Article

Memory Studies

‘Monument to the international 5(2) 145–164

© The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1750698011415247
citizens of Sarajevo’: Dark humour mss.sagepub.com

as counter-memory in post-conflict
Bosnia-Herzegovina

Anna Sheftel
Saint Paul University, Canada

Abstract
The challenges of remembering and memorializing the violence of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s tumultuous 20th
century have captivated numerous scholars’ imaginations, because Bosnia is a remarkable example of both
the utility and abuse of wartime memory. However, the elephant in the room during these discussions is the
role of dark humour in narratives of Bosnia’s recent past.This article argues that dark humour is an especially
subversive form of counter-memory, that allows Bosnians to express dissent from dominant narratives of the
Bosnian War that they perceive as unproductive or divisive. Examples are drawn from oral histories, film and
monuments to demonstrate how humour speaks to three major themes of Bosnian remembering: the idea
of Bosnians as powerless victims; the seemingly arbitrary nature of the war and its aftermath; and the failures
of the international community before, during and after the war. Bosnian dark humour critiques not only the
above themes, but simultaneously the social structures in place for discussing the past.

Keywords
Bosnian War, counter-monuments, film, humour, oral history, resistance

We are the only region to have a good sense of humor, Bosnians. I think it’s a way of surviving. Humor
gives you a distance. So we laughed a lot during the war. It was our secret weapon. So I thought why not
treat a subject that was serious with a good sense of humor. It eases up certain things. (Danis Tanović, on
his film No Man’s Land, interviewed by Paul Fischer, 2002)

I guess there were some really bad things like the shelling and being in constant fear, not sleeping in the
night ... but also there were some good things and some feelings, some sense of security when you are with
other people in the same position, when people help each other, and stuff like that. Like funny things that
happened, because we did not have electricity, so we had to do all sorts of stuff to watch television, like ...
take out the accumulator [battery] from the car to plug it in to our own television ... A lot of very funny
situations, but also horrible things that happened. (Alma, interview with the author, 2006)1

Corresponding author:
Anna Sheftel, Lecturer in Conflict Studies, Saint Paul University, 223 Main Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1S 1C4.
Email: asheftel@gmail.com
146 Memory Studies 5(2)

The Balkan sense of humour is infamous.2 It is a favourite topic of conversation among any and all
internationals who have visited the region because it is both dark and ubiquitous; one can easily
eavesdrop on expatriate conversations in Sarajevan cafes or relevant academic conferences that
delve into the details of the cruellest or most absurd joke that one has recently heard. And yet it has
rarely been taken seriously by these very same people in their academic and non-governmental
organization (NGO)-based work that shares its subject with many of the best jokes: the former
Yugoslavia’s recent violence, and how narratives of that violence are affecting the region’s present.3
Indeed, during my own oral history research in Bosnia-Herzegovina, I laughed frequently during
my interviews; however, it took me several years of reflection to realize that these humorous
moments contained important information about my interviewees’ remembering. Using Bosnia-
Herzegovina as an example, this article argues that dark humour is the elephant in the room in
discussions of post-conflict memory.
Philosophers and theorists have occasionally turned their attention to the structures and meanings
of humour.4 In his seminal work on the topic, Freud (1938) lays out every type of humorous
utterance possible in painstaking detail, musing on the various ways that such mechanisms affect
both the speaker and their audience. He argues that wit uses many of the same strategies as dreams
do in order to interpret reality and turn it on its head; it is similarly subversive and allows for the
expression of taboo ideas. Kant states that incongruities produce laughter, arguing that it ‘is an
affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing’ (1951: 52);
Schopenhauer (1966) similarly finds humour at the intersection of logically sophisticated, yet
ultimately nonsensical statements. The playwright Pirandello describes comedy as an expression
of profound melancholy: ‘the condition of a man who is always out of tune’ (1966: 46). Descartes
is interpreted as having thought that humor is ‘joy mixed with hate’ (Farb, 1981: 771), while
Koestler muses that humour necessarily involves, ‘an impulse, however faint, of aggression or
apprehension’ (1969: 54). These and other treatments of humour argue over whether humour
asserts dominance over others (Hobbes, 1969); serves as a way of resisting and sometimes
humiliating those who dominate (Beckmann, 1969; Obrdlik, 1942; Payne 2005); or facilitates
political intimacy (Klumbytė, forthcoming). They ask whether it is cruel (Koestler, 1969),
subversive (Zupančić, 2008), or an inherently social act (Bingham and Hernandez, 2009; Brandes,
1977). What everyone seems able to agree on is that humour is a very serious matter.
While canonical theorists argue about humour’s relation to power, social interaction, or
expressions of the taboo, it is more recent literature that has mapped these ideas onto what has
alternately been referred to as political humour, dark humour or gallows humour; that is, humour
that deals with contentious politics or difficult political circumstances. Much current scholarly
discussion of the potentialities of political humour centres around satire, such as political cartoons
or the American television comedy programme, The Daily Show. Such discussions ask how
analysing contemporary politics through a humorous framework affects political discourse. For
example, it has been alternately argued that The Daily Show creates a cynicism that alienates its
audience from political debate and participation (Baumgartner and Morris, 2006); that it reinvents
political journalism and renders it more productive (Baym, 2005; McKain, 2005); and that its
format uniquely allows it to it resist dominant discourses about American politics and subvert them
(Warner, 2007). These are all potential ways of characterizing political or dark humour in post-
conflict contexts as well. Only occasionally have such questions been extended to contexts of
oppression and violence (Brandes, 1977; Obrdlik, 1942).
Furthermore, when humour is studied within the context of difficult politics or violence, it is
usually regarded as a coping mechanism used during such experiences, rather than after. The most
significant exception to this is the study of humour’s place in Holocaust memory (Gilman, 2003;
Sheftel 147

Rosen, 2004), which asks both how and why the violence of the Holocaust can be rendered humorous,
and what the ethics of this are. The discussion is different, however, in political contexts that are less
distantly in the past. In her work on post-authoritarian memory, Payne argues that humour ‘makes
trouble’ (2005: 68) both within authoritarian regimes and later transitional governments:

[Humor] tells truths about political affairs in a way that renders them funny. These truths percolate from
below ... Humor speaks a truth silenced by official channels. It raises a mirror on society that reflects an
image very different from the one promoted by the old authoritarian order and its transitional successor.
Humor cannot and should not replace politics; it adds to, enhances, and embellishes politics ... Ultimately,
humor gives voice to individuals and ideas excluded from the official political discourse. It is a way of
making trouble, doing politics, by other means: an alternative form of truth-telling. (2005: 72)

