Abstract
The article discusses the relationship between political satire and changing media practices in the context of Iranian political history. It argues how such practices produce distinct forms of publics with mediated modes of expression of dissent. From print to the Internet, media technologies have enabled different forms of communication that, correspondingly, have led to the formation of different form of satirical publics of (sub)cultural variations. First, the study offers an account of political satire in its print cultural form and, second, its reconfiguration with the introduction of the Internet to Iran in the 1990s. With the Internet, I further identify three satirical practices: (a) prose, (b) cartoon, (c) and meme, with the last introducing a new form of satirical practice as a result of interactive communication in social media. The article finally discusses limits to studying political satire, especially in Iran, and argues that the impact of political satire on politics remains to be seen.
Since it might be ironic not to begin an essay on political satire with a joke, permit me to open up with the following story. Rumor or true, notwithstanding, the story goes something like this: one day the former President of Iran, Mahmood Ahmadinejad, receives a short messaging service (SMS) on his mobile phone that says ‘One day, Ahmadinejad found lice crawling on his head. He took a comb and made a neat middle parting in his hair. Someone asked him why he had done that. He replied, ‘One side is for male lice and the other for females’ (Kaur, 2008). Shortly after reading the joke, the president orders to shutdown the Iranian SMS, though temporarily, only to reread the same joke later in his email as spam. Like death, the comical is inescapable—and so is spam.
Jokes about Ahmadinejad, who emerged as a leading conservative candidate and in the end the winner of the presidential elections in 2005, were abound in the years after he took office. As Ravinder Kaur has argued, Ahmadinejad who represented a favorite state figure of mockery and lampoon helped the spread of jokes by the Iranian urbane middle classes as response to fears of possible consolidation of the conservative agenda that the new president and his administration embodied (Kaur, 2008). With the end of reformist politics led by Mohammad Khatami who won the presidency in 1997, horrors of a conservative hegemony over public life quickly gave way to fears of cultural closure and end of political reform. In this contemptuous context, humor served as a coping mechanism, or perhaps an alternative therapy mode that more than poking fun at authority mostly helped manage with the end of a reform era under Khatami, its promises of liberty and prosperity for the middle class.
With new media, in particular the Internet as an emerging computer-communication technology that proliferated under the reformists in the late 1990s, satire about Ahmadinejad and his ideology, which crisscrossed between conservatism and populism, had a livelier, more interactive, and participatory characteristic. Online, Iranians, based in Iran or abroad, created, shared, and circulated humorous tales, mockeries, or jokes that, figuratively speaking, undressed the new president's authority, and by extension playfully revealed politics, in particular Iranian politics with its claim to divine authority, as parody. In the 2000s, personal blogs and, later, on social media sites like Facebook, jokes about Iranian politicians shared themes and intended audiences, though hardly did they follow a single creative process in mocking the political establishment. Once political satire in its various expressions reached emerging cyberspace in the early 2000s, where it could travel easily across large and diverse segments of the Iranian population, the nature of Iranian politics changed.
What was this change? How did they allow this change to take place? And in what ways did the Iranian political satire change with the Internet? This study discusses the changing mode of political satire in Iran from print to digital media and shows that the impact of online satirical culture on Iranian politics is too early to be explained, as we still continue to witness the impact of the political culture of the print media from the Constitutional Revolutionary era. By analyzing the dynamics of satiric practices in print and Internet publics, in theoretical terms, the study adopts a public sphere approach, though not necessarily in its discursive rational form, on the relationship between satire and media practices. It identifies the proliferation of political satire as transgressive practices that shape networked publics, which disrupt claims of truth and denaturalize the discursively fabricated cultures of officialdom. 1
While satire can be described as essentially subversive, or as Frye has described ‘militant’ with an implicit moral assumption, political satire in particular is a kind of subversive practice that aims to disturb the political establishment and reveals the ideologies of truth upheld by those in power (Frye, 1957: 223). Political satire mocks organized politics through twists, mimicries, reversals, burlesques, diversions, juxtapositions, paradoxes, and incongruities to reveal despotism, corruption, or incompetence of politicians and official policies or ideologies they adhere (see Schutz, 1977). Under authoritarian rule, in particular, where repression is persistent, political humor becomes highly intense and complex with the aim to ‘outwit’ an equally complex system of state censorship (Freedman, 2009: 5).
