‘If we exhibited all the Balkan jokes, we wouldn’t have opened’: a trip to Slovenia’s Bullshit Museum
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- Borut Kokelj opened the Bullshit Museum in May on Ljubljana's main riverside promenade, filling five small rooms with mannequins, AI-generated images, and jokes centered on former Yugoslavia's humor culture.
- Kokelj has collected about 25,000 jokes from the region over the years and wears a T-shirt reading "What part of yebiga don't you understand?" — yebiga being loosely translated as "fuck it."
- The museum deliberately avoids jokes that mock specific ethnic groups, religions, or national symbols; Kokelj said exhibiting all truly "Balkan" jokes would have meant "we likely wouldn't have opened."
- Visitors are served rakija — Balkan fruit brandy — at the entrance, described in one exhibit as "the first aid of every Balkan household" and central to the philosophy of yebiga.
- The exhibition adapts the title of the controversial 1996 Serbian drama Lepa Sela Lepo Gore ("Pretty villages burn nicely") into the absurdist line Lepa jela lepo goje ("Fine food fattens you up well").
- The remaining jokes skew toward everyday absurdity and self-deprecation: "Life is neither nail polish nor acetone" and "Love is when you look like a sack of potatoes, but she sees you as fries."
Why it matters: In a region where Yugoslavia's violent 1990s breakup shattered any shared civic identity, the museum's curatorial choice to build a common cultural space without ethnic punchlines is itself a political act — and an admission that the "truly Balkan" jokes would have kept the doors shut, as founder Kokelj concedes.
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