The International Day of KVN
KVN (Russian: КВН, an abbreviation of Клуб Весёлых и Находчивых, Klub Vesyólykh i Nakhódchivykh or Ka-Ve-En, "Club of the Funny and Inventive") is a Russian humour TV show and competition where teams (usually college students) compete by giving funny answers to questions and showing prepared sketches. The programme was first aired by the First Soviet Channel on November 8, 1961. Eleven years later, in 1972, when few programmes were being broadcast live, Soviet censors found the students' impromptu jokes offensive and anti-Soviet and banned KVN. The show was revived fourteen years later during the Perestroika era in 1986, with Aleksandr Maslykov as its host. It is one of the longest-running TV programmes on Russian Television. It also has its own holiday on November 8, the birthday of the game, which KVN players celebrate every year since it was announced and widely celebrated for the first time in 2001.
Today Oleg Evgenyevich Menshikov (8 November 1960) was born, Russian film and theatre actor, singer and director. He started his film career in the early 1980s playing in the comedy Pokrovskie vorota and in Nikita Mikhalkov's Rodnya. In 1993, Menshikov collaborated again with Mikhalkov in Burnt by the Sun. The film won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Later Menshikov played the hero of Mikhalkov's 1998 The Barber of Siberia, appeared as Erast Fandorin in the 2005 film The Councillor of State and as Ostap Bender in The Little Golden Calf.
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