Yakov Smirnoff is, according to his own description, a Russian-born American comedian.

Smirnoff, birth name Yakov Naumovich Pokhis, was born in a Jewish family in Odessa, Ukraine, at the time part of the Soviet Union. He has been an art teacher in Odessa, and continues to paint. He came to the U.S. in 1977 and became an American citizen on July 4, 1986. He was a roommate of comedian Andrew Dice Clay and has appeared in several motion pictures, such as Buckaroo Banzai and on television. Since 1992 he has been a fixture at Branson, Missouri.

The largest part of the humour of Yakov Smirnoff falls into two wide categories:

* Misunderstanding of American life and custom through the eyes of a new immigrant. For instance, reading employment announcements of "Part-Time Woman Wanted": "What a country! Even transvestites can get work". Upon being offered barman on a "graveyard shift", the remark "A bar in a cemetery! What a country! Last call? During Happy Hour the place must be dead."

* Bizarre comparisons between America and Russia. "We have no gay people in Russia — there are homosexuals but they are not allowed to be gay about it. The punishment is seven years locked in prison with other men and there is a three year waiting list for that."

Subsequently, "In Russia" was replaced with "In Soviet Russia" in many of these jokes.

Yakov Smirnoff's legacy is the "In Soviet Russia" jokes, which frequently appear in many online communities, in particular Slashdot. The general form of the Soviet Russia joke is that the subject and objects of a statement are reversed, and the preposition: "In Soviet Russia" or something equivalent, is added.

However, the original context of the "In Soviet Russia" jokes have been somewhat lost. The original joke was, "In California, you can always find a party. In Soviet Russia, the Party can always find you!" or "In America, you watch television. In Soviet Russia, television watches you!" The implication is that the latter use of the noun "party" implies the Communist Party, and refers to pervasiveness of the Communist party in Soviet Russia. Thus, for a joke to have the same intent as the original, the latter part should be both different from the former part of the joke and describe a characteristic of Soviet Russia.

It is also worth noting that at the peak of Smirnoff's celebrity in the mid-1980s, he did not say "Soviet Russia" — he said "Russia," as the Soviet Union had been around since 1917, was still extant, and showed no signs of going anywhere any time soon. Smirnoff added the "Soviet" qualifier after the fall of the USSR, long after his fame had faded, to specify that he was referring to the communist regime and not the present state.

In a Family Guy episode, Peter Griffin plays around with his car's navigation system, and turns it to "Yakov Smirnoff Mode". The navigation system says, "In Soviet Russia, car drives you!". Later in that episode, it says, "Turn right at fork in road. In Soviet Russia, road forks you!" (The comment made by Peter Griffin: "Boy, did that get old fast.")

In an episode of King of the Hill titled The Bluegrass Is Always Greener in which they go to Branson for a bluegrass festival, Bobby sells a Soviet Russia joke to Yakov.

In the eighth season of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Crow T. Robot invited Yakov Smirnoff to lecture on the film Jack Frost, a Russo-Finnish co-production. Predictably, Smirnoff's "lecture" degenerated into a sequence of unrelated "In Soviet Russia" jokes: "In your country, you watch movie The Rock. In our country, we break rock in gulag." (Smirnoff was actually played by a member of the MST3K production team.)

There are also instances of this joke appearing on the television shows The Simpsons (DABF09, "The Old Man and the Key") and Futurama.

KGB-FM is a San Diego, California radio station that uses the fact that its call letters are the same as the KGB (the Soviet Secret Police and Intelligence Agency) as a promotional gimmick. Often times, on-air announcements are made in an ominous monotone with a Russian accent.

One day while Smirnoff (who years earlier had defected from the Soviet Union) was driving in the San Diego area, he tuned his car radio to KGB-FM and he heard, "This is KGB. We know where you are." Hearing this surprised and scared him so much that he nearly became involved in a motor vehicle accident.

Smirnoff received U.S. citizenship at Ellis Island on July 4, 1986, and ever since then the Statue of Liberty has been featured often in his art. On the night of the September 11, 2001 attacks he started a painting inspired by his feelings about the event, and composed around the Statue of Liberty. Just prior to the first anniversary of the attacks, he paid $100,000 of his own money to have his painting turned into a gigantic (200 feet × 135 feet, or 61 m × 41 m) mural. The mural is a pointillist piece, using one brushstroke for each victim of the attacks. Sixty volunteers from the Sheet Metal Workers' Union then erected the mural on a damaged skyscraper overlooking the ruins of the World Trade Center. The mural remained up until November 2003, when it had to be removed due to storm damage.