Laughing at power: Humor,transgression,and the politics of refusal in Palestine

Introduction

In late October 2015, a series of images of young Palestinians smiling during the moment of encounter with sovereign power—while being arrested by the Israeli army, escorted into military jeeps, and tried in military courts—began circulating across various social media circuits. Popular discourse surrounding these images, both within and outside of Palestine, diverged in some significant ways from earlier iterations of the Palestinian struggle. Some of the images were accompanied by the hashtags ibtisam (smile) and intifada thalitha (the third intifada or uprising), signaling the emergence of a new episodic burst in the long struggle for Palestinian self-determination. These images were jarring; they were defiant; they were non-compliant. They countered all the normative scripts. In the sequence of events to follow, those arrested would endure violence. They would be interrogated, likely held in military prisons, and tried in military courts. ¹ Those arrested were undoubtedly aware of the horrors that awaited them and yet they smiled.

What is it about this gesture that is so moving? So unraveling? So unintelligible? What kind of power does it hold? What does it refuse? And what, of course, does it produce? Indeed, the subjugated are definably not to laugh in the face of power; they are meant to cower and fear it. Yet through their smiles, in the face of the violence that is sure to visit them, these subjects refuse to grant the military regime under which they live ultimate authority. Their gestures are defiant even if not confrontational. This move, as I will argue in this article, signals a slightly different kind of political grammar. To laugh or smile in the face of power is not necessarily an expression of opposition; it is a refusal to recognize the authoritative figure itself. It is, in the words of Frantz Fanon (1963), to put the figure of authority “out of the picture.” Refusal, I argue, reconfigures the relationship of domination and subordination altogether. Or to put it slightly differently, if, as Billig (2005) suggests, “laughter and unlaughter are very much part of the processes of learning and imposing the discipline of social life” (177), in what ways might laughter, when out of place, and for our purposes here, in the face of a colonial authority, be a profoundly transgressive act? This article examines the political and productive power of humor and laughter to destabilize existing social hierarchies and puncture the colonial order of things. It traces in particular how the deployment of humor and laughter when definably “out of place”—in this case in the context of heavily militarized encounters and occupation—function as mode and practice of refusal to submit fully to processes of subjugation.

This is not to suggest, however, that humor and laughter are always or necessarily political or that we can assign a kind of instrumental intentionality or functionality to them. Laughter can of course signal many things. It can be deployed strategically or in a more Freudian vein, resemble a kind of primary process thinking; it can signal pleasure, embarrassment, nervousness, or fear. It can be cruel or serve as a kind of critical ameliorative in the face of grotesque violence and war. Indeed, laughter cannot be “considered apart from the rhetoric of communication” (Billig, 2005: 177). It moreover remains important to maintain an analytical distinction between laughter and humor. While humor, as Hannah Macpherson (2008) has argued, most often involves intellect and some kind of shared sociality, laughter is not always emitted by a “conscious reflective and controlled subject” (1083). It is often an involuntary convulsion. We may at times laugh, as Macpherson points out, and not know precisely why. It is precisely the spontaneous indeterminacies of laughter that enable it to “‘short-circuit’ the taken-for-granted rationalizations that underpin the social world” (Redmond, 2008: 255). Likewise, for Russell Peterson (2008), laughter is most often an “involuntary response incompatible with brainwashing,” which for makes it the “perfect critical response to authority” (quoted in Dodds and Kirby, 2013: 51). At the same time, humor and laughter are exceedingly complex phenomena—often visceral, fleeting, elusive, and at times entirely infectious. The very “fragility of the comic” (Macpherson, 2008) makes writing about humor and laughter exceedingly difficult.

It is indeed telling that over the course of many years conducting fieldwork in Palestine, I comprehensively avoided writing about humor and laughter, despite the fact that it punctuated my everyday routines and encounters. ² Laughter, at times, served as a therapeutic critique of the absurdities of occupation—for instance being told by our taxi driver in the West Bank that we needed to fasten our seatbelts when passing through Israeli military checkpoints in accordance with Israeli law. Other times, humor and laughter were ubiquitous, but hard to interpret. For instance, I would routinely pass through Qalandiya checkpoint, the main crossing between the West Bank and Israel. The experience of crossing this checkpoint for Palestinians is unequivocally unpleasant. Fear of being rejected passage by a soldier looms, as does the always impending potentiality of military violence, layered upon infinitely long delays in metal cages. Yet on any given day, you will see people smiling and laughing as they wait—sometimes in endlessly static lines—and as they exit the checkpoint on the other side. What is the cause of this display of pleasure? One could easily interpret this as a kind of emotive release, excitement, or relief at having made it through. Or alternatively, one could interpret this jovial display as simply part and parcel of the normal rhythms and patterns of daily life, akin, for example, to two neighbors conversing and joking on the street after a long day at work. It is invariably difficult, if not impossible, to reach any kind of definitive speculation on laughter and humor. Likewise, this article does not attempt to assign a kind of unitary coherence to smiling and laughter as affective expressions; rather it aims to think through the ways in which humor and laughter are part of what Geraldine Pratt (2000) calls a “riotous theatre of transgression.” In particular, I consider laughter and humor in relation to the transgressive and consider its potentiality for constituting new disruptive publics (Wedeen, 2013).

