Unlike most, Beavis and Butt-head are not offended or ashamed when they are told they have "white privilege." They are excited—but things quickly go awry.

In 1937, Boris Orman was working at a bakery in Russia when he shared a joke over tea with his colleague.

"Stalin was out swimming, but he began to drown. A peasant who was passing by jumped in and pulled him safely to shore," the joke went, according to British writer Jonathan Waterlow. "Stalin asked the peasant what he would like as a reward. Realising whom he had saved, the peasant cried out: 'Nothing! Just please don't tell anyone I saved you!'"

The joke is hardly the funniest ever told, but Orman was nevertheless one of countless Russians in the Soviet Union who received a 10-year stint in a labor camp for uttering the jibe. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, got off a bit easier. He received a mere eight-year sentence in the Gulag after Soviet authorities intercepted a letter he wrote to a friend in 1945 that made a crack about Stalin and criticized the Soviet system.