Despite arguing for the subversive power of humour, Payne nevertheless separates it from politics;
humour complements action, but is not action. Others are much more pessimistic, arguing that
‘political humor dissipates energy or deflects it away from direct political action’ (Brandes, 1977:
346). Scott (1990) is unique in his characterization of humour as a means of hidden resistance
among oppressed peoples.
As is evidenced in many of the above ideas, humour is generally regarded as a symptom or
litmus test of a general population’s feelings and anxieties, rather than as a political force in and of
itself. Why are we so afraid of taking humour seriously? While scholars argue about whether
humour helps or hinders political involvement and action, I argue that in certain cases, humour can
be political action. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, a region which has experienced considerable difficulty
remembering the violent past, humour is a way of remembering and representing this past in a
subversive manner; it offers an alternative mnemonic paradigm that resists the ethnically divisive
historical narratives that plague the region. It asserts agency and restores dignity that was lost as a
result of the perceived humiliation of the war. This article explores three themes that are both the
subject of much humour, and that speak to major issues in understanding the Bosnian War – the
idea of Bosnians, especially Bosniaks,5 as powerless victims; the seemingly arbitrary nature of
the war and its aftermath; and the failures of the international community – to show how dark
humour can, like Freud argued, be a way of expressing memories that otherwise seem dangerous.
Furthermore, Bosnian dark humour critiques not only the above themes, but simultaneously the
social structures in place for discussing the past. Erecting an ironic ‘Monument to the International
Community’ that will be discussed later in this article, can function as a comment on both the form
and content of that community’s involvement in the Bosnian conflict; these uses of humour can
therefore serve as very powerful criticism of both the Bosnian past and present.
In this way, it is a form of counter-memory; this is the Foucauldian idea that memory can be
used to speak truth to power, or to challenge dominant interpretations of the past that seek to
oppress or repress (Foucault, 1977). Memory scholars have generally used this and similar concepts
when talking about peoples trying to assert previously silenced narratives in the face of oppressive
histories (Brantner, 2010; Tachibana 1998; Young, 1993; Zur, 1999; among many others). Usually
such work focuses on uncovering a literal truth; I argue that dark humour is about countering with
a figurative truth. In the next section, I explain why many Bosnians reject the more usual forms of
counter-memory, and choose alternative mechanisms such as humour.6 I then analyse examples of
this by drawing on cultural phenomena such as the 2001 Danis Tanović film No Man’s Land and
recent Bosnian monuments, as well as oral history interviews that I conducted in the north-western
region of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2005–06, around the Bihać area, which was mostly under siege
during the war.7 These interviews discussed not only the substance of the historical events in
148 Memory Studies 5(2)

question, but also both their public and private meanings (Portelli, 1990), and they encouraged
interviewees to interpret their own memories along with me as part of the process (Greenspan,
2010). Humorous jokes and anecdotes emerged spontaneously from seemingly innocuous
questions, such as ‘why did the war happen?’ and ‘what was life like during the war?’ This
spontaneity was part of what convinced me that something important was happening when my
interviewees laughed. Due to the current fragmented nature of the country, as will be described in
the following section, my examples focus primarily on humour coming out of the Federation side
of Bosnia-Herzegovina, meaning that it tends to represent the Bosnian/Bosniak view of the war,
even though it is perpetuated by all three ethnicities.8 It should also be noted that most of the
humour described in this article refers to life under siege, or life at war; I have found very few jokes
specifically about the genocidal aspects of the Bosnian conflict. This is not to say that humour
about such episodes does not exist – the example of Holocaust humour shows that it certainly is
possible – but it is not surprising that it would be rarer, taboo or less likely to be discussed with an
outsider such as myself, especially as the Bosnian genocide is not so far behind us.9

Violence, memory and laughter in Bosnia-Herzegovina

While Bosnian dark humour obviously predates the 1990s, the prevalent use of humour as a form
of cultural resistance during the war has clearly inspired the post-conflict context. When Sarajevo
was under siege during the Bosnian War, from 1992 to 1995, artists, journalists and other actors
produced a remarkable amount of cultural resistance, in the form of theatre, festivals, posters,
books and other artwork. While these efforts have been thoroughly documented (FAMA, 1993;
FAMA, 2000; Sarhandi and Boboc, 2001; Sontag, 2001; Zelizer, 2003), and admired as a way of
resisting the violent attempt to destroy Bosnian culture, few have commented on the fact that much
of this resistance was funny.10 Published by a collective of journalists and artists during the siege,
the Sarajevo Survival Guide (FAMA, 1993) is perhaps the most iconic example of humorous
cultural resistance, and it is still sold widely on the streets of Sarajevo. It is a mock tourist’s
guidebook to besieged Sarajevo, which covers all of the relevant topics, such as: dining, featuring
recipes for dishes made with paltry UN rations (1993: 20–7); souvenirs, in the form of shrapnel
(1993: 38); recreation, including running from sniper fire and ‘urban rock-climbing’ to access
one’s apartment (1993: 51); transportation, wherein buses, trams and taxis simply ‘do not exist’
(1993: 58); and out of town excursions, wherein it is explained that, ‘officially, there is no such
thing as “going out of town”’ (1993: 79). Stephenson argues that ‘the guide does not rely so much
on its gallows humor to score points, but on the cumulative effect of the whole absurd gesture.
Sometimes, just the sheer honesty of a statement cuts through the gimmick with a force that leaves
one with seemingly no conceivable response’ (1994: 96). Indeed, the guide’s tongue-in-cheek
preface explains just how serious it is:

It is a chronicle, a guide for survival, a part of a future archive which shows the city of Sarajevo not as a
victim, but as a place of experiment where wit can still achieve victory over terror, the (sur)real ‘The Day
After’, contemporary [science fiction], the scene of factual ‘Mad Max 5’. This book was written at the site
where one civilisation was dismantled in the course of intentional violence, and where another one had to
be born, the one of the 21st Century. It is the picture of civilisation that emerges out of cataclysm, which
makes something out of nothing, gives some messages for the future. (FAMA, 1993: Preface)

The guidebook authors argue that there were, and continue to be, two reasons to make fun of life
in wartime Sarajevo: to assert the spirit of the Bosnian people in the face of their annihilation, and,
by taking things to their logical conclusion, to point out just how severe the siege, the war, and
Sheftel 149