The argument developed herein rests on two interrelated claims concerning the transgressive politics of humor. First, humor of the subjugated can do powerful work to destabilize existing power relations and established hierarchies by calling into question the norms and “rationalities” that underpin our social world. Palestine’s laughter in particular, I argue, constitutes a mode and practice of refusal to normalize conditions of subjugation. Second, this article contends that closer inspection of humor, as wielded on the part of subjugated populations can bring into view a different working theory of the political—one genealogically linked but not entirely reducible to resistance. Analyzing the tactic of smiling and laughing during the moment of violent encounters with colonial authority, I argue that to laugh in face of power is not to say: “I oppose you”—rather it is to say: “your power has no authority over me.” It is to refuse that power authorizing force. Refusal denies authority presumed and in so doing, reconfigures the relationship between dominated and subjugated itself. In querying the kinds of politics emerge when the colonized refuse to be the object of the colonial gaze and order, this article contends that closer inspection of the relationship between humor, laughter, and power carves out new space for a working theory of the political, one wherein power is not opposed but disavowed. This disavowal is also productive: it is to assert that other political orders and possibilities exist.

Considering refusal

Resistance has been theorized across the social sciences for decades through multiple analytical frameworks and approaches. ³ While theories within what can loosely be called “resistance studies” differ, they do converge around the positing of “resistance is an oppositional act” (Vinthagen and Johansson, 2013). ⁴ It is here refusal differs in some key respects. While refusal may be genealogically linked to resistance, it is not entirely reducible to it (McGranahan, 2016: 320). Refusal does not necessarily entail active opposition, the benchmark used by most scholars for resistance (Hollander and Einwohner, 2004). Refusal, instead, is a kind of abstention, a disinvestment from rules of engagement. It is a declaration of limits, a repeal of consent, a proclamation, as Audra Simpson (2014) contends, that “we refuse to go on this way.” In this way, refusal is productive of a something otherwise. Or as Erica Weiss (2016: 352) suggests, it is an “affirmative investment in another possibility.” This is not to say that refusal is never resistance or that refusal cannot be oppositional. Rather it is to suggest that refusal may more accurately capture a theory of the political being pronounced over and over again on the part of the subjugated (Simpson, 2016). What kind of political grammar, then, we should ask, emerges when the subjugated do not stand in opposition to repressive power and authority, but rather refuse to recognize that the said power has any, or perhaps more precisely, ultimate authority over them? This act of non-recognition conjures a slightly different mode of politics that is not necessarily legible within a resistance framework. Humor, I contend, can be read as a politics of disavowal.

Given the intimate ways in which recognition and non-recognition structure Indigenous experiences in settler polities, Indigenous scholars have long turned to the analytic of refusal to explore how Indigenous life persists in light of eliminatory efforts wrought upon it by settler states (Alfred, 1995; Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2007, 2014, 2015). ⁵ Audra Simpson (2014), for instance, examines how various refusals on the part of the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk to integrate into the settler world, whether through rejecting the “gifts” of settler citizenship, or refusing to vote, pay taxes, or travel on settler documents, index a denunciation of settler “factivity”—they render the settler world a disputed fact. In tracing these refusals, Simpson invites us to inquire what happens when consent is withdrawn? How do these refusals unsettle the ontological fixity of the settler state? In a similar vein, Glen Coulthard (2014) exposes the limits of settler reconciliatory and liberal recognition-based paradigms and calls for a prefigurative Indigenous politics (see also Povinelli, 2011), a “grounded normativity,” predicated on “turning away” from settler colonial power. ⁶ These scholars are not writing in a “rejectionist mode” (see Vinthagen and Johansson, 2013), but rather insisting that refusal be the starting point for the prefiguration of “radical alternatives to the structural and subjective dimensions of colonial power” (Coulthard, 2014: 18). ⁷ Refusal, as Stellan Vinthagen and Anna Johansson (2013: 168) contend, “does not reorient itself to whatever is on offer … It refuses to resolve, but neither does it necessarily proactively challenge. It ignores. Its mere existence and expression creates a tension with the status quo.” Here, an important analytical distinction between resistance and refusal comes to the fore. Whereas resistance, as Carole McGranahan (2016: 322) contends, consciously defies or opposes superiors, albeit in a context marked by differential power relationships, refusal does not acknowledge this hierarchy and reposts the relationship between subjects “as one configured altogether differently” (McGranahan, 2016: 323). Rather than theorizing refusal as the “cutting of social relations” as Marcel Mauss (1967) tends to do in The Gift, I follow McGranahan and Simpson to argue that refusal can be generative. It is to denounce the normalized order of things: it is a declaration that “we refuse to continue to go on this way,” and in so doing, these refusals carve out terrain for emergent, new possibilities. Humor and laughter in particular, I argue, possess this kind of radical potentiality to be generative of a something otherwise.

