Humor in the digital age
It is said that a joke (i.e. a joke in general) is a reflection of a crying reality, and the greater the amount of laughter in the joke, the greater the irony in it in front of reality, and the political joke in particular was always a “smart” expression of rejection and protest and a kind of disguised awareness. However, does consciousness need masks to express itself?
What is the use of irony in a reality that has become more clowning than the joke itself in the Arab world, and the tools of this world’s regimes in the media in all its forms are nothing but excessive fantasy comedic sketches, so that the news bulletin sometimes on some Arab stations can be classified within the entertainment industry without the slightest hesitation?!
In the era before satellite channels, the information technology revolution and the YouTube industry, which turned into a mythical phenomenon, satirical writing in the press, literature, theater, cinema and television was often a window for venting and sometimes implicit protest. The writing tools were not supported by graphic, image and visual effects techniques, nor by an accessible audio or visual archive. The satirical writing was a hard digging in the rock of reality to come up with funny and weeping paradoxes at the same time. It was funny because reality was exaggerated in its cruelty.
Muhammad al-Maghout, for example, was a writer and satirist, a not funny satirist who was able to extract sarcasm from the tyranny of power. Likewise, Zakaria Tamer in the story of the tiger on his tenth day intensified the symbolism in the imagined image of this miserable tiger. Muhammad Tamiliya in Jordan was absurdly realistic to the point of pain, able to He draws a smile between his lines with a sad shake of his head. If you laughed at the joke or the sarcastic “evil” then you are aware of the misery of the meaning in it.
Television was a transmission tool for theater and cinema, and the idea of a political cabaret emerged, among which Duraid Laham was among its stars. He subsisted on the creativity of Nihad Kalai in social criticism and then turned his back on him to feed on the genius of Maghout. Today, the traditional satirical literature, with all its genius at that time, has become mere books in a museum, no one laughs at its paradoxes, and no one finds the clever joke in it drawn on its current reality.
Reality itself has become a very sarcastic joke, expanding in its endless paradoxes, to the extent that capturing the irony can be caught in an overly serious scene. The master of satirical literature for me is the late Turkish “Aziz Nesin”, who criticized the authority in Turkey throughout his life with stories that touched the concerns of the Turks, and due to the geographical proximity and the remnants of the “Ottoman influence” in the Levant, his satire was understandable in the Arab East, even the great artist Yasser Al-Azma He used Aziz Nesin’s stories in his famous series “Mirrors” throughout its many seasons. The joke in general and in all its levels and types reflects the reality around it, and perhaps the greatest example was in the famous joke about the Spanish dictator Franco, in which the joke says that he was on his deathbed hearing the screaming of the masses outside his window, so he asked those around him about it and they said to him: It is the masses, they came to bid you farewell. Franco: Why? Where are they going?
* A Jordanian writer based in Belgium.
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