their consequences for contemporary understandings of humanity, were. They explicitly position
the book as a weapon against violence. What is especially interesting is that this book was trans-
lated into English and is continually printed and sold in both languages, even 15 years after the
war; what is its meaning now? Does it intend to convey different meanings to its Serbo-Croat and
English-speaking audiences? If during the war, it was an act of resistance against the threat of the
physical annihilation of Bosnian society and culture, now it is a testament to how that threat is
being understood and remembered.
Why spread these messages through humour, though? While the literature discussed in the
previous section makes some useful generalizations about the power and utility of humour, one
needs also to examine the Bosnian context. First, as has also been argued regarding Jewish comedy
about the Holocaust (Rosen, 2004), humour is a mechanism indigenous to the Balkans. As the
Tanović quote that opens this article suggests, Bosnians are proud of their sense of humour and see
it as a legitimate form of communication. Second, the 20th-century trajectory of remembering in
the region has created an atmosphere in which open discussions of the past are seen as dangerous
and unproductive, compelling Bosnians to find new ways to communicate.
From the beginning of its inception at the height of the Second World War, The Socialist
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) employed history and collective memory as an explicit
tool in its construction; this approach has left a permanent mark on the region. While the Yugoslav
brand of communism is seen as having been considerably more open and less repressive than
Soviet-style communism (Crampton, 1994; Malcolm, 1994; Ramet, 2006), the rule of Josip Broz
Tito from the end of the war until his death in 1980 was marked by a particular interest in controlling
the ways in which the history of his Yugoslavia would be written, by highlighting foundational
myths of the Yugoslav state, such as inter-ethnic cooperation, and downplaying memories of ethnic
violence that were a major part of how the Second World War was actually experienced in the
region (Banac, 1995; Bet-El, 2002). These myths were important not only for the state’s legitimacy,
but also for creating ‘Yugoslavism’, an all-encompassing identity that erased ethnic divisions
(Allcock, 2000; Pavković, 1999). After Tito’s death, revisionist historians revived the ugliest
episodes of the Second World War in order to make nationalist arguments against the legitimacy of
the Yugoslav state, and its multi-ethnic character in particular. This work was conducted by artists,
historians, and politicians, such as the late nationalist presidents of Croatia and Serbia respectively,
Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan Milošević (Banac, 1995; Bet-El, 2002; Denich, 1994; Djordjevich,
2003; Ramet, 2005). This opening up of the previously forgotten past was a major element of the
propaganda that led towards the wars and genocide that destroyed Yugoslavia. The Bosnian War
began in April 1992 after a referendum in which Bosnians voted to secede from Yugoslavia, which
was boycotted and then immediately contested by the alternative Bosnian Serb government. Fought
on three sides, Bosnian/Bosniak forces fought the Bosnian Serb and Yugoslav armies over the
status of the newly formed country; while the Croatian army initially backed the Bosnians, the
conflict eventually fragmented into three sides. While ethnic cleansing was a grim feature of
the various armies’ military strategies, Serb forces carried out a genocide against Bosniaks, which
involved the liquidating of villages, concentration camps, massacres of non-combatants and mass
rape. Over 100,000 people were killed during both the war and the genocide before it was stopped
by the Dayton Accords in 1995.
What has resulted from this trajectory of both historical manipulation and extreme ethnic
violence is that in the memories of the Bosnians I interviewed, the Titoist period, which silenced
open discussion of the violent past, is associated with peace, while the post-Titoist period, in which
previously suppressed narratives were unearthed, is associated with war. As one interviewee
explained, quite bluntly, when asked about why he still subscribed to a Titoist narrative of Yugoslav
150 Memory Studies 5(2)

history: ‘Of course the story was a lie. I think that we all know it was a lie. But what does it matter?
It was a lie that worked. That is why I still believe it’ (Nenad, 2005). Post-conflict efforts to
encourage Bosnians to speak openly about their pasts through institutional mechanisms such as
truth commissions (Gisvold, 1998; Minow, 1999) are struggling in this incompatible context. The
problem is that contemporary liberal democratic language about truth as a liberating and healing
force is precisely the same language that was co-opted by the revisionists before the war,11 a
tendency that continues today. Western scholars struggle to see beyond their own understandings
of post-conflict issues and how they should be managed, to how Bosnians themselves perceive
their challenges (Hayden, 2007).
The post-conflict context presents an additional quandary because Bosnia-Herzegovina is
now fragmented physically, politically, socially and culturally. The Bosnia-Herzegovina that
was created by the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995 split the country into two pieces – the
Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is home primarily to Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks,
and the Republika Srpska, which is home to Bosnian Serbs. These divisions, and the system set
out by Dayton that enforces them, have made it difficult for the Bosnian state to function
normally (Cousens and Cater, 2001; Weller and Wolff, 2006); the central parliament remains
constantly divided, the presidency is shared by the three ethnicities, and these splits add an
excess of administration that not only perpetuates ethnic nationalism, but that also makes it
more conducive to corruption and endless bureaucracy (Donais, 2003; Pugh, 2002). As an
interviewee of Zhelyazkova’s explained, ‘In Tito’s time life was real, now we have democracy
which means looting’ (2004: 11). Croats, Bosniaks and Serbs in Bosnia have different banks,
telephone service providers, beers, schools, media, alphabets. The divisions carry through the
very minutiae of everyday life in almost absurd ways. This also means that they have three
different truths that cannot agree on even the smallest details of what happened during the
Bosnian War. Top-down ethnic narratives of the war all feed into a given ethnicity’s nationalist
sense of identity. As Esma explained, ‘what am I supposed to say to someone who tells me that
we were shelling ourselves?’ (2006).
Idealistic ideas about counter-memory consisting of literal truth speaking to power do not seem
particularly implementable considering both the current ethnic fragmentation of Bosnia-
Herzegovina, and the above historiographic trajectory. This is where humour comes in. It not only
avoids the quandary of appealing to literal ‘truth’, that nefarious tool employed by propagandists,
but it is also able to take a step back, and comment saliently on the dynamics described above.

Laughing at ourselves
We have these sayings that we say about each other, what all of our weaknesses are, I guess. So we will
say things like that Montenegrins are lazy, and there is a joke: how do you hide something from a
Montenegrin? Put it under a shovel. In the same way, Bosnians are stupid. How do you hide something
from a Bosnian? Put it in a book. These are old jokes that we all make about each other, we are just joking,
but you know, when I look at how this happened to us, we were so naive, we allowed ourselves to be
slaughtered like this because we did not believe it could happen, I wonder ... I think maybe these jokes are
really a little bit true. I think maybe we are a little bit stupid, that’s how all of this happened. (Alen, 2006)

Popular discourse on the Bosnian War has often emphasized Bosnian ignorance of the idea that
conflict was imminent; Bosnians felt that they were a model of Yugoslavism, and thus they were
unprepared for ethnic violence (Donia and Fine, 1995). While some have questioned accounts that
portray Bosnians, particularly Bosniaks, as completely naive and unaware of the impending vio-
lence, arguing that this contributes to Bosniak narratives that focus too singularly on their total
Sheftel 151

victimhood (Miller, 2006), this theme is nevertheless extremely present in humour about the war.
This humour pokes fun at Bosniaks for being so stupid as to allow themselves to be murdered so
easily. In jokes such as the one cited above, Alen does not brag about his innocence; rather, he
seems to express shame about it. Holocaust scholars have devoted considerable attention to the
phenomenon of ‘Holocaust guilt’, referring not only to guilt about having survived, but of strug-
gling to remember and interpret one’s lack of resistance to Nazi oppression (Felman and Laub,
1991; Langer, 1991). To admit that one perhaps allowed oneself to be victimized, and one’s family
and loved ones to be displaced or murdered, is to admit an incredible amount of weakness.
Pirandello (1966) mused that humour emerged at the intersection of what human beings aspire to
be, and the reality of what they actually are, saying that:

While a sociologist describes social life as he objectively observes it, the humorist, armed with his sharp
intuition, shows and reveals how appearances are vastly different from what goes on in his associates’
unconscious. Indeed we lie psychologically just as we lie socially. Lying to ourselves by living consciously
only on the surface of our psychological being is the result of the social lie. (1966: 50)

Alen’s jokes seem to be situated precisely in that intersection.

