When millions of Algerians took to the streets beginning in February 2019 to decry their political system, citizens of differing backgrounds, geographic origin, and generation mobilized humor as a sign of the pacific and distinctively local nature of their uprising. These movements, widely called “the Hirak,” quickly earned the moniker “The Revolution of Smiles.” New jokes and chants with satirical bents emerged as activists held up signs ridiculing key figures among the country’s political elites. Drawing upon networks crafted in previous years, internet users framed and propelled forward the collective rejection of the political regime in online forums in instances of what Mohamed El Marzouki (2015) has called “citizen-made, participatory cultural production.” These efforts formed a “laughter of dignity” (Cheurfa 2019) that demonstrators used to confront their country’s entrenched regime and demand greater respect. Yet, as time has worn on, the state has ramped up counterrevolutionary measures and efforts to co-opt the Hirak while the COVID-19 pandemic has rendered the movements’ staple weekly protests impossible, ushering in a grim period for activists. Beginning in the early weeks of the uprising but picking up pace since late 2019, the government has cracked down on free speech in the streets and media outlets as well as on websites and individual social media accounts. Authorities even arrested Walid Kechida for sharing a cartoon on a Facebook page dedicated to humorous memes. This ratcheting up of repression raises the question of the status of the “Revolution of Smiles” today and whether a spirit of pacifist laughter and citizen-rallying fun has effectively given way to darker forms of humor, especially given past traditions of black humor in Algeria. Drawing upon critical theory surrounding humor and trauma, my paper will examine what remains of the “Revolution of Smiles” amidst government repression not unlike that seen after similar uprisings in the region. I aim to delineate changes in comedy usage among Algerian Hirak protestors and sympathizers from the beginning of the revolution to the present. In doing so, I hope to expand work by scholars such as Lisa Wedeen (2013) conceptualizing dark humor’s political functions amidst regime repression following counter-hegemonic uprisings. I will also historicize shifting Hirak humor within longer patterns of political and dark comedy within Algeria itself as well as the broader Middle East and North Africa.

Literature includes many studies that underscore the coping function of humor. In rather extreme instances, Sliter et al. convey how humor can help prevent Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in firefighters, and Frankl discusses how humor helps cope with suffering and survive the dire circumstances of concentration camps. This function can explain why people across different cultures and situations have resorted to humor in facing the current health crisis. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has taken a great toll on Iran; consequently, there has been an outpouring of Persian pandemic humor. In the early months of the outbreak, the University of Amsterdam launched a meme portal to collect pandemic humor from around the world. I was invited to prepare a Persian interface for the portal. A relatively large number of humorous files was submitted in Persian. These included texts, images, music and short video clips. The content analysis of this corpus conveys that although humor was utilized to cope with pandemic calamities, it has simultaneously served other purposes in Iran. Pandemic humor has also been used for providing information, political and religious censure. This research aims to analyze a corpus of Persian pandemic humor to determine its primary themes and functions. The initial results convey that medical and paramedical staff have used humor to cope with crushing working conditions and increasing experiences of human tragedy, suffering and death. At the same time, people have employed humor in order to criticize political authorities for their incompetence in managing the crisis. As politics and power are closely tied to religion in a theocracy, religious fervor has not remained immune to such criticism. Besides coping and censure, provision of information is another function for pandemic humor in Iran. Citizens resorted to humor to diffuse information and foster responsible behavior in the society. Personal responsibility in adhering to lockdown regulations and difficulties of homeschooling are among the recurring themes that serve this function of humor. References: Frankl, V. E. (1984). Man’s search for meaning: An introduction to logotherapy. Touchstone. “Research into ‘corona humour’.” https://www.uva.nl/en/shared-content/faculteiten/en/faculteit-der-maatschappij-en-gedragswetenschappen/news/2020/04/corona-humour.html Sliter, M., Kale, A., & Yuan, Z. (2014). Is humour the best medicine? The buffering effect of coping humour on traumatic stressors in firefighters. Journal of Organizational Behaviour, 35(2), 257–272. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.1868

