Article Politics and Space

EPC: Politics and Space

2020, Vol. 38(3) 387–404
Laughing at power: Humor, ! The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
transgression, and the politics sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/2399654419874368
of refusal in Palestine journals.sagepub.com/home/epc

Lisa Bhungalia
Kent State University, USA

Abstract
This article examines the political and productive work of humor under conditions of precarity,
war, and occupation. Drawing on the case of Palestine but making links to other contexts of
violence and war, it explores the transgressive power of humor 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, it contends, constitutes a mode and
practice of refusal to normalize conditions of subjugation. Accordingly, this article explores how
humor, as wielded on the part of subjugated populations, constitutes a different kind of political
grammar that cannot be adequately captured by the language of resistance. To laugh in the face of
power is not to say: “I oppose you”—rather it is to assert: “your power has no authority over
me.” It is to refuse that power authorizing force. As such, this article maintains 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 disavow-
al, I argue, is also productive: it is to assert that other political orders and possibilities exist.

Keywords
Humor, laughter, transgression, Palestine

Introduction

Certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter.

—Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World

Corresponding author:
Lisa Bhungalia, Department of Political Science, Kent State University, 302 Bowman Hall, Kent, OH 44240, USA.
Email: lbhungal@kent.edu
388 EPC: Politics and Space 38(3)

Power has nothing to say to laughter.

—Barry Sanders, Sudden Glory

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 polit-
ical 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, embar-
rassment, 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 main-
tain an analytical distinction between laughter and humor. While humor, as Hannah
Macpherson (2008) has argued, most often involves intellect and some kind of shared soci-
ality, 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 under-
pin 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
Bhungalia 389

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, fleet-
ing, 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 punc-
tuated 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 ubiqui-
tous, but hard to interpret. For instance, I would routinely pass through Qalandiya check-
point, 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 alter-
natively, 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 trans-
gressive politics of humor. First, humor of the subjugated can do powerful work to desta-
bilize 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 genealog-
ically 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 produc-
tive: 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
390 EPC: Politics and Space 38(3)

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 reduc-
ible 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 invest-
ment 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
Bhungalia 391

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 sover-
eignty, 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; Ridanp€ a€
a, 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 poten-
tial 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 under-
mine rather than directly oppose power regimes through an analysis of how Czech indif-
ference 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 absurd-
ities” (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 disinvest-
ment. 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
392 EPC: Politics and Space 38(3)

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, increas-
ing fragmentation of the Palestinian national movement, and a compromised, and increas-
ingly authoritarian Palestinian leadership have produced a bleak state of affairs. The
precarious set of conditions in which Palestinians are currently enmeshed—stateless, frag-
mented, and aid-dependent—has much to do with developments in the political and diplo-
matic 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 ter-
rain 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 collec-
tion 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.)

For anyone familiar with modern Palestinian history, this joke will invariably illicit a chuck-
le that emanates at least in part from despair, as it indexes a time prior to the deep
Bhungalia 393

fragmentation of contemporary Palestinian politics. Indeed, while many have rightly argued
that popular narrations of the first intifada (1987–1993) problematically romanticize this
period, attributing a kind of harmony and cohesiveness to it that rarely existed, this popular
joke does nevertheless capture the collective spirit and ethos of the time when Palestinians
were more unified in a collective struggle against the Israeli occupation.
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 nor-
malization 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 real-
ities 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 pro-
duced 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 free-
dom 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
394 EPC: Politics and Space 38(3)

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 poten-
tial 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.