On the Internet, political satire has a distinct public life. As a many-to-many form of communication with an audience spatially diffused, the Internet enables users to receive, (re)create, and share content and, accordingly, challenge the boundaries of the politically established norms or behaviors. Yet public life on the Internet is not just about communication, but also new experiences of mobility, simultaneity, participation and, more importantly, global connectivity. What these experiences shape is what I call ‘Internet publics’ or shared sites of participatory activities where affects, audios, ideas, tastes, and visuals, are disseminated and networked in individuated and yet translocal ways. Such publics, always in flux, are pluralistic in terms of encounter and networked in terms of social relations. 2 Social media, in particular, signals an emergent domain within the Internet publics wherein associations increasingly carve out spaces of networked interaction between remote actors. It is in these emerging associations, shaped by weak ties and digital connections, where new styles and genres of political satire continue to alter discussion or perceptions about politics.
With this theoretical framework in mind, in this study, which I should note does not claim to be comprehensive, I examine print and Internet media in their respective historical contexts. Each media involves a set of pervasive networks that question politics in complex and creative ways for diverse audiences. With the Internet media, in particular, I further identify three satirical practices: (1) prose, (2) cartoons, and (3) memes. With a tradition that also dates back to the Constitutional Revolution, the Internet prose and political cartoons may seem similar in content in comparison with their original found in the print culture, but in cyberspace, especially with the emergence of blogs and online news in early 2000s, they become part and parcel of a public culture that is shared and contested, interactive, and networked. The element of contestation led the way in developing a new kind of political satire that was correspondingly tied with the popularization of social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and other sites since 2008, namely, memes. While not all satirical genres involve in what Mary Douglas described as ‘leveling of hierarchy,’ Internet political humor with a distinct seditious intent can be potentially subversive in a specific social situation in which it is expressed, especially where political communication is controlled under authoritarian rule (Douglas, 1999 [1975]: 152).
In what follows I first offer a historical account of Iranian satire in print culture. My aim here is to underline major changes in public life with the emergence of, first, print media in the earlier 20th century, and, second, digital technologies in last two decades of the same century. As new media technologies reappropriate older traditions of satire, I argue, they also introduce new ones. Media publics and in particular the Internet public are produced by specific material, experiential, and historical processes. All in all, what these practices reveal is the construction of satirical publics that in shared practices and mediated modes of expression, including cinema and radio, perform subversion for an alternative perspective—and perhaps an alternative way of doing politics.
Political satire in print culture
‘Satire,’ in its modern sense, as Yahya Aryanpour has described, is a type of a literary genre that reveals political or social ills for a higher understanding of public life (Aryanpour, 1971 [1350]: 36). Such understanding of satire serves as a common basis for a broad conception of the term in contemporary Iran, as Föllmer's research shows, marked by submeanings and practices that include absurdity, hilarity, and amusement, along with ‘masked criticism’ (Föllmer, 2013: 195–196). 3 As a diverse genre that is complex to classify, ‘satire’ as ‘tanz’ has hardly maintained a singular semantic significance in Persian, nor has it ever entirely coincided with its meaning in the Western tradition (Sprachman, 1995). In cultural history, the term has converged with other subgenre traditions such as bawdiness (hazl), humor (hajv), and invective (heja), or ‘parody,’ as Ali Asghar Halabi calls, all practiced in various forms in the preprint era during the Samanid (819–999), Ghaznavid (977–1186), or Seljuk (1037–1194) periods (Föllmer, 2008; Javadi, 1988; Halabi, 1986 [1364]: 71; Kamashad, 1966; Sprachman, 1988). While satire has roots in older traditions of patronage cultures of courtly literature, the tradition also partakes in the unofficial cultures of folk humor, repressed for its bawdy, erotic, or grotesque literary practices throughout history by political or religious authorities.