How do filmmakers use intertextual and intermedial devices to engender political laughter? This paper will explore the nexus of intertextuality, laughter, and political turmoil through an analysis of intertextual blending in Palestinian movies from the Second Intifada period. Specifically, it will elaborate an extended dynamic analysis of filmic intertextuality in Divine Intervention (Elia Suleiman, 2002) through the juxtaposition of moving images from that film and from Le Ballon Rouge (Albert Lamorisse, 1956) and other intermedia. Literature scholars have traced how Palestinian filmic stories are in intertextual dialog with Palestinian writings, mostlythe stories of Ghassan Kanafani, but also Habibi’s Pessoptimist (Abu-Remaileh 2014; Yaqub 2012; Habibi 1974). Suleiman’s absurdist film humor is casually compared to the silent comedies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and the mutist films of Jacques Tati (Chion 2019; Chamarette 2014). But, sustained intertextual analysis has not been completed. This paper starts to fill this gap in intertextual criticism. The paper reintroduces three concepts from neoformalist and cognitive studies for intertextual analysis: transtextual motivation, allusion, and conceptual blending (Thompson 1988; Carroll 1982; Fauconnier and Turner 2002; Bateman 2016). It offers a short analysis of the Da Vinci image quote in Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad, 2005) and a longer blending analysis comparing Divine Intervention and Le Ballon Rouge. Hany Abu-Assad quotes visually and humorously from Da Vinci’s Last Supper (1498) with his protagonists beginning a final meal with the bombmakers. Intertextual blending analysis can trace whether the shot is just a sight gag, or the blend has a dynamic effect on the rest of the movie. Specifically, are both or one of the protagonists is Christ-like, and do Da Vinci and the Bible story cue further elements of the movie? In Divine Intervention, commentators notice the connections between the Ninja and The Matrix (1999) and the Old and New Testaments, but not the intertextual dynamics of the Arafat balloon scene. I offer a careful blending analysis tracing the comparisons Suleiman makes between Paris and Jerusalem, E.S. and a French schoolboy (and Manal Khader and a jeune fille), Arafat and the incarcerated schoolboy, Parisian child bullies and Israeli border guards; etc. Making intertextual jokes by blending a comic scene with a classical children’s movie, supports Suleiman’s satirizing of the casual, even childish, callousness of Israel’s occupation.

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.

The nature of Palestinian resistance has undergone numerous transformations in the almost 100 years that it has been present on the world stage. On the cultural level, it took its most definitive form in the 1950s, with poets and novelists like Mahmoud Darwish and Emile Habibi reconstructing resistance identities from both inside the Israeli state and across the diaspora. Today, a new generation of musicians have begun to both engage with and transform these inherited resistance paradigms, recreating their own political identities in the process. Inside Israel, in particular, budding musicians like Tamer Nafar and Jowan Safadi are employing lyrical satire to amplify and redefine their stance in relation to the ongoing occupation of the West Bank, the living conditions of Palestinian refugees, the continuing oppression of Israeli Arabs as second-class citizens in the Jewish state, and the cultural decadence in their own societies. The artists use humorous lyrics reclaim and reconfigure their long history with systemic racism and oppression by addressing such realities as Jewish racism towards Arabs in Israel, forgotten historical and ethnic connections between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land, and Western support for Zionist oppression of Palestinian natives. For example, in Tamer Nafar’s hilarious “Mama, I Fell in Love with a Jew”, Nafar relays a fictitious story wherein he and an Israeli woman are stuck in the elevator together. What ensues is a humorous dialogue that highlights the condescending attitude held by white Ashkenazi Jews towards dark-skinned Arabs. Furthermore, these musicians use their musical humor to challenge oppressive practices within their own communities, tackling norms imposed by their parent, Arab culture that create cultural stagnation and normalize such practices as the repression of women. In their hit song, “Who You Are”, Tamer Nafar and his band, DAM, mockingly portray the domination of women by having the men in the video speak on behalf of the women who, throughout the song, are reflecting on the expectations that their societies have for them. My paper will present a close examination of the lyrical content of a number of songs to reveal how such subversions are performed, what their practical value is in the lives of those they represent, and what their limitations are with regard to the parent cultures they are addressing.