‘If we exhibited all the Balkan jokes, we wouldn’t have opened’: a trip to Slovenia’s Bullshit Museum — SkimNews
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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 drawn from a collection of about 25,000 he amassed over the years.
- The museum presents itself as home to 'Balkan' humor but primarily showcases joke culture from the former Yugoslavia, opening with a poster reading 'A fool is a fool in both the Cyrillic and the Latin alphabets' displayed in both scripts.
- Kokelj admitted he deliberately avoided politically loaded jokes about religion, ethnicity, and national symbols: 'If we were to exhibit all the truly "Balkan" jokes, we likely wouldn't have opened.'
- The selection steers clear of ethnic stereotypes but includes a meta-joke about Slovenes distancing themselves as the 'most elegant' and 'European' of the region through innocent euphemistic curses like 'three hundred hairy bears.'
- Rakija, the Balkan fruit brandy, is served to visitors at the entrance and described in one exhibit as 'the first aid of every Balkan household,' tied to the museum's central word 'yebiga' ('fuck it').
- The armed conflicts of the 1990s Yugoslav dissolution appear only indirectly, through adapted wordplay like 'Lepa jela lepo goje' ('Fine food fattens you up well'), a riff on the title of the controversial 1996 Serbian drama 'Lepa Sela Lepo Gore.'
Why it matters: The museum's deliberate omission of ethnic and political jokes — with Kokelj saying they 'wouldn't have opened' otherwise — reveals how the Balkan region's wartime legacy still constrains public expression, even in spaces built around humor. By centering 'yebiga' and everyday absurdities instead, the exhibition reframes a shared post-Yugoslav identity around coping rather than conflict.
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