As a subversive form of humor, the satirical public culture can be described as a relatively modern phenomenon in Iran, dating back to the Constitutional Revolution (1906–1911), when new demands for justice and reform were made to end the autocratic rule of the Qajars Dynasty (1785–1925). 4 The genre is characterized by varied styles and techniques that developed under the heavy influence of the Ottoman, Indian, and Caucasus satirical publications of the period (Gheissari, 2005: 62). As a new civic discourse that primarily appeared in nonstate media, by and large initiated by poets and writers who favored reform and formed dissident associations, the political satiric tradition emerged to mainly depict authority in grotesque literary and poetic forms, a pronouncement of a comical view that by means of expose or exaggeration discharge political criticism at those in power with false pretenses.
Throughout its history, the critical tensions that the Constitutional era satirical works (1905–1925) evoked, in correspondence with the political language of democracy advanced by intellectual circles and other dissident networks, were about upholding the ideals of freedom and accountable government (see Afary, 1997: 116–142). With the print production of news from Georgia or Turkey, constitutional revolutionary parody was characterized by the kind of humor that primarily depicted the folly of unchecked royal power and the life of corruption created by absolute power. For example, the 1906 publication of the Azeri-Turkish article Molla Nasr al-Din and the 1907 publication of Sour-e Esrafil (Triumph Call of Israfil) with the popular satirical column ‘Charand Parand’ (nonsense) by Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda represented works that not only ridiculed incompetent authorities but also the norms and discourses of those who embodied the old order. Dehkhoda, in particular, led the charge in inventing a new critical discourse through his political humor, which mostly and vehemently made fun of Shah as an opium-smoking fool, while also mocking his family and the court (Katouzian, 2013: 234–235).
The media public associated with satirical cartoons was also a peculiar invention of the Constitutional movement (Afary, 1997). As an illustrative medium, which became very popular among Iranians, especially among the illiterate population who found them entertaining, cartoons served as understandable critical commentaries about social ills and state corruption (see Balaghi, 2000). The popularity of cartoons during the Constitutional Revolution is best evident when, despite censorship measures imposed by the Qajars, humorous columns such as Molla Nasr al-Din, published in Tbilisi, Georgia by Mohammad Jalil Qolizadeh, saw a rise in circulation in Iran and abroad. With cartoons that humorously depicted official figures, clerics, and conservative merchants, Molla Nasr al-Din challenged the pro-monarchist and traditionalist ideology of the Iranian society by directly making fun of the state and its perceived cronies.
With the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty under Reza Shah (r. 1925–1941), political cartoonists experienced severe restrictions, as a result of increasing centralization of the state, which extended to the production of news and media culture (see Olomi, 2011–2012 [1390] and Asadipour B and Omran Salahi 1977 [1356]). The 1939 arrest of Hossein Towfiq, the founder of the popular satirical journal, Towfiq is a testimony to the arbitrary rule of Reza Shah, whose policies on expanding state control over public life gave way to marginalizing dissident political activities. Following Reza Shah's abdication of the throne in 1941, however, the reign of Muhammad Reza Shah (r. 1941–1979) witnessed a sharp rise in contested political media in Iran. Cartoons, in many ways, took center stage because of the way they were able to disguise critical commentaries through humor on competing actors, from the Communists to the monarchists and pro-democracy nationalists, and their attempt to redefine Iranian political modernity amid a culture of corruption and hypocrisy.
