“Those who would be against the triangle would be against everything beautiful and progressive that we've created.” This line, from the 1964 Slovak film Prípad Barnabáš Kos (The case of Barnabáš Kos) is representative of a type of bombastic declaration with which scholars of Eastern Europe socialist language are likely familiar. It spoke of progress in absolute terms. It captured the world through a Manichean lens. Above all, it promoted a banal musical instrument as a symbol for global revolution. Surely this was either a prerposterous exaggeration or high parody. The film's depiction of the rise of an inconsequential trianglist's rule over an orchestra was indeed a satirical review of the previous fifteen years of building a utopian future under the KSČ. The language of that period provided most of the film's comic material.

The lead character in the film is a rather ordinary, lazy, or absentminded trianglist. Kos's role in the orchestra seems gratuitous: in one early scene he walks calmly into an ongoing rehearsal, sits down, plays a note, follows the music some more, and then packs his case to depart. Kos is such an ordinary, if bumbling, comrade that he assumes it is a mistake when one day he receives a letter informing him that he has been promoted to director of the orchestra.