Reading humor as refusal

While humor and laughter have yet to receive the same kind of rigorous and sustained treatment from within geography and related fields as more “serious” topics such as sovereignty, geopolitics, biopolitics, violence, and war, critical geopoliticians have increasingly explored how humor can destabilize and subvert dominant geopolitical narratives and established hierarchies (Dodds and Kirby, 2013; Flint, 2001; Kuus, 2008; Macpherson, 2008; Ridanpää, 2014a, 2014b; Routledge, 2012). ⁸ This body of scholarship tends to follow a Bergsonian approach wherein humor is seen as a social corrective with potential to decentralize power relations and subvert social norms. Dodds and Kirby (2013: 48), for instance, show how satirical performances by Stephen Colbert have anti-normalizing potential to unsettle key assumptions and claims underwriting prevailing beliefs of post-9/11 American political life. Similarly, Merje Kuus (2008) explores the power of satire to undermine rather than directly oppose power regimes through an analysis of how Czech indifference to NATO inclusion had the effect of denying accession rhetoric the emotional engagement it required in order to have any meaning. Satire and mocking, as these scholars demonstrate, present a unique challenge to established authority precisely because they weaken control over the dominant narrative. ⁹

Scholars of the Middle East too have increasingly explored the politics of pleasure and humor contextually in a region most often depicted as plagued by authoritarianism, war, and violence. Focusing on the “politics of pleasure” among Palestinian refugees in Beirut’s seaside, Corniche Laleh Khalili (2015) shows how displays of pleasure exhibited by Palestinian refugees constitute “momentary and ephemeral recognitions of ordinary life lived in hard times” (2). In a similar vein, Lisa Wedeen (2013: 864), writing on Syria, examines the emancipatory possibilities of comedy under authoritarian rule showing how humor creates “potential for world-creating openings by pointing out everyday life’s absurdities” (Wedeen, 2013: 864) Comedy here is not the stuff of Politics (with a big “P”) nor a vehicle for collective mobilization; rather its power, and arguably its distinct unique threat, lies, as Wedeen (2013: 865) suggests, in its ability to “dramatize what we already know but may not be recognizing, thereby inviting us to detach from aspects of ordinary life that no longer do affirming work for us.” Put differently, humor fosters conditions for disinvestment. Here, we can see the radical potentiality of humor. The detachment from what is opens up sensibilities and potentialities for a future unmoored from the constraints of the present.

Yet it is of course crucial that humor not be theorized outside of power relations. Just as mocking power can be a powerful delegitimizing act, so too does the reverse hold. It thus matters who is the agent and object of laughter. ¹⁰ The larger point here is not only to contend that laughter and humor are deeply social processes—the subject and the object matter—but rather that humor must be understood within a broader economy of power and violence. In this way, humor and laughter are more than just boundary-making exercises—although they are indeed that—but these gestures also carry the potential to reinscribe social hierarchies or to fundamentally disrupt them. In this vein, the following sections explore the transgressive potentiality of humor to destabilize the normalized order of things. This is not to ascribe a purposeful intentionality or rationality to humor or laughter but rather to track the productive and political work they do in violent contexts marked by gross asymmetries of power broadly, and specifically for our purposes here, in the context of settler colonial military occupation.

