By all counts, the Battle of Algiers (1956-1957) was a deadly serious event in the history of the Cold War and global struggles for decolonization. Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film bearing the title of the event equally made a great impact on world audiences and continues to be shown widely as an artifact of the conflict and an example of documentary-style cinematography (Daulatzai 2016). In the movie, Algerian nationalist hero and war martyr Ali La Pointe, played by a solemn Brahim Haggiag, cuts a daring figure as he punishes detractors from the nationalist movement and holds his own against French colonial agents. By all accounts, he embodies an ideal vision of Algerian masculinity as a man who has regained a stature of dignity through revolt on behalf of his community (Abu Sarah 2019). Despite the seriousness of both the Battle and Algeria’s broader Revolution to end 132 years of French imperialism, Algerian artists produced two spoofs on the film by the late 1960s. Both of these works – cartoonist Slim’s 1967 bande dessinée Moustache et les frères Belgacem (Mustache and the Belgacem Brothers) and Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s 1968 classic comedic film Hassan Terro (Hassan the Terrorist)– subverted the ideal masculinity showcased in Pontecorvo’s masterpiece to ridicule two groups of men who could have posed a threat to the nation in the post-Revolution period: Algerian soldiers who had fought in the French army (harkis) and fake Independence War fighters (the faux moudjahidines). This paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine how both Moustache et les frères Belgacem satirized deadly serious events to pass along messages surrounding ideal and less ideal versions of masculinity in a postcolonial Algerian context. In doing so, it aims to fill in a historiographical gap in the study of the history of gender in the country, which has overwhelmingly focused on women. This work will also contribute to a broader understanding of the centrality of humor as a political tool of the state as well as comedic artists in the early years of Algerian independence, as Algerian communities grappled with questions of national belonging and the legacy of the Revolution. Finally, by highlighting these spoofs and Algerian audiences’ responses to the Battle of Algiers, I will contribute to the scholarship surrounding Pontecorvo’s highly influential and highly studied film.