The excerpt from the Sarajevo Survival Guide cited in the previous section similarly avoids
victimhood, in this case by subverting it and reclaiming the activities of citizens in a besieged city
as having different meanings. As this article’s opening quote from Alma suggests, many
interviewees, when asked what they talk about when they remember the war among their family
and friends, refer to ‘funny stories’. Alen, too, told me:

We talk a lot about funny things that happened to us. How some neighbour went to plug in electricity into
the building of the police department, because they had electricity during the war, and how they caught
him on the roof, and they took him to the prison, and they were laughing at him. I guess we talk about that
kind of stuff, mostly. (Alen, 2006)

While such anecdotes are not as obviously political as others, they nevertheless relate to the
approach of the Sarajevo Survival Guide, of making something funny out of something tragic, and
thereby subverting one’s victimhood. They demonstrate ingenuity in the face of deprivation, but
they do not fall into the trap of claiming some sort of heroism; we are still making fun here. These
stories position Bosnians as neither victims nor heroes, allowing them to avoid the traps of domi-
nant narratives in the region that try to push them into one or both of those roles. Furthermore,
contrary to the Hobbesian notion that humour asserts dominance, Bosnian self-mockery shows
quite the opposite; humour is found in laughing about how one is inferior, and in finding non-
threatening ways to express one’s foibles (Solomon, 2002). This can also be found in laughter at
how ethnic narratives are being unproductively perpetuated in the present day. No Man’s Land,
Danis Tanović’s 2001 film about the Bosnian War, depicts three soldiers, one Serb and two
Bosnians, who are trapped between the two armies’ front lines. One of the Bosnians, Cera, is
immobilized on a bouncing landmine that will explode if he attempts to get up, and it is the slow
lack of resolution of this issue that keeps these men in the same space for the duration of the film.
While much of the film is a commentary on how the conflict irreparably damaged Bosnia, and on
the international community’s ineptitude there, there are various moments that poke fun at
Bosnians themselves. For example, in one scene, two Bosnian soldiers are sitting watch at their
front line. Listening to the radio, one soldier exclaims, ‘Ooh.’ ‘What is it?’ the second one replies.
‘Ooooh,’ the first soldier repeats. ‘What’s wrong?’ asks the second one. ‘Fuck!’ mutters the first
one. ‘What?’ replies the second soldier, frustrated at this point. Finally, the first soldier replies,
152 Memory Studies 5(2)

‘Did you see ... Such a mess in Rwanda!’ (Tanović, 2001). Such a use of irony only highlights the
foolishness of the soldier, of how one can be right in the middle of a violent mess and still not
realize one’s predicament.
There is obviously something hilarious about a Bosnian soldier on the front lines of his bloody
and similarly genocidal conflict pitying Rwanda. The scene satirizes those often-repeated stories
of how Bosnians sat and waited while the war approached, naively expecting to be safe. Zoran
describes the expectation that the war would not reach his hometown of Bihać by saying:

You know what, it’s amazing, I’m going to tell you a story. The war started in Croatia, we were so passive
about it. The war started in Slovenia, we were so passive about it, we were telling that it’s not going to
come to Bosnia, this is unbelievable, it’s just happening for a day or two and it’s going to stop, and then
the war continued in Croatia – the shelling, the dead people, the killing civilians, tanks, guns all around,
towns destroyed, and we were still like ... we still believed that it’s not going to come to Bosnia. And then
the war started in Bosanska Krupa, it’s like ... 25 kilometres from Bihać, and we were singing songs about
Yugoslavia in Bihać, about Yugoslavia! And that same Yugoslav Army was attacking ... Muslims and
Croats in Bosanska Krupa. And all of a sudden, war came to Bihać ... And we still, I remember the first day
of war, I was in a shelter, in the basement, with many of my neighbours, and we still talked about how it’s
going to pass in a couple of days, this is just ... we were just misunderstanding, you know. But it didn’t, it
lasted for three and a half years. We were so passive here .... People were so passive ... (Zoran, 2006)

Tanović mocks this blindness by taking it even further; even at the front lines, as an active par-
ticipant in the conflict, our soldier does not understand that Bosnians have little to pity about
Rwandans. He is not fully aware of what he is part of. Rather than glorifying Bosnian victimhood
or naïveté in the war, this humour critiques it. Bosnians are foolish, rather than noble. This self-
critique also demonstrates a cynicism that feeds into a Bosnian sense of cosmopolitanism, avoid-
ing overly sentimental narratives and asserting a self-aware intelligence that counteracts their
image as downtrodden masses without agency.12 Because this is an act of laughing at one’s own
naiveté or stupidity, this self-aware use of ironic humour serves to make present-day Bosnians,
laughing at themselves, regain their dignity and intelligence.
Tanović does not just mock Bosnian naïveté, though. In another scene, the two mobile soldiers
who are stuck in no man’s land, Čiki and Nino, descend into an argument about who started the
war; what begins as a tense and worrying exchange escalates into juvenile taunting, as both men
shout at each other ad nauseum, ‘Who started the war? You started it!’ (2001). The ways in which
the various Bosnian ethnic groups have, and continue to, shape their own narratives of the war are
reduced to childish bickering. The situation is only resolved when Čiki, the Bosnian, points his
rifle at Nino and forces him to confess that the Serbs started the war. This meta-commentary
therefore problematizes not only Bosnian narratives of their role in the war, but also the divisive
and almost arbitrary context in which they are formed; it is in some ways more incisive than
scholarly critiques of these narratives have been. As Cera, who acts as a Greek chorus throughout
the film, eventually declares, ‘Who cares who started it? We’re all in the same shit now’ (Tanović,
2001). This is both literally true of the circumstance in which the three soldiers find themselves,
and figuratively true of the reality of post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is politically
unstable and impoverished. As Alen told me, ‘I don’t need to remember the past. I need a job!’ a
statement on which he elaborated by joking, ‘I personally don’t freakin’ care who is a Muslim, who
is a Serb, who is a Croat. Let us work. Let us earn money. Let us make kids!’ (2006). Both Cera
and Alen are saying that this obsession with proving who did what to whom is arbitrary, and is
distracting Bosnians from the mess in which they currently find themselves.
Sheftel 153

By laughing at themselves, then, Bosnians are able to address several things. First, they can
explore feelings of shame and foolishness about their role in the war, echoing Freud’s (1938) ideas
about humour as a way to express taboo ideas. Second, they can subvert or reinvent what it means
to have been a ‘victim’ in the war, particularly around stories of life under siege where one literally
could not act. Finally, they are able to point out the ways in which their own public narratives about
the war are contributing to Bosnia’s continued instability. Laughter here serves as both relief and
critique. It paints Bosnian actors as self-aware, cynical and cosmopolitan; they were passive during
the war, but the post-conflict context affords them the possibility to counteract that reputation
through humorous self-critique.

