The article is devoted to the study of the problem of continuity between images, motives, poetic clichés of Russian as well as Jewish folk cultures and components of the laughter discourse of the Soviet era. Genre patterns (procession, round dance, game, street song, everyday wit), chronotope (Pesach / Easter / May day), archetype (a dying and resurrecting hero), ethnical and social stereotypes (“aliens”), ritual objects (carnival carriage; matzo vs Easter baking), grotesque rhymes (“matzo – lamza-dritsa”) are analyzed on the basis of the popular city song “Tram No. 9”, ditties, memoirs, satirical wall newspapers. Those elements of the traditional laughter culture of the Slavs and Jews had been actively interacted in the urban environment at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, was exploited by the Soviet carnivals of the 1920s–1930s, and remained in Russian folklore of the second half of the 20th century. The study demonstrates that the scriptwriters and actors of the Soviet carnivals borrowed some of the brightest and at the same time common elements of folk laughter culture, which formed extremely labile semantic ties outside the traditional calendar and everyday contexts changing their content in agreement with the political situation. At the same time, the basic techniques and bottom semantics of the folk comic remain unchanged.