While the text often provided a streamlined narrative backbone to the comical performance, it was nonverbalized imagery that effectively undermined the ideological predictability of narrative canons,producing a situation of laughable incongruence. To put it differently: by focusing on the visual aspects of Soviet laughter, the cluster shows that the source of the Soviet comic was not so much intra-textual, as in traditional comedy, but 
inter-medial. It was the counterpoint of different performative media—textual versus visual, vocal versus gestural—that unleashed an important affective discharge, which might or might not have been intended in the original text.