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The Subversive Power of Humor as a Form of Dissent after the Arabic Spring
Abstract
In his web-based episodes of "Big Brother", published for four seasons by the online newspaper ‘MadaMasr’, Egyptian cartoonist, screen write, comedian and journalist Mohamed Andeel provides a scathing humorous analysis of serious, and often bleak, issues in the Egyptian society. Dark humor and sharp satire characterize the series of "Big Brother", which sheds light on many ills in post-2011 Egypt and bitterly satirizes how citizens are brain-washed through pro-regime media to stereotype and negatively frame key issues that are going on in the Egyptian society. Andeel’s immensely followed Facebook page reads: “Andeel - with an Alif.” This study will present a socio-semiotic multimodal analysis of a number of Andeel’s videos in the “Big Brother” series. The videos are seen as dynamic texts that create a channel to communicate angry responses towards current policies in Egypt through hard-hitting humor as a discursive practice. To harness the complex implications of this rich recourse, a socio-semiotic and multimodal methodology will be followed to account for the rhetoric of digital textual complexities of the videos (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996, 2001, 2006; Baldry 2000; O’Halloran 2004; O’Halloran and Smith 2011). The channel of expression here is satire in which the character that Andeel plays in the videos shares his vision of the solution to Egypt (and the world’s) problems through a harsh pseudo-logic. The subversive power of humor is used to express anger and frustration. The humor in Andeel’s case arises from a reversal of evaluation: inefficiency becomes a good thing and injustices become the norm. It is “an overly aggressive type of irony with clearer markers/cues and a clear target” (Attardo 2000:795). The multi-modal sociolinguistic analysis in this study aims to show how satire in Andeel’s videos is also a means of persuasion. A person, behavior or a state of affairs is implicitly criticized and therefore evaluated unfavorably using subversive humor as a vehicle in the hope of persuading the audience that something has to change. The critical sociolinguistic appraisal of the discursive environment in this study emphasizes the role of this type of web-based mediation in effecting social change through maintaining sustainable social relationships with the audience. Through the qualitative analysis of data, the study highlights the two facts that the language-media-society equation has become particularly prominent and powerful through the multimodality of the digital media; and that contemporary social changes are linguistically inflected in profound and complex ways.
Discipline
Linguistics
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
None