Czech humour is something we can ‘all learn from’, says creator behind Just Czech Things
If you’re an Instagram user living in Prague, you may have scrolled past content by the account Just Czech Things, a profile with over 65k followers run by 32-year-old Arthur Kornienko. Originally from Russia, Kornienko is often mistaken as a Prague or Czech local based on the memes he makes that take inspiration from Czech jokes and cultural commentary. During the day, Kornienko works in marketing, but after hours he puts on the hat of content creator Kornienko came by our studios to tell us more about the account, and his many sources of inspiration.
“I’m a humble meme-maker during the night and a normal person during the day. My name is Arthur, I’m 32-years-old and I’m actually not from Europe, some people think I’m from the Czech Republic or Europe, but I’m actually from far away originally, from Russia. I’ve been living in the Czech Republic for nine years now.”
What brought you to the Czech Republic originally?
“I came here to study, I ended up getting my masters and I wanted to stay on and work here.”
What about Czechia made you want to stay and eventually start a meme account?
“I felt like after two years of living here during my masters wasn’t enough time in the country, I wanted to get more of a sense of the country and see if I could get a job. I also studied in Zlin, a small city in Moravia, so I wanted to come to Prague and get a taste of the big city life. After my masters, I came to Prague and started working.
“As for my account, I’ve been passionate about content creation all my life, but I’ve always been very shy about it. I started the account in 2019, and by that time the blogger or influencer train had already departed, but I really wanted to do it still. So I said screw it, I’m still going to do it, and I started making content, and thankfully it really picked up.”
So much of your content takes these iconic Czech moments and contextualizes them for your followers. How do you get your inspiration for your content, and how do you ground yourself in Czech inside jokes and Czech cultural phenomena?
“When I stared this account, I wanted to have it as an expat humour account. Since I’m an expat living in the city, I wanted to make jokes for the English speakers here in the country. Of course the English speaking audience is bigger than the Czech one, so my goal was to package and export Czech humour and lifestyle, and the funny observations I’ve made here. At the very beginning a lot of my jokes were very Czech bound, they were for people who live here or have lived here long enough for foreigners to understand the jokes.
"I don’t want to make jokes only for people who live in the Czech Republic or Prague, I want to make it more international. I have it in my bio that I’m a ‘pro-bono Czech ambassador’, so I really want to export my humour and the culture world-wide. Right now, I’m in the process of making what I’m producing more accessible for everyone.”
"If you take a look at the content I’ve produced over the last year, I’m trying to lower the entrance barrier for my jokes. I don’t want to make jokes only for people who live in the Czech Republic or Prague, I want to make it more international. I have it in my bio that I’m a ‘pro-bono Czech ambassador’, so I really want to export my humour and the culture world-wide. Right now, I’m in the process of making what I’m producing more accessible for everyone.”
For me as a foreigner in Czechia, your account has been a useful tool to understand Czech culture and humour. There’s that reel about the weather you did featuring the clip of Czech skier Stanislav Řezáč where he speaks three different languages, that’s such an iconic joke amongst Czechs, and for me it helps to understand the humour and the inside jokes here a bit more. So what’s your process and how do you go about creating your content?
“That’s a great question, and that’s the corner stone problem of every creative person. At the very beginning, when I had around 30k followers, I monitored the news a lot and looked at other memes for inspiration, and I still do this. But after the account picked up a bit I started getting a lot of feedback from my audience, both positive and negative, and I welcome both.
"My biggest inspiration is my audience, because what I produce is for them. But sometimes I also just do my research, and stay on the ‘hype-wave’ to see what’s trending and go with this kind of content. It can be difficult to differentiate my leisure Tik Tok time and Instagram time versus my inspirational one. My personal feed is super tailored to me, and doesn’t have anything to do with my Czech account, but when I do inspiration for my Czech account, its super specific to that kind of content. So at times it can be difficult to not lose the focus of what I’m doing, so it’s all about finding balance.”
You mentioned that you’re 32, but a lot of your followers are Gen Z, so how do you make sure you’re relating to the audience you’re trying to target?
“I can’t believe I’m at the age where people are asking me how I relate to young people! Zoomers are always coming up with new words, and every year it gets harder to keep up with the latest trends. So as every other adult, I google everything and watch trending reels and Tik Tok’s, but the feedback my audience provides is also very useful. The process of keeping up is hard, especially as you get older and have more responsibilities. But content wise, trends change so quickly, so you have to be constantly up to date, the world is changing so fast.”
Is it ever difficult to balance having your own personal life and career, and managing the social media life?
“I wouldn’t say it’s difficult, but it’s all about balance and pacing yourself. Every day I dedicate about an hour for inspiration of content creation, I just write it in the notes on my phone. I use that time to create content. But sometimes I feel exhausted, because after work you have a social life with friends, sports, and of course a normal job. So that’s why I do a lot of shorter content, and not full length videos, it’s just too time consuming.”
What’s interesting about your account is that you do really funny reels about how Czech men wear socks and sandals for example, but you also do ones about how Czechs hate being called Eastern European, it’s a nice balance of humorous topics but also socio-political ones. How do you strike that balance?
“I will start with the socks – obviously there are a certain number of things that people who know the Czech Republic can relate to, so I do jokes like these. But I also feel like if I exclusively do these jokes I’ll become a one trick pony, whose jokes revolve around certain topics. I think it’s important to push myself and change my content. Czechs being Central European versus Eastern European was a recent joke that I got the idea for through feedback from my followers.
"It’s not a problem to talk about politics or social stuff, but since I do it with humour, you have to strike a balance between funny and witty and provoking a bit where you stir up conversation."
"It’s not a problem to talk about politics or social stuff, but since I do it with humour, you have to strike a balance between funny and witty and provoking a bit where you stir up conversation. It’s difficult to strike this balance because you can either come off plain where you’re just stating facts – and where’s the fun in that? But you can also risk coming off as offensive or borderline insulting people, and you don’t want to do that.
"So with politics you need to find the balance, because you can get a lot of engagement when you post controversial topics, but it would mean people would be arguing more, and I don’t want my community to be arguing, I want them to be thriving and having healthy discussions. So I’m always in search of this balance, on one scale provoking stuff, and on the other hand interesting and engaging content.”
How do you see Czech humour, and how do you feel you’ve taken it on over the last nine years through starting this account?
"I really like Czech humour, Czechs can really take jokes and can even laugh about themselves even if someone else points something out, they’re usually okay with that and sometimes even exaggerate jokes even more."
“I can definitely say I have some experience with Czech humour! I really like Czech humour, Czechs can really take jokes and can even laugh about themselves even if someone else points something out, they’re usually okay with that and sometimes even exaggerate jokes even more. Czechs have a super chill attitude, and this is something we can all learn from, that we don’t have to take jokes too seriously.”
Do you have any other plans for content to do in the future, or are you just going through the archives of all the good Czech jokes?
“I want to step out of reels a bit and do some street interviews. I have some that I did in France a year ago, where I got French people to pronounce difficult Czech words, so that was fun and it was a really good experience, but it didn’t get as many views as my normal reels do. I want to step away from being just the ‘meme guy’ and move more towards being an observer and packaging those observations into interesting content.”