The humor of tragedy

There is arguably little that can be said is comedic about the current situation in Palestine. Seven decades of ongoing displacement and dispossession, a defunct peace process, increasing fragmentation of the Palestinian national movement, and a compromised, and increasingly authoritarian Palestinian leadership have produced a bleak state of affairs. The precarious set of conditions in which Palestinians are currently enmeshed—stateless, fragmented, and aid-dependent—has much to do with developments in the political and diplomatic realm. The hopeful mood of the Oslo years dissipated not long after it became apparent that the peace process would yield not a viable, independent Palestinian state but instead, ever-more sophisticated modes and modalities of colonial rule. ¹¹ In light of these conditions, disillusionment among Palestinians is widespread and many have lost faith that any enduring solution can be reached through formal political channels. In this context, humor serves an important social function: humor has become an increasingly popular vehicle for social commentary and critique. ¹² As Palestinian artist Khaled Hourani has observed, “Palestinians have lived through an era when political slogans and answers … no longer suffic[e] and have ceased to capture the popular imagination” (Lionis, 2016: xv). This has resulted, he observes, in people “living through confusion whilst inspiring and confronting this dramatic and disordered reality with humor” (Lionis, 2016). This is not to suggest that other modes of politics and collective action have been evacuated—indeed quite to the contrary. ¹³ It is to suggest however that in an era of widespread disillusionment with formal politics and deep-seeded satisfaction with the status quo, humor and satire have become an increasingly popularized form of political rhetoric and thus constitute ripe terrain for scholarly inquiry.

The evolution of Palestinian humor is shaped, as anywhere, by particular histories of struggle, political developments, collective traumas, and shared cultural understandings. Indeed, as humorology theorists Henri Bergson and André Breton have long emphasized, humor is “always shaped by the context of its time” (see Lionis, 2016: 25; Bergson, 2005 [1911]). Ethnologist Sharif Kanaana (1990, 2013), for one, has detailed, through the collection of some 1500 Palestinian jokes spanning from the first intifada (uprising) in the 1980s into the post-Oslo moment of large-scale disillusionment, how the nature of jokes reflect shifts in popular morale and political temperament. During the first intifada, for instance, popular jokes of the time reflected a sense of cohesion and shared purpose, as the following joke widely circulated during the first intifada demonstrates:

A group of soldiers stopped a shab (youth) in the marketplace and were about to take him away. A woman who was shopping in the vicinity saw what was happening. Immediately, she threw herself at the soldiers and started shouting and screaming, telling the soldiers to let her son go because he had not done anything, but was simply walking with her while shopping. She kept pulling and tugging at the boy until she got him loose. As she walked away with him hand in hand, one of the passers-by heard the woman ask the boy, “Which family are you from, dear?” (cited in Kanaana, 2013: n.p.)

The Oslo period however marked a definitive shift in Palestinian politics as diplomacy replaced popular struggle and the mechanisms and instruments of occupation proliferated throughout the aid flows on which Palestinians were increasingly dependent, on the one hand, and within their newly established national governing body, the Palestinian Authority (PA) on the other. Just as Oslo constituted a critical juncture in Palestinian history, which arguably has much to do with the contemporary disillusionment and precarious state of Palestinian politics today, it also generated an “explosion of laughter and humor” (Lionis, 2016)—although a more cynical humor that did not carry the same sense of triumph, unity, and optimism as that generated during the intifada years. As Lionis (2016) contends, “Oslo delivered to the Palestinians a cruel punchline, one that denied their expectations and hopes, reshaping their identity and leaving them in what is now the worst period in their history” (79–80). The shifting political reality is reflected in the evolving tone and tenor of Palestinian jokes which increasingly conveyed a sense of disillusionment, fragmentation, and self-ridicule during the post-Oslo years. Widely circulated jokes reflected popular disillusionment and skepticism that statehood would ever be attained (see Kanaana, 2013), and the PA, for its role in suppressing Palestinian national aspirations, became a focal point of satirical critique, with jokes most commonly addressing PA corruption linked to tatbiyeh, or normalization with Israel (Hass, 2008). ¹⁴ Post-Oslo humor and satire also turn inward and offer commentary on internal divisions and fissures within Palestinian society underscored by geography and class. Many jokes are directed at the excessive wealth and elitism of Ramallah, often referred to as the “Ramallah bubble,” which contrasts sharply with the rest of Palestine—most especially the Gaza Strip, an impoverished and enclosed territory beleaguered by routine bombing and a decade-long sanctions regime. ¹⁵ These multiple realities of Palestine—or these many Palestines—are reflected in the satirical Palestinian show “Gaza-Ramallah” which began in 2008 shortly after Israel’s military operation “Cast Lead.” During a presentation to Ramallah’s nouveau-riche, the show opened with Manal Awad, one of the playwrights, highlighting the deeply contrasting realities of Gaza and Ramallah—a mere 50 miles apart: “You get massacred, while we are having a party.” The show also reserves ample critique for the PA, calling attention to its hollow nationalist slogans all the while normalizing ties and security relations with Israel and critiques the enduring “Oslo culture,” which having propped up an elite sector of Palestinian politicians, businessmen, and NGOs with links to Israel, has enabled “a few individuals to accumulate wealth at the expense of the struggle against occupation” (Hass, 2008).