In Zahr’s account, humor is an effective tool for denying power its desired effects; he refuses
to submit to fear or intimidation or to be overcome with humiliation. Or to echo Batkhin,
laughter—and humor for our purposes here—crack open the official narrative and upset the
established social hierarchy. Zahr refuses to play along with the normalized scripts of this
encounter, opting instead to laugh at its ineffectiveness to keep him at bay—“I’m here for
the third time,” he exclaims. Zahr continues with an account of an interrogation by the Shin
Bet as he defies attempts by the intelligence officer to render him intelligible within the
established categories of Israel’s security regime:

I was in the VIP room one time for eight hours. Finally it was my turn to talk to the soldier, and
he says to me what they usually say: “What is your father’s name? And I say “George.” He said,
“What is your father’s father’s name?” and I said “Ilyas.” Now for anyone who knows Arabic
Bhungalia 395

names very well you know that these are two very Christian names, super-duper Christian
names. [. . .] So then he said to me “what is your mother’s name?” I said “Anaan.” Then he
said, “What is your mother’s father’s name and I said “Oh [shaking head], “Mohammad,” and
he got very confused. He said, “So are you Christian or Muslim?” and I said, “You know,
whatever.” He said, “No, no. I need to put it in the computer. Are you Christian or Muslim?” I
said, “Listen man, in my house we celebrated everything, you know Christmas Eid, Easter, Eid
again. We even celebrated Rosh Hoshana and Yom Kippur. [. . .] We just celebrate everything. I
said, “Just put Jew in your computer. Isn’t that better for me? Put Jew in your computer and I
don’t have to deal with this anymore.” And he started laughing, and I started laughing and he
said to me, “Where are you from? And I said I’m from Nazareth, like Jesus.” And I said to him,
“Where are you from? He said I’m from Tel Aviv. I said no. Where are you from from?

Zahr makes a number of moves here. First, he uses humor to mock the security rationality
at work. Zahr refuses to be the subject the soldier expects neither conforming neatly to any
one religious category, nor does he grant the solider the ability to control the course of the
exchange. Zahr uses comedy as a tool for rendering absurd what the Shin Bet seeks to
normalize and make routine: an interrogation of family lineage as somehow an accurate
barometer for one’s security threat level. “In pointing out this absurdity,” Zahr remarks,
“I turn the experience on its head and create power from a position, which is typically
powerless.” Joking becomes a way to refuse the colonial rationality that normalizes the
discourse that Palestinians are always, ever preexisting “security threats” and that under-
going interrogation for 8–12 hours and being compelled to recount an entire family lineage
is or should be, normal. By exposing the absurdity of these rituals, humor shifts them from
the black box of security and reveals them for what they are: racialized policing practices
that seek to uphold a specific racial, ethno-religious order. Second, Zahr uses humor to
unsettle settler colonial claims to exclusive territorial belonging. Flipping the question, he
often receives as an Arab-American: “Where are you from, from?”—Zahr turns that ques-
tion onto the soldier thereby questioning his claim to exclusive territorial right.
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 naturaliza-
tion of their conditions of subjugation. While Zahr’s humor can be read as a more overtly
396 EPC: Politics and Space 38(3)

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

It would be during a lot of these sort of black, operatic, Kafkaesque moments waiting at
checkpoints that I would see really funny scenes around me.
—Tanya Habjouqa18

The absurd becomes accepted. The absurd becomes the norm.

—NGO Director, West Bank19

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 tumul-
tuous 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).
Bhungalia 397

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 secu-
ritized 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 detri-
mental to Palestinian life. Roughly halfway through detailing the kinds of rhetorical acro-
batics 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 com-
mentary 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
398 EPC: Politics and Space 38(3)

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, individ-
uated 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 human-
ity denied.

Laughter as refusal

Laughter is always the laughter of a group.

—Henri Bergson

The native laughs to himself every time he spots an allusion to the animal world in the
other’s words.
—Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

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.

