Gendered Comedy in Algeria: A Panel in Honor of Nadjib Berber, Hadj Miliani, and Ameziane Ferhani
Panel III-17, sponsored byAmerican Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS), 2024 Annual Meeting
On Tuesday, November 12 at 11:30 am
Panel Description
From the meddah to modern theater, to TV comedies, protest chants, and poetry, humor has taken many forms of expression in modern Algeria and carries great significance in the country. An early post-independence statesman even declared that the Revolution (i.e. nation) “has to know how to smile and laugh at itself” (McDougall 2017). Algerian writers have long recognized humor’s importance to different societies and communities in their country (Khelladi 1995, Dahak 2018). In 2019 the world witnessed the force of “Algerian humor” (Sonay 2019) as Algerians created humorous chants, jokes, banners, and other products to push for political change through the country’s Hirak movement.
Studies on humor and gender in MENA contexts demonstrate that humor can release tensions arising from gender discrimination/violence (Moussaoui 2006, Reichenbach 2015), work as a disciplining tool for reinforcing gender boundaries and definitions of “proper” gender conduct (Abedinifard 2015), and assist groups in seeking equal gender rights (Tijani 2016).
While some work has addressed Algerian women’s humor (Morsly 2000), humor and gender during the country’s civil conflict of the 1990s (Moussaoui 2006) and in the country’s vibrant cartooning industry (Mimouni-Meslem, Laborderie 2022), this panel considers the interaction between humor and gender across various different media, including film, stand-up, and television. It will also expand the study of gender in the country, generally dominated by literature on women, by considering how humor has been used to shape notions of men and masculinity. The use of humor among Algeria’s expansive diasporic community will also be explored. In all, this panel will address the following questions:
- How has humor influenced ideas surrounding gender in modern Algeria and the diaspora?
- What role has humor about gender played in challenging or, conversely, bolstering gender norms?
- How have Algerians across genders, in different contexts and periods, and through different media expressed ideas surrounding gender?
By answering these questions, this panel will also respond to a general need in the field of MENA Studies for more work that explores the connections between gender and humor. Amidst a flourishing of essays and books since the Arab Spring analyzing humor in the region (Damir-Geilsdorf, Milich 2020, El Khachab 2017, among many others), such a contribution will be welcome and useful. Finally, this panel will honor an artist, a journalist, and a scholar who dedicated their lives to producing or commenting on humor and other cultural forms of expression in Algeria.
Disciplines
Anthropology
Art/Art History
Communications
Interdisciplinary
Language
Literature
Media Arts
Sociology
Participants
Presentations
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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.
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Aïsha u Bendo are a quasi-mythical down and out comedic couple that love to hate one another. From the beginnings of a sui generis Darija-based Algiers popular street theatre to the cinema screen, their names are ubiquitous as the central protagonists in the still current Algiers dictum aisha u bendo yimshīw u yitg3adu (Aisha and Bendo the stop and they go). In perhaps one of his best known texts Des Louangeurs au Home Cinema en Algérie (2010), Hadj Miliani sketched out a special form of socio-cultural methodology (of which he was one of the precursers) sitting between an archeological draft and a genealogical essay anchored in the symbolic systems of speech, practice and pop creation. Engaging with such a methodology through Miliani’s style of respect and critique this paper will endeavour to explore through textual analysis and reception of their representation the pluralities of the couple’s portrayal alongside the deeply held symbolism of Aisha u Bendo’s representation. Operating simultaneously at a trans-local Maghrib/Diaspora synchronous plane and a diachronic inter-temporal plane, I intend to mine multiple media from the phonograph recordings held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France of Soussan and Ksentini to digitised film on the web of a short 1980s series dedicated to the couple (which it may yet be possible to find in the archives of Algérie Télévision) and via resonances in comedic couples in 1990s home cinema readily available via pirate copy on the streets of Algiers and illicit web stores. I will end in post 2010 diaspora theatre in Marseille and Paris where their name is evoked anew. Across these temporalities, I propose a careful semiotic archeology of the couple’s ever shifting shape in the twentieth century. Aïsha u Bendo have been variously depicted as Jewish-Muslim, all male, all woman: the couple never fails to amaze and upend the false dichotomies of Algerian culture as sexist, misogynistic and exclusivist.
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Dawlatun lā tazūlu bi zawāli arridjāli [a state that does not perish when men perish], uttered by the late president Houari Boumediene, this famous slogan characterizes the patriarchal obsession that was exhibited by the Algerian ruling class since independence. The post-independence scene was marked with a series of nationalist projects that envisaged a particular model for structuring the Algerian society. It was coupled with a tight control over the cultural and artistic spheres to assure that artistic productions, whether in literature, film, music or television, all comply with the state’s established goals (Rashdi 2006, 31- 32). The radical Islamist project that rose to power by the end of the 1980’s provided its own image of what constitutes an ideal Algerian. Al-Dhāt Al-Asīlah – the true or the pure self, is the culmination of a socio-political project that sought to reshape the Algerian society (Arouss 2008, 655). When the nation descended to bloodshed during the Black Decade, and Dawlatu arridjāl was facing a real existential threat, the Algerian cultural sphere was among the radical Islamist’s preferable targets (Rashdi 2006, 32), with men representing the higher number of casualties. Caught between the myths of the war of liberation and the Mujahid, and the corrupted image of the Salaf [the ancestor] that Al-Dhāt Al-Asīlah represented, the Black Decade was a battleground for a distorted masculinity.
This paper contributes to Arab Humour studies by demonstrating how comedy was employed to challenge the dominant political discourses during Algeria’s most difficult political turmoil. Through a comparative analysis of two comedy shows that were aired in national television, Mā Mes’ūdah wa Ḥdīdwān [Grandmother Mes’ūdah and the Clown] and Bilā Ḥudūd [Without Borders/No Red Lines], I analyse the two shows’ successful navigation of the gender politics and the state’s censorship that governed the Algerian television during the Black Decade. While Mā Mes’ūdah wa Ḥdīdwān preserved a patriarchal image by maintaining a strict segregation between men and women, never portraying men as laughing, and relegating folly to the child-like figure Ḥdīdwān and the cross-dressed Mā Mes’ūdah, it softened the palate of a national audience that was accustomed to a different genre of comedy and paved the way for the far more daring Bilā Ḥudūd. The latter, through the trio of Bilā Ḥudūd, employed humour to redefine the notion of masculinity in Algerian television while providing a brilliant social commentary.