In light of these conditions, satire has become an increasingly popularized mode of commentary with new Palestinian satirical literature, comedy shows, and films being produced every year (see Lionis, 2016). As Sharif Kanaana (2013) remarks, drawing on two and a half decades of observation, jokes become almost compulsive “when a political problem becomes urgent and strongly felt.” Indeed, for many Palestinians, satire and humor have emerged not in a space evacuated by politics but as a distinct mode of political expression. As Kanaana observes, “When people are made the passive object of history, without freedom of press or an open book market, not to mention participation in power, they hit back against those in power with jokes” (cited in Hessenland, 2005). Palestinian humor has, in turn, offered a devastatingly accurate grammar for capturing the precarious condition of the Palestinian present underscored by factionalism, a deeply compromised leadership, political fragmentation, aid dependency, and ever-more sophisticated modalities of colonial rule. Akram al-Surani, author of Watan Kharej el-Taghtiya (Homeland Out of Coverage) aptly captures this sentiment with a joke no less: “The people need a bladder the size of Gaza and Ramallah combined, big enough for them to urinate on the prevailing situation, frustration, national dialogue, turbid water, grim faces, false authorities, newscasts and high prices.” In a similar vein, the popular blogger Hamza al-Bheisi frequently deploys humor on his blog, “The “Maglouba” (In Reverse), which he launched as a way of coping with the harsh realities of life in Gaza. Like al-Surani, al-Bheisi finds that humor best captures the bleak nature of the contemporary moment. As he writes on his blog: “Three things make Palestinians stand up at attention: the national anthem, the ATM and the launch of a political party.” Indeed, we should ask, what does humor capture, particularly in moments of despair that other languages do not? Part of the answer, I contend, resides in the ability of humor to serve as a therapeutic critique of the fraught conditions in which the subjugated are enmeshed. ¹⁶

Beyond critique, humor has also been mobilized in more productive, emancipatory ways. Palestinian-American comedian Amer Zahr, for instance, understands the liberatory potential of humor and consciously crafts it toward that end. A descendant of refugees Nazareth and U.S. citizen, humor for Zahr has become a way he processes the pain of displacement, dehumanization, and racial violence experienced both in Palestine/Israel and in the United States. “If you can make it funny” he states, “it kind of makes it not as damaging to your psyche. That doesn’t mean you live with it and accept it, but you find ways to compute it that become effective to you.” Zahr’s renditions of traveling through Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv demonstrate how he utilizes humor as both a psychological ameliorative and as a tactic to disrupt the normative scripts of the militarized and racialized airport encounter. In the first of two narrations below, Zahr begins by calling the interrogation room where Palestinians are routinely held by Israel upon landing in Tel Aviv airport the “VIP lounge”—“You can stay as long as you want!,” he exclaims and then recounts his recent experience at the airport:

I actually brought a book, because I knew it was going to happen, and I just sat there, and I started to feel sorry for them. I started to laugh at them: “This is what you do? This is your profession? […] How terrible that you’re living your life like this. And it’s not working! Because now I’m here for the third time. If your point was to try to piss me off so I don’t come back, you’re very bad at it.” Now I’m just like, “Okay, I feel sorry for you.” Like, the guy that strip searches Palestinians when they leave Tel Aviv airport… What a terrible job! […] I think it’s about flipping it, and it’s not that hard in our context.

The popular use of humor under conditions of subjugation is, of course, not unique to Palestine. Distinct parallels can be drawn to the ways other subjugated populations deploy humor as a kind of “interpretive method,” as Diane Goldstein (2003) traces in her thick ethnography of the use of humor by poverty-stricken communities of Rio de Janeiro, through which people begin to “unravel the complex ways in which [they] comprehend their own lives and circumstances” (3). As Goldstein (2003) contends, the use of humor by residents of Rio’s favelas “opened up a window onto the complicated consciousness of lives that were burdened by their place within the racial, class, gender, and sexual hierarchies that inform their social world” (3–4). The seemingly mysterious use of humor by Rio’s poor at definably non-humorous moments, such as waiting in line at the emergency room with a dying child, when visiting a loved one in prison, or during a humiliating encounter with police, speaks to a shared social script, an internal language of those ranking among the lowest in Brazil’s racial and class hierarchy. ¹⁷ Their humor and laughter, Goldstein (2003) observes, captures, with acute precision, the “absurdity of the world they inhabit” (13). As the following section explores in greater detail, drawing on fieldwork in Palestine, humor narrates with similar precision to Goldstein’s account of humor in Rio’s favelas, a social reality that is both fraught and absurd. Emerging as part of the “informal” script in daily encounters and in countless interviews, humor emerged as a crucial means through which people confronted but also refused to accept the absurd conditions in which they lived. Humor, put differently, constituted a means by which the subjugated refuse the naturalization of their conditions of subjugation. While Zahr’s humor can be read as a more overtly transgressive politics, which he deploys to deny the border guard the power to dictate the terms of the airport encounter, at other times, humor, as explored in the subsequent section, functions as a distinct mode of political rhetoric that lays bare the absurdities of a life-world produced by a decades-long settler colonial project, and in laying bare, opens possibilities for the emergence of a something otherwise.