The encounter described here by Fanon speaks to the ways in which processes of racializa-
tion work and accumulate, as Ben Anderson (2014) observes, in living bodies. In this
encounter, the narrator’s body is transformed by the encounter; it is mutated into a dreaded
object, a thing to be feared, “a frightening and ominous presence” (Yancy, 2012: 2). Fanon’s
Bhungalia 399

body absorbs the impact of the white gaze—he becomes a product of it. The encounter itself
constricts: the narrator is “strangled by the attention” (Yancy, 2012: 2). In this process,
Fanon loses his laughter. He has become an object: mute and without affect. But the
encounter also stretches well beyond that particular moment and place—it is mediated by
the historical forces of colonialism and the processes of racialization that underwrite them
(Anderson, 2014). The psychological and somatic violence of that encounter—and the his-
tories deposited in this moment—accumulates in the narrator’s body. He becomes
“completely dislocated,” detached from his own presence—he makes himself into an object.
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 con-
tend, 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
400 EPC: Politics and Space 38(3)

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 defin-
itive 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 perform-
ances 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 subju-
gated (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 suffering24—that we might see a
something otherwise emergent.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Bhungalia 401

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

Notes
1. Palestinians with West Bank IDs are subject to Israeli military rule and thus are processed through
Israeli military courts (which have a 99.74% conviction rate). Palestinians with Israeli citizenship
fall under Israeli civil law, though they may be processed through the military court system (see
Yehuda et al., 2014).
2. The omission of humor is due, in part, to my predominate focus throughout the course of field-
work on other “objects” of study—war, violence, policing, aid—objects legible for funding bodies,
objects around which I thought I could write a dissertation. Humor was, of course, ubiquitous but
somehow always seemed to escape my direct attention. In retrospect, I realize that I viewed humor
in much the same way I did any other social practice integrated into the rhythms of everyday social
life—while acknowledged, it was, in my mind, naturalized, a kind of non-object for analysis. Given
my self-imposed analytical blinders, there are few direct references to humor and satire in my
fieldnotes. The “data set” for this article, thus, draws on my re-reading of my fieldnote logs with an
eye to the sites and instances where humor was clearly present but not consciously coded as such.
Accordingly, fors this article, I draw both on this re-reading of my own fieldnote archive, as well as
on popular cultural production in Palestine.
3. These range from James Scott’s (1985) classic theorization of quiet, quotidian, and personal
“everyday resistance” (infrapolitics), to subaltern studies scholars who importantly reformulated
“history from below,” through empirical studies on everyday resistance in South Asia (Guha,
1999; Sivaramakrishnan, 2005), to Foucauldian-inspired accounts, that consider how domination
and resistance is polyvalent and integrally embedded throughout all social relations.
4. Such is the point argued by Jocelyn Hollander and Rachel Einwohner (2004: 544) in their survey of
resistance studies literature. While considerable disagreement exists among scholars regarding
questions of recognition and intent, they maintain, there is almost “virtual consensus that resis-
tance involves oppositional action of some kind.”
5. In anthropology, see McGranahan (2016), Simpson (2016), Sobo (2016), and Weiss (2016).
6. This call by Coulthard has a much longer genealogy in Aboriginal political thought (see, e.g. King,
1990; Womack, 1999). Taiaiake Alfred, writing in the 1990s, calls on Indigenous collectivities to
re-examine the “roots of their own Native political institutions and the canon of Native thought”
rather than take the “present internal-colonial system as their reference point” (Alfred, 1995: 7; see
also Simpson, 2015).
7. Similar positions have been emulated in contemporary Indigenous movements against settler land
seizures, pipeline construction, and environmental degradation wherein Aboriginal geography and
governance constitute a starting point, rather than defaulting to settler norms and institutions as
their point of departure (see Vinthagen and Johansson, 2013).
8. While beyond the scope of this article, it is crucial to note that there is a rich literary tradition that
has turned to humor as a mode of political critique, including writers such as Mikhail Bulgakov,
Jaroslav Hasek, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and Jacques Tati, among others.
9. A second strand of geographical research has engaged more directly with the affectual geographies
of humor. Paul Routledge (2012), for instance, explores how emotional experiences generated
through political performances of “clowning” transform the intimidatory nature of policed
spaces, while Hannah Macpherson (2008) shows how laughter among visually impaired walking
groups forges collective bonds wherein the visually impaired subject is liberated, even if tempo-
rarily, from her reduction to an object piety.
10. One might recall the recent testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford when asked to recount her most
vivid memory of the alleged sexual assault by then Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett
Kavanaugh. Referring to the exchange between Kavanaugh and his friend in the room at the
402 EPC: Politics and Space 38(3)

