Soviet-Era Joke About Long Line To Shoot Putin

Dialogue

A Russian man is in line at the gas station. "I've had enough," he says to his wife. "You take the wheel, I'm going to shoot Putin."

After two hours he returns and gets back behind the wheel.

His wife asks him, "Did you shoot him?"

And he replies, "No, the line to shoot Putin is longer than this one!"

Text content

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10:54 AM · Jul 8, 2026 · 1.2M Views

Overview

The meme has a dark humor joke in white text on a black background at the top, paired with a photograph below. The joke follows a classic Soviet joke format: a Russian man waiting in a long gas station line tells his wife he is fed up and will go shoot Putin instead. He returns two hours later and gets back in the car, and when his wife asks if he succeeded, he replies that the line to shoot Putin was even longer than the gas station line. The accompanying photo shows a man standing next to his car on a road, facing an extremely long queue of cars stretching far into the distance, visually emphasizing the absurdly long lines referenced in the joke's punchline about widespread public frustration.

Origin notes

This meme is sourced from 9Gag's RSS feed, originally posted on July 8, 2026, with 1.2 million views at the time of capture. It adapts the classic Soviet-era dark humor joke trope that jokes about the ubiquitous experience of extremely long lines for goods and services in the Soviet Union, recontextualized for modern Russian political commentary, paired with a real traffic jam photograph to make the punchline more vivid.