Laughing at the absurdity of war

We were so skinny at the end of the war, I am saying sometimes that this was the biggest benefit of the
war … we looked like movie stars. It is a good way to diet, when you are hiding in the basement and
snipers are keeping food from getting to you. Maybe the Serbs did us a favour, they helped us control our
appetites. (Mirela, 2006)

Jokes about weight loss thanks to life under siege abound in Bosnia; there is an almost identical
passage to Mirela’s remarks in the Sarajevo Survival Guide, which explains dryly that, ‘Sarajevo
is a city of slender people. Its citizens could be authors of the most up-dated diets. No one is fat
any longer. The only thing you need is to have your city under siege – there lies the secret of a great
shape’ (FAMA, 1993: 8). Why joke so much about getting skinny due to a war-imposed starvation
diet, and why have these jokes persisted into the post-conflict landscape? As was suggested in
previous sections, many Bosnians have had difficulty adjusting to the changing opinions they are
supposed to have about their neighbours; in a short period of time, they were expected to go from
being a ‘model’ Yugoslav society, to one in which the three ethnicities are at odds with each other.
Playing around with the role of victim and aggressor in the above quotes blurs these divisions
considerably. Furthermore, it once again subverts the idea of being victimized. It also mocks the
perpetrator for having ‘[done] us a favour’, playing into a long legacy of ridiculing perpetrators
(Rosen, 2004). Wiesenthal (1990) muses that in the case of the Holocaust, humour could be a use-
ful tool of rapprochement between victim and perpetrator, as a way of bridging distance, but that:

it should sometimes be deliberately employed as a weapon: the neo-Nazis are best fought by making them
look ridiculous. It should even be possible, in retrospect, to make figures like Hitler and Himmler objects
not only of revulsion but also of ridicule. I cannot think of anything more ridiculous than that moustachioed
Germanic dwarf with his tinted hair, who barked his speeches like a seal and then, like a string puppet,
flung up his arm awkwardly and crookedly in the Hitler salute. One cannot nowadays watch film clips of
his big speeches without laughing. (1989: 407)

Does humour about wartime weight loss cause a rapprochement by blurring categories, or does it
ridicule the enemy, taking away their power? The latter seems more likely, as these jokes do little
to comfort the enemy; the blurring seems to happen more to comfort themselves. It does neverthe-
less make the perpetrator look impotent and silly, although what is unique about Bosnian humour
is that one rarely takes a shot at the other without laughing at oneself at the same time. This is
certainly evident in No Man’s Land, which, while clearly a film with Bosniak sympathies, portrays
both sides as equally ridiculous, even if the Serbs, by planting the landmine under Cera, appear
more nefarious.
154 Memory Studies 5(2)

The most important factor in this and other humour about the war, though, is the use of absurdity.
Freud explains that nonsense humour ‘consists in advancing something apparently absurd or
nonsensical which, however, discloses sense that serves to illustrate and represent some other
actual absurdity and nonsense’ (1938: 665). Pirandello similarly argues that humour demonstrates
that ‘the pretense of logic is much greater in us than real logical coherence’ (1966: 50). As elaborated
previously, the work of Kant (1951) and Schopenhauer (1966) similarly see humour as emerging
essentially out of the conflict between logic and absurdity. The sieges of several Bosnian cities,
including Sarajevo and Bihać, where Mirela was located during the war, were ridiculous. By taking
such ridiculousness to its logical conclusion and emphasizing it with humour, one highlights the
real seriousness of its ‘actual absurdity’. The humour of No Man’s Land has been described by film
critics as Beckettian (Gibbons, 2002), and compared both to Waiting for Godot13 (Ebert, 2003) and
Endgame (Gonzales, 2001), because it darkly and unrelentingly laughs at the absurdity of human
actions. In one scene, Čiki and Nino bond over having known the same beautiful (Bosniak) girl in
Banja Luka, a reminiscence that is quickly broken when Nino comments that she went ‘abroad’
(Tanović, 2001). Such a moment only reminds the characters, and the viewer, how ridiculous it is
for people so close to each other to be pointing guns at one another.
Bosnian absurd humour is at its best when discussing the reasons for the war and its aftermath.
In No Man’s Land, the previously discussed act of one soldier pointing a gun at the other and
forcing them to do something they do not want to do ‘because I have a gun and you don’t’ punctuates
the film. When Nino manages to find a gun so that he can counter Čiki’s dominance, he quips,
‘There, we’re equal now’ (Tanović, 2001). These sardonic remarks create a nihilistic metaphor for
the meaning of the Bosnian War; it is about who holds the gun, and nothing more. Again, they
betray an intelligent, cosmopolitan self-awareness that counters one’s actually having participated
in such a corrupt and morally bankrupt war. Nowhere in the film does anyone confess a more
profound reason for this violence, or for why one ethnicity’s narrative of why they are at war is
truer than the other’s. In my own oral history work, interviewees would stumble when asked why
the war happened. This is not a straightforward question to answer, and 15 years after the war, it is
even less clear. Mirela explained:

Well, what it was really about, it started for one thing, and it ended with completely ten thousand different
things that weren’t even in people’s minds when it started. I guess, it started with ... the thought that it was
going to finish so soon ... it was going to finish as soon as some goal that some people wanted to pursue ...
and it ended in a complete mess. People were not even aware that it ended, in the way it ended. It is really
complicated to comprehend it. Because ... when you see the beginning of the war, it was ... it was just one
thing, and in the end, it turned out to be like ten thousand different things in my mind, and it is not really
clear, like, I do not know, I am still not clear on that, I think it is going to take years and years. (2006)

What does it mean, after a war, a genocide, and over 100,000 casualties; after a country is com-
pletely divided and restructured upon ethnic lines; after over a decade of an experiment in democ-
racy that remains shaky and uncertain; to still not know what the war, this thing that unleashed all
this instability, was about? Such a confusion can only be described as absurd. Alen similarly mused:

Why did it happen? I wouldn’t say it was started by the loonies. It was started because certain goals had to
be accomplished. And the certain goals were that one nation should prevail, and all other nations should
be down in the mud, and they should be manipulated with. And that idea didn’t work, that idea did not even
work in World War II. That idea will not work ever. You cannot evaporate a nation. As long as you have
five people, they are going to ... make a soccer team again. Of eleven. I would not say that Milošević
started it, that is definitely a ... right answer, but I would not say he was a loony, he had a plan, but the plan
was lunatic. The plan was loony. (2006)
Sheftel 155

Even Alen’s impassioned and hopeful conviction that attempts to destroy a people are ‘lunatic’,
and therefore a terrible basis on which to start a war, invokes humour. The resilience of a nearly
destroyed people is summed up by saying that they will ‘make a soccer team again’. Laughing
about how obvious it is that people will find each other and resist attempts to annihilate them only
points out how stupid the plan was to begin with. Mirela cannot comprehend the reasons for going
to war, and Alen thinks they are ‘actual nonsense’.
This confusion and absurdity extends towards the present day; not only was the raison d’être of
the war nonsense, but the resulting cultural and political landscape is too. During one interview,
Emir joked:

When I saw these images of Biljana Plavšić14 being transferred to prison in Sweden, it looked so nice! It
was like a palace. And I looked around at my small apartment that is falling down and I thought to myself,
this is how I can get a nicer place to live … maybe I can kidnap some people and hold them hostage for a
few days and then I could be sent to the tribunal and then maybe I would have a nice place to live. It makes
a lot of sense, no? I don’t have a job or anything to do here, maybe Sweden would be nice. (Emir, 2006)

Issues of joblessness and poor living conditions are popular topics for this sort of joking. In the above
case, Emir is referencing the idea that many Bosnians perceive that war criminals have been afforded
better lifestyles than they have, by virtue of being imprisoned in the West, where even punitive
accommodation is more luxurious than living as they do in cramped apartments or houses that are
only half-built, because of a lack of funds. It also hints at the reality that even within Bosnia, those
who emerged as successful politicians and public figures after the war were those who had profited
from it, while ordinary people remain disempowered (Jansen, 2006). Here is another aspect of the
Bosnian War that is ‘actual nonsense’: the guilty parties – both perpetrators and war profiteers – have
been able to live better after the war than ordinary citizens. Indeed, maybe Sweden would be nice.
Finally, the war was absurd because it accomplished nothing; it tore a country apart and left
everyone worse off than where they began. This is in contrast to narratives, as were described in a
previous section, of the Second World War as having been productive, because it brought about
Titoist Yugoslavia and Yugoslavism. Vanja told me:

What was the war about? … You know the Eurovision song contest? In Yugoslavia we took the song
contest very seriously. We love music here, we love Eurovision, but it is very, very difficult to win,
especially when countries are making alliances with each other, voting is not fair. I think that Milošević
and Karadžić and all these men … really they are great lovers of music, and they wanted to give Yugoslavia
more chances to win the contest. Now we have so many entries in the contest … Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia,
Macedonia, soon even Montenegro, it is really a service that Milošević provided us, to be able to display
our musical talents in so many different ways … This is a joke, a joke … But it is a better answer than the
real answer, it is possible. It makes more sense. (Vanja, 2006)

Laughing about why the war happened, what it meant, and where it left the Bosnian people gives us
‘a better answer than the real answer’.15 At least, were the war to have resulted in an excellent strategy
for winning more song competitions, it would have accomplished something. Making one’s invented
accomplishment one that is so ridiculously minute only further demonstrates how impoverished the
real results of the war were. In the opening scene of No Man’s Land, a local man tentatively guides
a relief unit of Bosnian soldiers through the fog, where they eventually fall asleep for the night, only
to wake up to find themselves only metres away from the Serbian front line. Their immediate slaugh-
ter is what kicks off the action – or purposeful lack thereof – of the film. Čiki utters the film’s very
first words of dialogue by saying, ‘Fuck me if he knows where we are’ (Tanović, 2001).
156 Memory Studies 5(2)

Laughing at the international community

You know what is a good way to get rich in this country? Start an NGO. All of a sudden, EU and other
international people, they will just give you money, and you can do whatever you want with it! There are
so many NGOs in this country doing nothing but collecting money. Why try to work when I can just start
an NGO and collect millions of dollars? This seems to me like a good plan. (Dina, 2006)

Dina’s cynicism echoes Vanja’s in the previous section; however, while Vanja hinted at the guilt
of the international community in his words, Dina takes it even further. The role of the interna-
tional community before, during and after the Bosnian War has been controversial. It is accused
of having crippled the Bosnian military by enforcing an arms embargo in the early days of the war;
of having been complicit in the slaughter of civilians through the shoddily set-up United Nations
(UN) ‘safe areas’, of which the most infamous example is Srebrenica; of having failed to protect
refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) and to deliver necessary humanitarian aid
(Corwin, 1999; Rieff, 1995). The American-facilitated Dayton Accords ended the war by reward-
ing aggression and fragmenting the country into its currently unsustainable structure (Cousens and
Cater, 2001). The ICTY failed in its initial purpose of stopping the violence through legal mecha-
nisms during the war, and has brought few of the major players to justice in its aftermath (Hazan,
2004), as well as being disconnected and unresponsive to Bosnian concerns (Delpla, 2007).
Current international involvement in Bosnia-Herzegovina is not only complicit in creating a
dependent state that cannot function on its own (Bugajski, 2000), but has also mismanaged the
millions of dollars that it poured into the country’s reconstruction, only furthering Bosnia’s prob-
lems with corruption (Weller and Wolff, 2006). Dina’s joke refers to the last item on this laundry
list of crimes. The international organizations that were meant to help fix the country have only
further corrupted it; no wonder, then, that one might choose to laugh rather than turn to institu-
tional solutions set up by the international community.
On the international community’s guilt in the war, we return to the opening scenes of No Man’s
Land. Before planting the bouncing landmine underneath Cera, who is wrongly presumed to be
dead, the nefarious Serbian soldier who performs this perverse act examines the mine lovingly, and
exclaims: ‘Look at it: Made in EU.’ This goes further than accusing the international community
of not doing enough, but rather paints it as complicit. Following from this indictment, much of the
movie buffoons the UN chain of command, wherein the higher one goes, the less impetus there is
for actually intervening in the chaos of the war. General Soft, the British commander in charge of
the UN mission, is both cruelly indifferent and completely ridiculous; he reacts to the German
de-mining expert’s eventual news that he will not be able to deactivate the bouncing mine by
instructing him to ‘Get back into the trench. Pretend to be busy.’ At the end of the film, after both
Čiki and Nino have killed each other, and it is clear that Cera will be left to die on the mine, Soft
commends the implicated UN soldiers by telling them, ‘good work gentlemen, I’m very pleased. I
have no doubt that in the fullness of time you will be duly compensated’; to underscore the painful
callousness of these remarks, the viewer sees Cera listening to this exchange. The UN is literally
portrayed as ‘pretending to be busy’, and as being satisfied with such a role in the war. It saves not
a single human life in this predicament. The British journalist in the film, who is portrayed as
voraciously seeking the truth to the point of self-righteousness, is not spared; Čiki’s final words
before being killed in a shootout with Nino are directed towards her: ‘And you vultures film it? You
get good money? Does our misery pay well?’ These moments come together to form a dark
commentary on the international community’s role in the Bosnian War, concerned more about
public and political opinion, as well as advancing their own careers, than saving lives. It is in line
with the thinkers cited earlier who see humour as something cruel and full of melancholy (Koestler,
Sheftel 157