Towfiq emerged as a leading publisher of political cartoons under Mohammad Reza Shah. During this period, Prime Ministers and their administrations, largely viewed as inefficient and incompetent, provided the main source of satirical focus for Towfiq. In 1949, the journal was shut down by the Pahlavi regime for its many humorous cartoons about Abdol Hossain Hajir, then Prime Minister, whose one-year term in office was marked by lack of significant accomplishments, providing Iranian satirists ample source material. After Towfiq’s shutdown, the cover page of another magazine, Norwrouz Iran, satirically depicted a copy of the Towfiq article pushed into a funnel with a title that read: ‘Towfiq to-qif shod’ (Towfiq is suspended). The play with the words ‘tou qif’ (into the funnel) and ‘tow qif’ (suspended), closely correlating with the name of the magazine, Towfiq, carries a double meaning: it describes that the magazine is banned and comically portrays the act of suspension as an image of a funnel. The now famous satirical depiction brings to light the element of comedy in the act of banning a satirical magazine and hence underscoring the absurdity of censorship.
The establishment of theocratic state with the 1979 Islamic Revolution introduced new censorship measures that also extended to the social realm, especially how gender and sexuality could be depicted in the print media according to the ideals of Islamist revolutionary activism. While media censorship continued to develop after the Iran–Iraq war (1980–1988), the late 1990s saw a new era of the print media and, consequently, satirical cultures (see Sadr, 2002/2003 [1381] and Sadr, 2006/2007 [1384]). Under the newly elected reformist government under the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005), an increase in freedom of the press gave new momentum to democratic change. Although the period also saw fierce opposition from the conservative establishment seeking to curtail the liberalization policies endorsed by the reformists, the opening of the press facilitated the satirical culture to flourish. It marked a new ‘golden’ age for satirists and cartoonists to publish their work in front pages of major reformist newspapers, hence breaking down, in words of cartoonists, Mana Neyestani, the ‘monovocal’ culture of prereformist era (Neyestani, 2000 [1379]: 10). 5 It was also in this relatively open context when, in the late 1990s, Ghol Agha reemerged as one of the most popular satirical magazines. A common theme in Ghol Agha's caricature illustrations, for example, was marked by comical depictions such as witty and funny behavior of a tea-serving servant in a bureaucrat's office, representing the average Iranian trapped within the state apparatus, yet bravely making fun of officials with a folksy, sarcastic humor.
The production of new political cartoons by cartoonists such as Keyvan Zarghanari also set a new satirical tone for Iran's reformist political culture under Khatami's two-term presidency (1997–2005). Humor served as an alternative mode of critical expression in the expanding Iranian public sphere, which by then also began to include the Internet as a new medium relatively free of censorship. During this period, other journals such as Zan (Woman) also began to publish critical cartoons about the conservative establishment in that some challenged the state's promotion of patriarchy with illustrations openly poking fun at women's rights under Islamic law. In 1999, Zan was shut down under the pressure of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for offending Islam, along with numerous other reformist newspapers that were also banned by the judiciary during the same period (Mir-Hosseini, 2002: 99). Nikahang Kowsar's depiction of the ultra-hardliner Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi as a crocodile academic strangling a journalist with his tail was the most politically explicit illustration to emerge in the reformist era. Kowsar was arrested and later left Iran due to death threats. The Kowsar incident, however, heralded an era of increasing conservative control over the print media, a process that was eventually consolidated after Khatami's presidency in 2005 and continues to this day.
The Internet political satire
Internet was introduced to Iran in 1993, with its adoption by the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), affiliated with the Ministry of Science (Rahimi, 2008; Rahimi, 2011). When promoted educational institutions and later to the market, little did the state authorities, who endorsed the new technology, know that the country's growing postwar culture of humor would quickly expand into this new sphere of communication. Equally important were the years between 2001 and 2008 when Iran saw significant Internet expansion as the population of Internet users grew from 1.7 to 23 million, a penetration rate of about 35%. 6 It was during these years when the satirical culture attained a prominent presence in the Iranian political life, a process with origins in the reformist era in the late 1990s.
