Can Islam be funny? Responding to Talal Asad’s famous proposal to approach Islam as a “discursive tradition” anchored by a canon of sacred texts, a number of scholars have instead proposed an emphasis on fun, play, or more generally the ambiguity of “everyday life” in Muslim societies (Deeb and Harb 2013; Schielke 2012). But humor and satire have rarely been examined as speech acts of religious elites, even though they might offer “flashes” of political possibility within the constraints of a seemingly overdetermined discourse (Benjamin 1968; Navaro-Yashin 2002). In this paper, I consider the role of humor and satire among a particularly “serious” cohort of Muslim scholars in Morocco, specialists in the discipline of the qira’at. Study of the qira’at, the seven canonical vocal renderings of the Qur’an, has been on the rise in Morocco, thanks to a broader, state-driven “recitational revival” (sahwa tajwidiyya). I build my analysis off of two contrasting ethnographic scenes. First, students’ sharing and collective audition of YouTube videos featuring performative mistakes by older, well-known recitation specialists; and second, one qira’at teacher’s reference to satirical poetry as a meta-commentary on students’ desire to leave a class session to pray. Interestingly, the first scenario occurred in a shared apartment, a relatively private setting free from the type of authoritative oversight common in the classroom setting. But while humorous responses helped emphasize clear and shared understandings of “correct” performance in the first scenario, the teacher’s discourse in the second left the question of correct ritual practice open. Engaging this tension, I argue that such humorous exchanges among scholarly elites are key sites for what Shahab Ahmed calls the explorative dimensions of Islamic tradition-making (Ahmad 2015; cf. Alatas 2019), something ethnographers may miss by focusing exclusively on “everyday” Muslims. Here, clear interpretations do not necessarily emerge where authority figures are most “present,” nor is satire strictly a weapon of the weak for subtly contesting political power. Rather, authority figures themselves might leverage humor to break preconceptions about Islamic orthopraxy and open up new interpretive possibilities with which adepts must contend, in this case advancing their pedagogical transformation into a transgenerational class of elite scholars known as “The People of the Qur’an” (ahl al-Qur’an).