Laughter and the absurd

In late July 2018, I was in Ramallah undertaking research on U.S. aid cuts to the Palestinians. I was being driven to an undisclosed location for an interview with a high-level official in the PA. The United States had just recently passed the Taylor Act, ²⁰ sharply decreased its donations to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital, and was laying groundwork for the soon-to-be-proposed “Deal of the Century,” which in the view of many Palestinians would concretize Israel’s geopolitical designs for the region. The PA was facing a financial crisis and contempt for recent developments in U.S. policy was palpable.

The car pulled up to a house offset from the main road by some 200 meters. I was escorted into a large office and invited to sit down. After the usual offerings of coffee and informal chatter, the interview began. I had a long list of questions concerning tumultuous developments resulting from recent U.S. posturing in the region. The official painted a dismal picture of the likely scenarios if U.S. policy continued on course. He then paused, somewhat abruptly, and asked if he could ask me a question. “Yes,” I said, unclear as to what I might be able to offer him. “Could you tell your president that we did not kill Jesus?” The question took me aback; I could only respond with laughter. “Really,” he said, as if a serious proposition. “Muslims did not kill Jesus,” and then went on to cite the historical impossibility of such a scenario rehearsing the origins of Christianity and Islam. During this short interlude from an otherwise grim interview, I was entirely overcome with laughter. Laughter was the only appropriate, possible response, the only grammar for the absurdity of the moment: amid a heavy discussion of the very real violences embedded in U.S. actions recently undertaken, we were discussing the impossibility of Muslims having killed Jesus. To date, I do not know if the official was serious (the story first ran in the satirical publication, The Herald). Regardless, his deployment of humor in this moment was illuminating. Humor captured the political paradox of the time. The comment was obviously absurd, but in posing it, the official captured a key dissonance in contemporary Palestinian politics: on the one hand, that any possibility for a just resolution to the Palestinian question is ceding further from view, and on the other, that world figures commanding considerable control and influence over the Palestinian question possess such little understanding of it, the region, or history more broadly. The official’s delivery of this comment acutely captured these twin currents. Humor, for this official, offered a language, a mechanism, for naming this collision between the real—the dismal reality of the contemporary Palestinian condition—and the utterly unreal (Lionis, 2016).

Akin to this anecdote, humor has become an increasingly popularized mode of political rhetoric in bleak times due to its ability to “turn a situation upside down to reveal its absurdity” and in doing so, invite contemplation (Robb, 2010: 94). The humor and satire that that emerged in countless interviews, encounters, and informal conversations during the course of some eight years conducting research on foreign aid intervention in Palestine oft made a mockery of the hegemonic security posturing Israel—and foreign donors—have adopted vis-à-vis the Palestinian population. Particularly notable was how the heavily securitized approach to aid administration adopted by foreign donors, which configures Palestinians as always-potentially terrorist, has produced a circus-like atmosphere, a world turned inside out by the security-obsessed frameworks that predominate in western aid administration. The dizzying array of security infrastructures and surveillance regimes Palestinians are forced to navigate to receive funds, “aid game” itself as one informant called it, often generated uncontrollable laughter as informants recounted their experiences and frustrations negotiating the hyper-securitized conditionalities of foreign aid. In one instance, the director of an international NGO started to laugh during an interview when recounting the security protocols to which her organization had to abide when using U.S. funds in the Gaza Strip. She recounted the routine dissemination of an “anti-terrorism certificate” to every vendor for purchases made to confirm the recipient is not a terrorist. “We have to fill it out every time we buy something in Gaza,” she stated, “even a cup of coffee. No one knows what they are signing; they just sign it. It doesn’t exactly meet the foreign policy aims.” ²¹ Her laughter woven throughout this recounting makes a mockery of the claim that U.S. counterterrorism financing law, to which she is referring, serves any kind of national security function. In another instance, a Palestinian NGO worker recounted his responsibilities while working for a U.S. development firm, among which included the drafting of donor reports and publications for public dissemination. ²² These documents, he noted, could not mention the separation wall that encircles the West Bank, nor was he permitted to name Israeli settlements as such. These objects could only be described passively—one could only name their effects. Project reports, he explained, had to be devoid of any mention of the occupation—they could only discuss the impacts of nameless actors and processes detrimental to Palestinian life. Roughly halfway through detailing the kinds of rhetorical acrobatics he had to perform in writing such documents, his sentences were interspersed with laughter. Imagine, he said, some Palestinian just decides that it would better suit him to take a snaking route for 2 hours through the entire West Bank to reach Bethlehem from Ramallah. His laughter here points to the silences that have become more or less routinized under conditions of aid dependency. As exhibited in thousands of donor reports, foreign aid to the Palestinians is determined to be a definitive need; however, one is prohibited from naming the very thing that generates the crisis. Foreign aid becomes a self-reinforcing loop.