The election of Khatami in 1997, won by the support of the collision of civic groups, intellectuals, women, student, and reformist clerics, coincided with first instances of satirical works in both their cartoon and poetical–prose forms appearing on newly created websites such gooya and Iranian.com (Akhavan, 2013: 13–17) Concurrent with the growing use and popularity of mobile and satellite media in the late 1990s and early 2000s, cyberspace marked the transformation of political satire through new communication processes born out of growing online network associations. What the Internet changed with the satirical print culture was how humor can be expressed and communicated to multiple audiences while addressing major political changes. Online satire quickly and at times effectively would reach and circulate among multitude audiences through various digital technologies in the country and abroad. Such transformation through media convergences entailed complex processes, which space precludes me to provide an extensive study. However, in what follows I briefly describe some of the key developments.
Satirical prose
As I argued in the previous section, poetical and prose works of satire are products of the turn of the century rise in print media, during which popular print enabled poets and writers to produce innovative and critical works on politics for a wider audience in Iran and beyond. The element of transnationalism is best evident in the works of Iranian satirists in the late 20th century, who continue to use various media technologies from radio to satellite TV to reach a global Iranian audience, with growing diaspora communities since 1979 (Alikhah, 2008). The online presence of exilic writer community is directly linked to the political conflict between reformist and conservative factional strife and subsequent conservative crackdown on print media in 2000 with the adoption of new press law in reaction to the relative freedom of press between 1997 and 1999 (Shahidi, 2007). With the closure of numerous print publications by the hardliners during the reformist period and imprisonment or harassment of numerous dissidents, journalists in particular saw the new medium as a cheap and easy way of reporting the news, many of which highly critical of the conservative power structure in the country.
The most important political satirist to emerge from the period was Ebrahim Nabavi. Nabavi, who wrote for Arya, Jame-eh, Toos, and numerous other leading reformist newspapers, was the first director of Gol Agha, the most popular satirical journal in postrevolutionary Iran (Föllmer, 2013: 197–199). A prolific writer, journalist, and humorist, Nabavi adopted various styles of literary humor, while his parodies of state ideology and revolutionary iconology with the use of subtle expression of humor set a new satirical prose tone for the Iranian political culture during the Reformist era. Along with figures like Roya Sadr, Kiyamars Saberi, Manouchehr Mahjoubi, and Iraj Pezeshkzad, Nabavi would write witty and hilarious pieces in the satirical column Sotun-e panjom (‘fifth column’) in the newspaper Jame-eh. The column would target politicians and reveal the empty nature of revolutionary slogans that dominated public life in postrevolutionary Iran.
With crackdown on reformist media, Nabavi became a main target of conservative attacks. With his second arrest in 2000, Nabavi left Iran for Paris and then Belgium, where he continued his writings with the Rooz online news in 2005, published by Gooya, one of the early Persian-language websites based in Belgium. With the election of Ahmadinejad in 2005, it was mostly online sites such as BBC Persian, Deutsche Welle, and Radio Zamaneh where Nabavi saw his humorous political commentaries disseminate on the Internet, mobile, and even satellite TV. On satellite, Nabavi would regularly appear on channels such as BBC and Voice of America (VOA) Persian, especially after 2009 when he took an active role in the opposition movement abroad. Blogs too were effective in spreading Nabavi's political satire, where many Iranians were also active in political discussions, though mostly on individual blogs where online political discussion would involve discrete posts by users in the commentary section. 7 It was in the early 2000s when the emergence of Persian blogs saw the rise of many marginal groups, especially women and youth, engaging in varied forms of self-express, in particular poetry, while facing societal and political restrictions offline (Akhavan, 2013; Alavi, 2005; Amir-Ebrahimi, 2009; Sreberny and Khiabany, 2010). Nabavi was a leading figure in articulating a new age of blog-activists, who saw the Internet as a place to make connections and shape communities of like-minded individuals.
