This paper explores the reception of the eighth-century naqaid (lampoon) poetry of Jarir and al-Farazdaq. The paper proposes a new reading of the naqaid by examining original manuscripts of this poetry together with secondary sources (akhbar) that range from near contemporaneous with the poets to ca. two centuries after their deaths. These akhbar give us information not only about Jarir and al-Farazdaq’s performances, but provide insight into the akhbar recorders themselves in the recounting of this poetry. I show that the recorders of these akhbar in recounting Jarir and al-Farazdaq’s poetry were in fact a type of performers themselves, reperforming this poetry in a sense as they committed it to paper. In doing so, these recorders appropriated the voice of Jarir and al-Farazdaq, incorporating passages of the poets’ highly comedic poetry into their own accounts, displaying Jarir and al-Farazdaq’s skillfully crafted passages in passages of their own. By doing so the recorders linked the poetry of Jarir and al-Farazdaq to their own writings, thus connecting the poets in a way to themselves. I divide the paper into two parts. In the first I conduct a close reading of select passages from Jarir and al-Farazdaq’s naqaid. In the second part I examine akhbar sources that comment on some aspect of Jarir and al-Farazdaq’s naqaid, including the poetry itself, the venue of its performance, and the relationship of the audience to it. This approach is the first to suggest that recorders and preservers of Jarir and al-Farazdaq’s poetry were themselves a type of performer, appropriating the poets’ voice in their own reperformance of this poetry. By exploring the naqaid alongside comments about it found in the akhbar, my thesis challenges conventional interpretation. The result is a new picture of eighth-century Arabic lampoon poetry as a dynamic genre, not only surviving, but thriving over centuries, as it was performed and reperformed over time.