Adventurous Vacation or Riff-Off?

I am in a mad end-of-semester grading crunch and haven't been on Vocal much this week, but this is something I couldn't resist sharing as another great example of dry and biting Russian humor.

In the linked reel, a Russian wife has shared the video of a "dream beach" with a crock in the shallow on the left and a shark - on the right. The large quote at the bottom of the reel is allegedly from her husband:

"Why go to Turkey? Let's fly to a new place, swim in the open ocean. We only live once!"

On the very top of the reel, the smaller font says, "Meanwhile, this is our vacation shoreline."

What makes this an example of Russian humor is that someone stitched the reel with ten funniest comments in the middle of the video, under the caption "when comments are a form of art." If you can't tolerate that annoying laughter, you don't need to watch the reel to the end as here is the translation of the comments:

They are wagging their tails, it means they are friendly.

And why aren't you swimming? Is the water a little too cold?

But the beach is SO empty, so clean! Enjoy!

When your mother-in-law buys your vacation package.

"The final journey tour," courtesy of "Restful Peace" travel agency.

Contact zoo.

Sharks don't swim in dirty waters, so you definitely can swim there safely.

There's a lot of free space in between, you can go swim there.

Swim after sunset. When it's dark you can't see them and you won't be so scared.

Why are you making them wait?

I went to the comments under the stitched reel. The commenters tried to figure out where this coastline was, and the general agreement was Australia, where every living thing seems to be dead-set on killing humans. I also found some other gems there:

Where is this, exactly? I want to send my ex-wife and her mother there, as a divorce settlement gift.

It's a buffet for wild sea life.

Did you buy a one-way ticket, I hope?

When YOU are the seafood.

Your girlfriends are already swimming, why are you not in the water?

When you don't know you are the dinner item on the all-inclusive travel package menu.

If you swim in the middle, will the crock still eat the shark?

When both the crock and the shark are set on targets other than each other.

The last two commenters are referring to the viral video of sharks fighting for territory with a crocodile in Queensland, Australia. When I tracked that video to an original TikTok reel by an Auzzie fisherman Vincent Bates (posted on March 31, 2023 and as of May 8, 2025 collected an impressive 12.9 million views), I realized that the "Russian wife"'s reel was not original at all, but a humorous interpretation of the part of this video. So the best comments video I just translated for you is a stitch of a stitch.

What a world of social media we humans are living in: someone posted quite an interesting original video capturing wild ocean life, someone else repurposed it with a humorous commentary on married life in a different language, and then someone else got the best biting comments to the second reel and posted it for entertainment. And now I translated it and wrote a story here on Vocal. The reel I laughed at so much in my FB feed is actually a tertiary source, second-hand interpretation of Vincent Bates' original video.

It's kinda sad because the original has great educational value, in my opinion, but we are living in the world of short and funny reels and soundbites. I wonder how many of those commenters actually researched the video and figured out where it came from. By the way, Bates has another video, recently added in March, of sharks and crocodiles again, but it's a little shakier and clearly is designed for entertainment, with the music and all. His whole channel is a rabbit hole I could spend hours on, but I need to go back to grading. Until next story!