Since 2009 Nabavi has continued with his ‘fifth column’ on YouTube and his Facebook page, where he regularly mocks Iranian politics on a weekly basis. 8 From the mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Galibaf, to hardliner clerics, Ahmad Janati, Nabavi's satirical prose takes the bare premise of incompetent and hypocritical officials as its starting point and continues to form a humorous play on the ideology of the state, which the politicians best embody. The most representative of state characters was Ahmadinejad, who Nabavi satirized as the buffoon monkey who served not only as a politician but also the ideological idiocy that governs the Islamic Republic as a political state with claim over absolute truth. What is revealed through Nabavi's Facebook satirical prose is mostly the hollowness of a republic that, as famously a dissident cleric, Ayatollah Morteza Montazeri described, is neither a republic nor an Islamic state. Nevertheless, what also can be identified with Nabavi's Facebook site is the network of interactive followers he has accumulated over the years. It is indeed in comments sections, many of which are humorous replies to Nabavi's posted parodies, where Iranian satirical prose attains a new political life. The Facebook network marks a new forum where new meanings are generated primarily because of the interaction between the ‘followers’ as both audience and participants, where Nabavi is one among many producing political satire on a profile that is personal and yet collective in terms of network interaction in a social media site.
Political cartoons
Since the Constitutional Revolution, political cartoonists have served as partners with satirical writers, whose works have appeared in numerous journals, side by side (see e.g., Nabavi and Kowsar, 2000 [1379]). With the rise of the Internet and crackdown on print media, however, cartoonists were able to ‘separate away,’ so to speak, and establish their satirical genre online with effective popularity. With reformist influence on the decline and the judiciary enforcing greater constraints on what could be explicitly expressed, cartoonists like Nikahang Kowsar emerged as alternative interlocutors of social commentary on various topics ranging from clerical hypocrisy to Iran's nuclear program. Although the entire focus of satirical works was not only on the president, prior to the 2009 presidential elections, cartoonists facetiously depicted Ahmadinejad's popular religious beliefs (seen by many as superstitious), and failed economic policies (seen as populist and ineffective by others). However, as censorship sharply increased with the election of Ahmadinejad in 2005 and expanded with the 2009 presidential elections, largely because of repressive media policies implemented by Ahmadinejad's administration in collaboration with the judiciary, cartoonists became more cautious in making illustrations in the aftermath of the postelection protests, injecting more subtle political commentary into their drawings.
As numerous cartoonists went into exile during Ahmadinejad's presidency, political cartoons however became more explicit and confrontational online. This was partly due to reaction caused by the state crackdown after the elections, which provoked resentment among dissident, including cartoonists such as Bozorgmehr Hosseinpour, Touka Neyestani, and Jamal Rahmati who saw the Internet as a quick and inexpensive way to vent out their frustrations. These cartoons with belligerent satirical thrust directed against the Islamic Republic reflected a public culture of online-free expression as a perceived open media where the artists can reach a wider audience for greater artistic impact.
The most important online cartoonist to emerge in this period was Mana Neyestani, whose 2006 ‘cockroach’ cartoon which appeared to depict Azari-Iranians as cockroach with the caption ‘What must we do in order for cockroaches not turn us into cockroaches?’ caused Azaris to protest in northwestern Iran. 9 Since his exile to Malaysia, Neyestani has published his cartoons on leading Persian-language sites such as Mardomak and Roozonline and his Facebook sites, where he regularly posts his art works. Neyestani's political cartoons humorously juxtapose symbols of freedom and peace with violence, militarism, securitization, and authoritarian rule. In one cartoon, for instance, a smiling solider is spoon-feeding a white dove, symbol of peace, while the bird sits (or rather stabbed from the bottom) on a bayonet. The expression of pain on the dove's face is indicative of the paradox of militarism's claim to peace and order. What lies behind the peaceful smile of the military figure in the cartoon is the paradox of being forced to be happy, a contradiction that only intensifies the theme of violence as depicted in the illustration.
