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The New York Times

MOSCOW — It is not, from a purely technical standpoint, impossible to make fun of Vladimir V. Putin. His head is shaped a bit like a light bulb, with eyes that are heavy-lidded, as if to convey that he has just been reading your dossier. He has a needle nose, a prizefighter’s swagger and a fondness for posing shirtless. If all else fails, there is always the matter of height.

But caricatures of the Russian prime minister long ago vanished from state-controlled television. Ten years ago, the creators of the show “Kukly” came under such pressure from the Kremlin to retire their grotesque puppet of Mr. Putin that they responded, rather sardonically, by depicting him as a burning bush. The show was eventually canceled, and caution has prevailed since then. A talk show, “Real Politics,” included Mr. Putin in cartoons, but he was seen only from the neck down.

So it came as a surprise on Friday morning a few minutes after midnight when 3-D animations of Prime Minister Putin and President Dmitri A. Medvedev appeared on a New Year’s special on Channel One, Russia’s leading channel. The two figures performed a soft-shoe on Red Square, singing slightly raunchy doggerel about gas pipelines and Ukrainian debt. Hardly shocking stuff, except for this: Mr. Putin’s and Mr. Medvedev’s figures are being added to the regular cast of “Mult Lichnosti,” a biweekly show lampooning public figures, according to Konstantin L. Ernst, the channel’s director.

Gleb O. Pavlovsky, a political consultant who advises the Kremlin, said “the ability to joke is appearing” after a long pause that he attributed mostly to fear.

“So far, there is a very careful selection of targets,” said Mr. Pavlovsky, who hosted “Real Politics” for three years. “But I think nothing frightening will happen if that selection is lifted. Of course, it cannot happen overnight, because there is still a sense that the president should be above the fray, at a higher level, a level where he cannot be hit by a rotten apple.”

Mr. Ernst said he was exploring a sharper-edged humor because younger viewers demanded it. One of the channel’s recent success stories is “Projector Paris Hilton,” in which four comedians riff ironically on current events, à la Jon Stewart. He said he was not obliged to consult with the Kremlin while developing animations of Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev, but allowed that “we have to be careful.”

“One shouldn’t do anything insulting,” he said. “You can insult someone in show business, because a person like that is selling himself, and does not answer for anything else. Whereas the president and prime minister also represent the work they do. When you insult one of them, you insult many things at once. In any case, our authors have no desire to insult them.” He added, “There are some jokes that are unpleasant, but don’t injure your heart.” ...

It is unclear whether the ruling tandem will face real mockery on future episodes of “Mult Lichnosti.” But close observers of Russian television — and some inside it — say the boundaries of televised humor do seem to be expanding, if slowly. ...