1969; Farb, 1981; Pirandello, 1966); one laughs at these depictions with discomfort, as they
relentlessly mock the darkest human tendencies in war. As the de-mining expert explains, after
inspecting Cera and determining that there is nothing that he can do to save him, ‘This man is
already dead’ (Tanović, 2001). Tanović suggests in an interview that contemporary Bosnia-
Herzegovina is ‘like the man on the mine ... waiting to explode’ (Fischer, 2002). Thus, the
international community plays an integral role in condemning Bosnians to their cruel fate.
One can also find such a sardonic view of the international community in recent Bosnian
monuments. In April 2007, on the 15th anniversary of the beginning of the Bosnian War, artist Nebojsa
Serić Soba erected a monument with the help of the Sarajevo Centre for Contemporary Art in a square
in the centre of Sarajevo, with a pedestal that read, ‘Monument to the International Community, from
the Grateful Citizens of Sarajevo’. The monument consists entirely of a giant can of spam (Figure 1).
As a representative of the centre explained, ‘The Ikar canned beef is remembered by the people of
Sarajevo with disgust. Cats and dogs did not want to eat it and people had to ... Everybody agreed that
we should do the project in this way. It’s witty, ironic and artistic’ (Reuters UK, 2007). Indeed, the
spam monument subverts colonialist notions of a people being ‘grateful’ for the assistance they
received by focusing on its inadequacy, which is demonstrated through a very literal depiction of what
that assistance entailed. What did the international community contribute to Bosnia? Spam.
What is especially interesting about this monument is how it serves a dual purpose: it ridicules
both the UN’s humanitarian assistance during the war, and the internationally influenced project of
post-war commemoration. It is also not the first tongue-in-cheek monument to appear in the former
Yugoslavia. In 2005, the divided city of Mostar erected a monument to Bruce Lee (Herscher, 2011),
and, in 2007, the Serbian town of Zitiste erected a monument to the fictional character of Rocky in

Figure 1. The spam monument.

(Reuters/Danilo Krstanovic, reproduced with permission)
158 Memory Studies 5(2)

2007 (Jovanovic, 2007). These artefacts are of course western-looking in their depiction of iconic
Hollywood personalities; this is an aspect of the western world that is appreciated by many Bosnians.
They also imply that these figures are the most easily agreed upon ‘heroes’ worth commemorating,
contrary to the more expected subjects of commemoration, such as wartime military commanders or
politicians.16 Finally, they betray a sarcastic rejection of the post-war project of commemoration and
public remembering that has been promoted and institutionalized by the international community,
through NGOs engaging in civil society projects, and through bodies such as the ICTY and American
calls for a truth commission (Kritz and Finci, 2001). They therefore get to the heart of the use of
humour in Bosnian remembering by rejecting conventional means of representing the past and
subverting them. They offer a meta-narrative that reflects on the story behind the mnemonic options
that have been put forward. Expanding on Young’s (1993) exploration of memorial possibilities,
these are both ‘counter-monuments’ and counter to the idea of monuments. They are possibly the
best example of humour as alternative political action; subverting public space, the spam monument
is in constant, visible opposition to the international community’s narrative of what it accomplished,
and continues to accomplish, in Bosnia. Its irony is relentless. It beats the international community
at its own game.
Bosnian humour that addresses the international community is mocking and sometimes spiteful,
echoing ideas about humour as aggressive (Kant, 1951), and as ‘joy mixed with hate’ (Farb, 1981:
771). As Payne suggests, the humour involved in No Man’s Land and the spam monument
‘[exposes] failed efforts to bring truth, justice, and reconciliation for past crimes ... [and] builds
solidarity among an opposition, subverts government authority, and demands justice’ (2005: 70).
The ‘Monument to the International Community, From the Grateful Citizens of Sarajevo’ therefore
makes the perfect punch line to this discussion of humour; it is a self-referential monument to the
content, processes and structures that influence and complicate Bosnian wartime remembering.

Conclusion
As a consequence of their complex relationships with their histories of violence, both ordinary and
artistically inclined Bosnians are interested in remembering and speaking about the past inasmuch
as that remembering can be understood as productive. Many found this utility in Titoist narratives of
the Second World War, but they have not found it in recent local, national or international narratives
of the Bosnian War. They therefore turn to alternative ways of speaking about and remembering the
past, such as humour. Humour is not the only way to speak about the Bosnian War, nor is it the only
way to counter dominant narratives about it. However, it is a powerful and often used tool that has
not been given enough consideration by Balkan and memory scholars. The examples discussed in
this article demonstrate that Bosnian ways of laughing at the war get to the heart of the major themes
that come up in discussions of Bosnian memory: the negotiation of victimhood, the absurdity and
futility of the war and the controversial role of the international community within it. Furthermore,
they address these themes from the angle of intelligent, self-aware social commentary that positions
Bosnians as cosmopolitan citizens of the world, rather than hapless victims, allowing them a more
empowered stance from which to negotiate how they want to be seen by the world, and how they
want to see themselves. This humour therefore not only resists common characterizations of the war
that feel humiliating and insulting, but it also completely subverts them.
What is also remarkable about these examples is how their different iterations – from oral
history interviews with citizens of small towns with little to no political affiliation to academy-
award nominated films – demonstrate that humour is present as a way of speaking about the violent
past across Bosnian society. While many ordinary Bosnians remain sceptical and disaffiliated from
many top-down political ways of speaking about the war, as described earlier in the article, humour
Sheftel 159

transcends the tension between the top-down and bottom-up; everyone finds ways to laugh about
the war and its aftermath, and a young woman in Bihać tells the same joke about wartime weight-loss
as artists and journalists in Sarajevo once did. Humour is able to transcend boundaries that more
straightforward political discourse cannot as easily penetrate, because it is not as fraught. In my
interviews, young people, old people, men, women, politicized and non-politicized interviewees
all told jokes about the war. It was a common element found where few others could be; as Alma
mentions in one of the quotes that opens this article, humorous anecdotes can serve as a form of
bonding among people who have survived similar things. It can build a sense of camaraderie and
solidarity where such dynamics are lacking. I therefore wonder if humour could also be a means of
bridging gaps between the still divided ethnic communities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where earnest
discussions of violence have thus far failed. Can it create a space not just to talk openly about the
past, but subsequently to move understandings of what Bosnia-Herzegovina is forward as various
citizens struggle to create a Bosnian state that is coherent and functioning?
Scholars who are interested in how speaking about the past can be used to mend broken societies
must think beyond literal approaches to truth-telling; this tendency is overly narrow and betrays
our cultural biases. We miss a lot when we overlook phenomena such as humour in our studies of
post-conflict remembering. This article shows that there is much to be gained by thinking as
broadly as possible about what speaking about the violent past consists of. Memory scholars have
often commented on the reality that memory is complex and non-linear; therefore, when asking
how people remember, we should be looking towards diverse iterations of memory, of which
humour is a prime example. Humour sheds important light on how Bosnians are negotiating the
post-war landscape, as their jokes blur the lines between what happened in the war, how those
events are being remembered in the present, and how the present is affecting their perspectives on
the past. Where wartime humour, as demonstrated by the example of the Sarajevo Survival Guide
(FAMA, 1993), represented an immediate resistance to actual violence, post-conflict humour
becomes even more complex, crossing temporal lines and blurring the boundaries between past
and present. When Tanović describes Bosnia-Herzegovina as the man on the mine, he is invoking
both the war and its aftermath; he is therefore critiquing the Bosnian predicament before, during
and after the conflict. As such, this humour is complex and worthy of serious consideration, as are
other alternative ways of speaking about the past.
Humour is also sophisticated and politically engaged; it is a legitimate means of speaking truth
to power. Humour is a form of resistance. The emotional and figurative truth of the humour
discussed in this article moves discussions of Bosnian memory forward beyond their usual tropes.
Studying humour allows us to focus on the resilience and intelligence of the Bosnian people, and
to experience some much-needed relief in the face of truly terrible historical events. As Tanović
suggests in the quote that opens this article, ‘it eases up certain things’ (Fischer, 2002).

Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by the Fonds de recherche québécois sur la société et la culture (FQRSC).
The author would like to thank Steven High, Neringa Klumbytė, Cynthia Milton, Stacey Zembrzycki and the
two anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article. She is also in debt
to her friends and interviewees in Bosnia-Herzegovina, who introduced her to the joys of Balkan humour.

Notes
1. All interviewees cited within this article have been given pseudonyms. While little discussed in this
article is controversial, the same interviews are cited in other work on more contentious topics, and
therefore the author has chosen to obscure their identities. All interviews cited were conducted by the
author, unless indicated otherwise.
160 Memory Studies 5(2)

2. See, for example, a recent piece on Gabrovo, Bulgaria, a town that was infamous for its House of Humour
and Satire under communism (Kimmelman, 2010).
3. I suspect that some scholarly hesitancy about discussing humour in this context comes from the culturally
situated nature of humour; it seems dangerous to interpret it when not a Bosnian insider. Along these lines,
I acknowledge that my interpretations come both from in-depth academic research in Bosnia and what I
learned from Bosnian culture from my local friends. Most of these interpretations are ones that I deemed
fairly uncontroversial from my knowledge of Bosnian culture, but I am certain that a Bosnian writing this
article would surely be able to go far deeper than I can.
4. Scholars alternately study what they call ‘humour’, ‘comedy’, ‘wit’, and jokes. While some, like Freud
(1938) and Pirandello (1966) are very careful about the distinctions between these categories, such
worries are not particularly important for the arguments of this article, wherein I refer to everything that
makes one laugh – from a joke to a sarcastic remark – as ‘humour’.
5. Bosniak is the common term for Bosnians who are of Muslim ethnicity.
6. Humour is, of course, not the only alternative mechanism for counter-memory. In other work on this
topic, I argue that silences and communist nostalgia are used in similarly powerful and subversive ways.
See also Hackett and Rolston (2009) on storytelling as resistance in Northern Ireland, and Scott (1990)
for his opus on various ‘hidden’ means of subverting oppression.
7. Borrowing from the caveat laid out by Farb (1981), I apologize in advance that the act of explaining
and analysing jokes and other funny things renders them not very funny at all. I hope that even when
‘speaking seriously about humor’, one can still find the examples described in the following pages at least
a little bit funny.
8. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina comprises 51% of the country, as opposed to the Republika
Srpkska, which makes up the other 49%. The Federation represents the Croatian and Bosniak ethnic
groups, but all three ethnicities reside in the region. However, most Serbs who I interviewed that resided
in the predominantly Bosniak Federation region around Bihać stood in solidarity with the Bosniak side.
Therefore, while this article contains oral history excerpts from the three ethnic groups, it nevertheless
reflects the politics of people who were primarily on the Bosniak side during the war.
9. As the cited literature on Holocaust humour shows, there is a precedent for laughing about genocide. I
imagine, though, that because much of the Bosnian experience of genocide involved such taboo topics
as sexual violence, it may take longer before we hear any jokes about it, or they may not surface at all. It
should also be noted that as an outsider, what interviewees would joke about with me might have differed
from what they would have joked about among themselves.
10. Film has been one possible exception to the academic silence around the humour of Yugoslav political
art, because the legacy of humorous political film in the region is so strong. See, for example, Horton’s
(2002) survey of humour in Yugoslav films of the 1980s and 1990s, and how they speak to the politics of
the time.
11. See, for example, Gruenwald’s article, which interprets the emergence of revisionist histories in the region
by predicting that ‘The maturing of dissent in Yugoslavia would seem to lend support to [the thesis] that
just as Yugoslavia was the first Communist party state to break away from the Soviet Empire, it may also
be the first totalitarian dictatorship to metamorphose into a pluralistic, democratic, multiparty system’
(1987: 528).
12. In her essay on staging Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, Susan Sontag (2001) similarly touches on the
particularly Sarajevan dedication to cosmopolitanism. In her justification for using a ‘gloomy’ and high-
brow play as a vehicle for Bosnian self-expression during the war; she refers to the criticism of such a
theatrical choice as ‘condescending’ (2001: 301). She then goes on to make the point that the significance
of her having staged the play in Sarajevo during the war was about more than a famous intellectual
standing in solidarity with the Bosnian people, but also that it showed ‘that this is a great European play
and that they are members of a great European culture’ (2001: 303). Sontag muses that, ‘Culture, serious
culture, is an expression of human dignity – which is what people in Sarajevo feel they have lost, even
when they know themselves to be brave, stoical, or angry’ (2001: 304). I similarly argue that humour is
also about the restoration of a European cosmopolitanism and dignity.
Sheftel 161

13. Waiting for Godot is a play that seems to come up endlessly in discussion of the Bosnian War, particularly
in reference to Sontag’s staging of the play (Sontag, 1993; Sontag, 2001). For obvious reasons, a play
about individuals patiently waiting for someone who will never arrive served as powerful cultural
commentary during the siege.
14. Biljana Plavšić, a Bosnian Serb politician sentenced to 11 years in prison by the ICTY, is a controversial
‘perpetrator’ figure because she pleaded guilty, and thus received a shorter sentence and comfortable
detention conditions. Critics have argued about her sincerity, and the implications of her case (for
example, see Drakulić, 2009).
15. Humour is not the only way of inventing reasons for the war, highlighting its inherent irrationality. In
her piece on rumour during wartime in Sarajevo, Marina Antić comments that spreading rumours ‘spoke
of the necessity of bypassing reality for the sake of survival’ (2005: 45). Humorous musings as to the
meanings of the war, therefore, seem to go hand in hand with rumours and other such non-truth-based
explanations. They make an illusory sense where a real one is lacking.
16. I am grateful to Cynthia Milton for helping me articulate this interpretation.

References
Allcock JB (2000) Explaining Yugoslavia. New York: Columbia University.
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Author biography
Anna Sheftel is a lecturer in the Conflict Studies Programme at Saint Paul University in Ottawa,
Canada. She has worked on wartime memory in Bosnia-Herzegovina and with Holocaust survi-
vors in Canada. Her research interests include: post-communist memory, communist nostalgia,
oral history, counter-memory of genocide and atrocity, memory and community politics, and war
tourism.