This paper examines official court prose and its parodies in late-medieval Egypt. Its focus is the taqlid, the official document of investiture presented by court writers to an ascendant leader or administrator. I argue that the taqlid, with its literary techniques for uniting the court, both voiced and sublimated Egypt’s political anxieties during the volatile period of the Crusades. Its dual character--ranging from triumphalist to deeply equivocal--made it a prime target for parody among authors on the fringes of the elite political class. Modern scholarship has labeled taqlid parodies as Post-Classical literature, marking a fractured court system and a cultural hierarchy that no longer held. This paper insists that the goals of taqlid and its humorous adaptations are in fact largely the same: they valorize Islamic history and "high" Arabic against a backdrop of political uncertainty. As the Fatimid caliphate dissolved and successive military regimes from Asia Minor seized control of the empire, the taqlid ceremony assumed new ideological functions in administration and poetics. From Salah al-Din’s investiture to the rise of the Mamluks, governments placed enormous pressure upon writers and the taqlid form itself to promote certain leaders among diverse regional audiences and to win support for the expensive, controversial efforts of anti-Crusade. The rigors of administration found an aesthetic language of apologia that resonated throughout the eastern Mediterranean, but at the same time the taqlid became seen as foundering in cliche. Irreverent authors such as the puppeteer-dramatist Ibn Daniyal emphasized the pomp of investiture as a cynical exploitation of poetic language but, crucially, their works reaffirmed the privilege of poetry. Rather than spurning established authority altogether, the humorous text divided the question of ideology, between language and ritual. The very category of Post-Classical Arabic requires critical adjustment, so that we might identify its techniques for reifying elements of tradition even as it ridicules the courtly performances in which that tradition took shape.