Stripping the boss: the powerful role of humor in the Egyptian Revolution 2011

Political Movement and Electionlore

This paper is an ethnographic study of digital culture and Iranian online political humor: a hybridized genre of folklore which converges in both online and oral spheres where it is created and shared. It specifically explores the emergence and growth of politicized humorous cellphonelore, which I term “electionlore”, during and after the 2016 February elections in Iran. Analysing different joke sub-cycles in this electionlore, I argue that they serve as a powerful tool for my informants to construct their own “newslore” (Frank 2011) and make manifest what I define as “vernacular politics” through which they become mobilized and unified in their political activism. I diverge from the theory of “resistance jokes” (Powell and Paton 1988; Bryant 2006; Davies 2011) and propose a new framework for studying political jokes in countries suspended between democracy and dictatorship, demonstrating how jokes serve as an effective and strategic form of reform and unquiet protest.

Can the "stripping of the boss" be more than a joke?

In January 2011, uprisings and demonstrations broke out in Egypt, and the reverberations of the revolution are felt up to this day. The events that lead President Hosni Mubarak to resign were violent, disturbing, and definitely serious, but at the same time they were fuelled by and caused a plethora of jokes and funny slogans which circulated among the protesters. Previous studies on the functions of humour have suggested that among other things, humour can be used to enhance group cohesion by lifting up the spirits or to attack the (political) enemy by sharp sarcasm, the duality of which is captured in the metaphors of a shield and a sword. The present article builds upon "Stripping the Boss: The Powerful Role of Humor in the Egyptian Revolution 2011" by Helmy and Frerichs (2013), offering another perspective on the functionality Egyptian political jokes grounded in the current sociological approaches to humour. It aims to argue that humour as an ambiguous phenomenon is unreliable in reaching serious aims and thus cannot be conceptualised as a predictably functioning tool in conflicts, although it can sometimes give insights into the functioning of a society as a mirror of the social reality.