The works of other cartoonists like Vahid Nikgoo and his use of video animation on Facebook to offer social and political commentary through humorous stories are a comedic account of Iranian life after the revolution. Nikgoo's online animations mock traditional stories of moral order, destabilizing account told in Aesop's Fables as a way to reveal moral shortcomings in Iranian society and societal expectations based on good behavior and ethical conduct, in which users live and make politics an aspect of everyday life. While Nikgoo's satirical animations are not explicitly political in nature, they do tend to underscore the false moral premises that serve as the bases of political order. Equally important is the showing of Nikgoo's Facebook site videos on the popular satellite channel, Farsi 1. As an example of media convergence, the migration of online political satire to other media platforms, in particular satellite TV, has also entailed not only the convergence of multimedia processes but also blending of numerous forms of expression such as cartoon, music, and visual practices.
Political memes
As the most prevalent feature of social media, Internet memes are user-generated visual practices of re-creating distinct content that could inspire a wide range of emulations and remakes (Shifman, 2014). A term coined by Richard Dawkins who originally described small elements of culture that disperse with people by copying or imitation processes, Internet memes are primarily about travesties, mashups, and changes in the content of recognizable cultural texts or images diffused in the digital sphere (Dawkins, (2006 [1976]). Through Photoshop or remixes, memes represent jokes, rumors, or mockeries that flow from one digital network domain to another, which, in the process, undergo remakes and diffuse from individual to individual online. In many ways, memes, though not exclusively a product of the new media domain, identify a set of humorous practices that mostly manifest on the Internet as an interactive space where images and texts could be reconfigured in various humorous ways. The political dimension of meme culture lies in how such meme remakes aim at politics and politicians, as parodies or imitations produced by the Internet users, who are both audiences and participants in a broader media convergence process.
The first political expressions of Internet memes appeared prior to 2009 elections when parodies of Ahmadinejad circulated on the growing popular Facebook and YouTube sites. The connection between the growth of social media and meme public culture is critical since it was largely due to an increased state regulation over news sites and blogs, a process that began to intensify in 2001, which led many Iranians to engage with emerging social media as a more networked space of interaction with greater possibility for anonymity, an din which also marked the defining feature of memes produced by multiple users as mostly unknown authors. Social media served as a less individualized public space (as in blogging) and more of a socialized networking site (as in Facebook) for posting satirical meme works that spread despite government regulations.
Ridiculing Ahmadinejad defined the intent of numerous anonymous online satirists who poured feverish scorn on the president as a dangerous and dishonest politician. Iranian Diaspora led the way in remaking images of Ahmadinejad in humorous ways, producing comic framing of their political antagonist, at times for appeal on a wider global audience. For example, a popular meme that circulated in post-2009 election shows a photoshoped theatrical poster of the comedy film Me, Myself & Irene, with Jim Carry's image, whose character in the movie undergoes a major mental breakdown that leads to a second personality, depicted as Ahmadinejad. In the photoshoped version, Ahmadinejad is more than someone who has a psychotic meltdown, like the movie's character, but a villain with multiple personalities who is deceitful and destructive.
The particular meme largely responded to the alleged dishonest statements that were mostly made by Ahmadinejad in the 2009 presidential debates. The reconfiguration of Jim Carry's photo into Ahmadinejad, with the new title ‘Me, Myself & Iran,’ easily appeals to various audiences with an understanding of global cinema from Hollywood and also reframing of a political personality beyond the political as we know it; politics as a stable domain of decision making based on effective outcomes. The caption on the side of the photoshoped poster writes ‘From gentle to mental.’ It draws attention to a feeble and psychotic process of a breakdown that warns of a politician gone crazy. While dishonesty plays a key role, what the meme primarily reveals is less about the chilling collapse of human sanity, and more about satirizing the quack, the seducer, and imbecile that represents political authority in Iran.
Another popular meme circulated on social media shows four cartoon characters with surreal and grotesque heads as ‘meat,’ ‘bread,’ ‘energy,’ and ‘wages’ written on their shirts. ‘Wages’ is short, somber, while the other three are smiling or laughing. With a shameful expression on his face, ‘Wages’ listens to nameless bigheaded cartoon who, while gesturing to the other three figures with his hands, angrily asks: ‘why have you stayed so small? Look at your friend, how they have grown.’ In this particular meme, a humorous reference is made to the economic condition of the country, reminding the viewer about the economic disparity, especially in terms of income, among Iranians.
