On December 3rd, 1994, Saïd Mekbel, a writer lauded as one of Algeria’s greatest contemporary journalists, was murdered while at lunch with a colleague in a pizzeria near downtown Algiers. He was killed by a young man who reportedly acted on the orders of one of the armed organizations then launching a revolt against the state. Over the course of the country’s civil conflict of the 1990s, oftentimes unknown agents kidnapped or killed approximately 105 media workers for reasons as equally murky as the attackers’ identities. Mekbel himself was the author of a popular editorial column named “Mesmar J’ha,” the Nail of J’ha, a common trickster in Middle Eastern and North African folklore. Through this work that the editorialist had carried on since 1990, Mekbel used irony and satire to express his distaste for the then ongoing conflict and the raw emotional experience of losing numerous colleagues and friends. As Mekbel published his editorial pieces on a day-to-day basis in the widely-read Le Matin newspaper, this source offers historians a unique pathway to comprehending how Mekbel’s emotions and emotional appeals to readers fluctuated in rhythm with events. Scholars have typically associated the actions of Algerian men with humiliation and anger during this period. The present piece underscores one example of a member of the Algerian civilian majority who rejected violence during the “Dark Decade” and argues that he embraced a range of emotions beyond anger, namely a mournful irony, to mobilize his followers into common responses to the deteriorating security situation unfolding around them. This article will highlight the agency of past actors in employing emotions to carve out their own emotional communities (Rosenwein, 2002) and the multifaceted and multidirectional consequences these efforts could have in the midst of one of the deadliest conflicts of the late 20th century. To accomplish these goals, I rely upon a close reading of dozens of Mekbel’s writings from the height of Algeria’s civil conflict along with humor and social mobilization theory and literature from the region on grief and mourning. This piece will be of interest to historians and other students of emotion in MENA seeking to better understand how past actors can seek to simultaneously appeal to, reflect, and influence emotional communities during a moment of stark political division.