Humor has emerged as an increasingly popular mode of political commentary to capture absurdities of the life-worlds produced by decades-long military occupation and settler colonial rule. There is no shortage of jokes in Palestine indexing the absurdities of everyday life, for instance, about how it might take a few days to reach neighboring Jordan from the West Bank given the tight restrictions on Palestinian mobility, or recounting the myriad objects and commodities that pass through Gaza’s underground tunnel system, such as Kentucky Fried Chicken, SUVs, and zoo animals (Sherwood, 2013). These narrations of the comedic and bizarre, while at times belly-convulsing funny, are simultaneously commentary on real life conditions and constraints.

Humor, as literary scholar Barry Sanders (1995) observes, has an uncanny ability to capture the utter absurdity of the life-worlds of the subjugated. These worlds are violent, oppressive, and indeed utterly absurd. Humor becomes a means by which this reality can be narrated, processed, and transcended, if only fleetingly. Indeed the release of air from a laugh, offers an escape, even if only ephemeral, from what Walter Benjamin has called the “‘beastly seriousness’ of ongoing oppression” (cited in Wedeen, 2013: 864). However, I also want to argue beyond relief theory to suggest that laughter also poses a distinct challenge to power precisely because it disavows it. In this way, I depart in some regard from dominant theories of humor and comedy. The main theoretical approaches (superiority, incongruity, and relief theories) are all grounded, as Billig (2005: 195) has observed, in a psychological explanation of humor, and any psychological interpretation of humor necessarily takes as its model “the individual perceiving a particular comic stimulus.” These approaches often individualize humor seeing it most often as a coping mechanism for trauma and suffering, as a way of survival in dark times and as a mode of healing. ²³ While indeed true, individuated theories of humor cannot fully account for why it is that power is so deeply fearful of laughter and mockery. They cannot explain why it is that laughter and satirical critique elicit such exaggerated performances of state violence and retribution. What it is about humor that is so deeply threatening? Indeed power, as Sanders (1995) points out, “has nothing to say to laughter. It remains dumb in the silent sense, dumbfounded in the weakest way” (25). In this final section, I draw on a Fanonion analysis of humor as a means by which colonized subjects reclaim emotional expressiveness, and contend that humor, and its associative registers of laughing and smiling, as wielded by subjugated populations, is as much about “turning away from power” as it is about asserting humanity—that which is precisely denied in the colonial and militarized encounter. Through laughter the colonized subject rejects her reduction to an object, “a face bereft of all humanity” and in so doing, insists on a humanity denied.

Laughter as refusal

In one of the most widely cited passages in Black Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon (2008 [1952]) recounts an encounter with a young white boy and his mother on a train. The young boy, upon seeing the narrator grabs his mother and screams,

“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.

“Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me.

“Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.

“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.

In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon revisits effects of the colonial encounter but this time refuses them through laughter. The settler’s desire to transform the native into an animal remains the same. As Fanon observes, the settler speaks of the native primarily in zoological terms. When asked to describe the native fully, the settler, Fanon (1963: 41) asserts, “constantly refers to the bestiary.” However, in this instance, Fanon rejects the effects of the colonial encounter—he repudiates them with laughter. The native, Fanon contends, “laughs to himself every time he spots an allusion to the animal world in the other’s words for he knows that he is not an animal” (Fanon, 1963). And it is precisely at this moment, Fanon contends, when the native recognizes his humanity that he is victorious. Laughter here becomes a means by which the native refuses to be interpellated into the settler’s world—to become a product of that world. Through laughter the native rejects the power of the settler’s gaze to transform her into its object, a “face bereft of all humanity” (Fanon, 1963: 42). The native laughs at the absurdity of the colonizer’s world, and in so doing, puts it in its place.