Other popular memes juxtapose prerevolutionary with postrevolutionary photos of Iranian social life, with the former, prior to times of sex segregation under the Islamic Republic, depicting women and men freely walking together on the beach in an apparent happier times. What the nostalgic memes underscore is a satirical account of the present moment, under the current Islamist regime, marked by nostalgia of lost time. The association between loss and humor may not seem obvious, but it calls for the recovery of contemporary time. Recovery, likewise, involves not only recognition through grief over what is lost but also a desire of exploration, a going beyond the present now, a demand for change in return to happier times.
As satirical ridicule, political memes on social media extend from politicians to the officialdom culture espoused by the state. Also, numerous meme parodies of Iranian politics at large focus not only on how political reality could be understood from a comical perspective, but unique ways in which such depictions allow ordinary people to participate through intense use of personalized conceptions and senses of humor for political purposes. Since 2009, political memes have played an important role in the Iranian social media with satirical manipulation of everyday politics through mashup and remix practices. Meme continues to shape the digital culture of popular politics where citizen activism in offline domains remains limited under authoritarian rule. Notably, what lies at the heart of growing meme practices is an alternative practice of citizenship with Internet as transgressive space.
By way of conclusion, this article discussed the relationship between political satire and various media practices in the context of modern political history in Iran. It also argued how such practices produce distinct publics with mediated modes of expression, and by extension forms of sociability, that shape them. Media technologies have enabled different forms of communication that, intrinsically, have involved the formation of different form of publics of (sub)cultural variations. Which actors as audiences–users engage or interact for political purposes with each media in a distinct historical context reveals different expressions of political satire, and accordingly different responses from various state actors or agencies armed with policies that change according to historical settings. While the Constitutional Revolution Satirical cartoons or prose contributed to public discourse through print networked activists in favor of constitutional government, a process that continued into the digital age, the political meme culture signaled the rise of many-to-many public networks, enabling social media actors to share, distribute, and participate in making meme satires.
In reference to the Iranian satirical publics, however, there are several interrelated themes that I have not examined in this study. The most important is the connection between corporate digital technologies, state-funded cultural policies, and production of satirical contents through convergence media, in which the Internet features an aspect of a broader media landscape. If the weekly VOA satirical show, Parazit (static), is of any indication, political humor could entail a straightforward political agenda with the U.S. government funding the satirical show with the aim of regime change in Iran (Semati, 2012). As the case of Parazit shows, while satire can take the form of resistance by Iranian expats based abroad to confront authoritarianism in Iran, the genre can also be instrumentalized by a state power against an enemy regime. This serves as an instance when the humorist becomes a court jester who authorizes rather than parodies power.
Yet, political satire is a living practice on the Internet and its presence, produced in whatever digital or nondigital context and in whatever influence it may have on the broader political sphere, cannot be ignored. While online satire has not replaced other non-Internet forms of humor, as performed in the so-called face-to-face encounters, it has nevertheless led to the proliferation of subcultures of humor and clusters of sociability that with the expanded Internet network may have long-lasting impact on the intertwining lines of local and global political life. 10 The satirical Internet publics are multifaceted participatory cultures of humor, articulated in an assembly of outlets in online landscapes that operate in the daily/nightly life of users whose life is increasingly becoming embedded in digital technology. This everyday dimension perhaps indicates something more lasting than merely changing the status quo on the short-term basis. Following Raymond Williams, we may as well be experiencing a historical process that is difficult to fully assess because we are in the midst of a broad transformation; and it is in this ongoing long-term procedure, which the satirical publics will bear their mark on politics at large (Williams, 1961).
Footnotes
Acknowledgement
I would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of Ali Gheissari on an earlier version of this article.