In my contribution to this panel, I will examine how Egyptian public figures under Anwar Sadat (r. 1970-1981) and, later, Hosni Mubarak (r. 1981-2011), actively harnessed the state-controlled Egyptian press to promote and popularize family planning as a solution to overpopulation. As I will demonstrate through a close reading of political cartoons in national periodicals, however, the same state-controlled medium also undermined these top-down efforts by making a mockery of family planning, in effect transforming overpopulation, a major problem, into a “comedic crisis,” something to be remedied, on the one hand, and ridiculed, on the other. In charting the making of this comedic crisis in Egypt, this talk will break new ground in discussions of media, popular culture, and archives in Middle East studies by complicating the idea of state-controlled media, demonstrating the power of popular culture to enhance existing histories, and presenting the kinds of alternative narratives that may be crafted by historians in the absence of national archives. I will begin by exploring how state employees, social service workers, and journalists collectively extolled the merits of family planning and encouraged citizens to actively embrace it in popular periodicals, before shifting to the drawings of several illustrators who directly undercut this media campaign by publicly lampooning family planning. As will become clear, gravity and levity collided in the case of Egypt’s population politics, a history of which raises broader questions regarding the study of popular culture and its potential to radically enrich the writing of Middle East history.