Fanon’s laughter is pervasive in Palestine. Humor and laughter, both staged and “off-script”—in checkpoints, in detention rooms, and during confrontations with the army—are being performed in daily life and for international audiences. These performances, I contend, do a certain kind of political work. The subjugated, in this instance, laughs or smiles when she is expected to cower, to be mute, to be overtaken with fear. To refuse reduction to a mute object “bereft of humanity” is to defy the normative scripts of that encounter. It destabilizes the colonial performance itself. It is perhaps this reason—for the destabilizing potentiality of laugher and humor to dislocate the colonial figure, to put it, as Fanon might contend, “out of the picture”—that humor, satire, and laughter are emerging everywhere. Akin to the images of young Palestinians smiling during their moment of arrest by Israeli authorities, new waves of images are circulating of Palestinian prisoners smiling for the cameras during their military trials or during rare moments when their transfers from one military prison to another are captured on film. The recent imprisonment of Ahed Tamimi by Israeli military authorities is but one example. Ahed, a 17-year-old from the village of Nabi Saleh, became known to the world when video footage of her slapping an Israeli soldier went viral. Ahed, subsequently arrested along with her mother, became an icon for the Palestinian struggle, while conversely for Zionists and supporters of Israel, another example of Palestinian terrorism. During her military trial, images of Ahed surrounded by Israeli prison guards smiling while shackled and wearing a brown jumpsuit began to surface. Displaying a similar affect to the youth at the outset of this article, she donned a smile in Ofer military court during her sentencing to an eight-month prison term while stating unflinchingly: “There is no justice under occupation.” These images, and the discourses circulating around them, denied the intended effects the full weight of Israel’s military regime sought to produce. Ahed’s delivery of a smile, during her most compromised position inside Israel’s carceral regime mocked attempts by the occupying authority to pacify an unruly, dissident subject. These performances by Ahed, like those of the young Palestinians being arrested at the outset of this article, defy the normative scripts of the colonial relationship. Palestinians are definably not to laugh during their encounter with colonial authority; they are to fear it and its unfettered power. They are to be reduced, stripped down, and transformed into mute objects. Yet in the face of a military power that exercises gratuitous violence on their bodies, they smile and laugh, as if in a café among friends or waiting at a bus stop. They refuse, as per Fanon, to become a product of the colonial gaze, to be constituted by it. With this affective gesture they say: “your power has no authority over me.” To laugh in the face of power is, to borrow from Fanon, to put authority out of the picture. It is to deny what Hegel and Fanon have argued is necessary for the master/colonizer: to have recognition from the subjugated of its authority. Through laughter this recognition is refused. Authority has lost its authorizing power—it cannot dictate the terms. It is here that we see the radical potentiality humor presents for something anew—a definitive break from what is.

Yet we would be remiss to read these affective gestures, whether on the part of Ahed in Israel’s prisons or on the part of young Palestinians smiling during the moment of arrest, exclusively in relation to a figure of authority. To laugh, in this context, is to reclaim an expressiveness, a subjectivity outside the parameters the dehumanizing encounter produces. Ahed smiles not for the prison guard—for to seek recognition as a fully constituted human subject from this figure would be futile—but for herself, and for Palestinians more broadly. Fanon (2008 [1952]) shouts his “laughter to the stars. The white man,” he observes, “was resentful … I had won. I was jubilant” (100). The reaction of the white man, in Fanon’s account, is secondary. Fanon establishes a space for himself where, through laughter, he reclaims his humanity. Likewise, the laughter of the subjugated in Palestine—whether youth under arrest, families awaiting long lines at military checkpoints, or racialized subjects chuckling at the absurdities they are forced to endure in the interrogation rooms of Ben Gurion—constitutes a moment, even if fleeting, wherein their humanity is reclaimed in a world that constantly strives to deny it. It is here, as for Fanon, where they establish a space for themselves.

Humor does not lend itself to easy analysis; it is not the stuff of classic social and political theorizing. This has led some to question the utility of humor as a political force. Such has been the charge launched at Bakhtin’s (1984) theorization of the laughter of the oppressed, which he sees as a kind of temporary liberation from the prevailing social order. Some have argued that laughter, in Bakhtin’s world, frees “just enough tension to maintain social order” (Lionis, 2016: 28). However, if we consider the social world not as a static product but one always in formation, one always being called into being by a repetition of performances that may at any point be disrupted and constituted anew, then humor invariably has radical potentiality indeed. As demonstrated in the case of Palestine, humor renders bare, with at times acute precision, the absurdity of the worlds the subjugated are forced to inhabit. The laughter of the subjugated is at once a kind of internal dialogue of the subjugated (Scott, 1985) as much as it is a productive political force, a disinvestment in the social order that is. For it is through these seemingly mundane, quiet, and repetitious defections from the “normal order of things”—through a joke, a smile, or a chuckle—that something new is being made. As the case of Palestine attests, it might precisely be through the chuckles of the subjugated—laughter directly through the teeth of suffering ²⁴ —that we might see a something otherwise emergent.