing about giving that material a room of its own, especially now that so much humour disappears into feeds within a day. A meme can travel across half the world before breakfast and be completely dead by dinner. The old regional joke had to survive by being good enough for someone to remember and tell again.

The museum has made a business out of collecting that stuff before it disappears. Visitors can add their own notes, walk through hundreds of jokes and leave with a slightly less respectable understanding of Slovenia than the one they arrived with.

Which, for a museum called BULLSHiT, is probably the highest compliment available.