time of the alleged assault, she replied: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproar-
ious laughter between the two.” Dr Ford’s response underscores how the laughter of those in
positions of power at the expense of the powerless—in this case, the expressed joy between
Kavanaugh and his friend, at the violence being exercised on Dr Ford’s body—is a particularly
cruel form of domination; their laughter is a reminder of Dr Ford’s object status in whose pain
they find pleasure.
11. The political and geographical processes inaugurated by the Oslo Peace Accords (1994-2000)
effectively rendered unattainable any prospect for the realization of a viable Palestinian state.
As per the Accords, the Palestinian territories were divided into a mixed sovereignty arrangement
whereby Israel maintained exclusive control over nearly 70% of the territory and retained ultimate
security control over the region in its entirety. Oslo also birthed the Palestinian Authority, tasked
with enforcing Israel’s security imperatives throughout Palestinian society, and created the
groundwork for the influx of large-scale foreign aid flows into the territories.
12. It is also crucial to note that humor, in different iterations, has long had a place in Palestinian
literary and popular culture. Emil Habibi’s (2003 [1974]) deeply satirical Secret Life of Saeed the
Ill-Fated Pessoptimist for one, was penned in 1974.
13. As the Great March of Return protests in Gaza ongoing since March 2018, demonstrations in the
West Bank against the PA, and mobilizations against the recently passed “nation-state law” within
Israel, which enshrines the ethnic-religious character of Israel as exclusively Jewish state attest,
popular, street-based politics are far from absent.
14. Yasser Arafat—formerly the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which became the
PA as per the Oslo Accords—was perceived by many Palestinians as having conceded Palestinian
national aspirations in pursuit of a negotiated settlement with Israel.
15. For a critique of the “Ramallah bubble” discourse, see Rabie (2013).
16. Painful historical events are too narrated with jokes. Palestinian-American comedian Amer Zahr
commonly rehearses a joke to audiences across the US–Palestine divide about the Arab cultural
tradition he coins “start leaving.” “We have this phenomenon in our culture,” Amer says, “which
is called ‘to start leaving.’ It’s when all the men are sitting in the living room and then one of their
wives pokes her head in and says, ‘Honey, let’s start to leave,’” Zahr says. “Yes, we Palestinians
don’t just leave, but rather we start to leave.” Zahr then jokes that the reason so many
Palestinians still remain in Palestine/Israel is that they “started to leave” in 1948. This year
marks the founding of the State of Israel and concomitantly, the expulsion of some 750,000
Palestinians from that territory. The trauma and pain of this historical period continues to
impact the lives of diasporic Palestinians and those on the “inside” alike. Zahr finds a way to
tap into this pain with a different grammar. Through comedy, he is able to transform the deep
pain of displacement into an affective release where, in the context of his shows, it is collective-
ly affirmed.
17. As but one example, Goldstein recounts how a family narrates the events leading up to the tragic
death of their child with fits and bursts of laughter. The narration of events weaves through
multiple episodes and layers of state abandonment and medical neglect, patronizing power
plays on the part of the doctors, and, in the final hours, medical staff smoking and chatting in
an adjacent room as the child died. As Goldstein (2003: 39) recounts, the family highlighted the
absurd nature of these tragic events in each retelling. Their laughter, she recounts, was “mad and
absurd, similar to the conditions under which they lived” (Goldstein, 2003).
18. Quoted in Tse (2015).
19. Interview conducted in Ramallah with the director of a Palestinian NGO in 2010.
20. The Taylor Act, passed by Congress into law on 23 March 2018, terminates all US funding to the
PA until the PA ceases to provide support to the families of Palestinian killed by Israel and
prisoners in Israeli jails.
21. Interview conducted with the director of an international organization in Ramallah, West Bank in
September 2009.
22. Interview conducted in Ramallah, West Bank in July 2015.
Bhungalia 403

23. Most of the literature on humor and Palestine draws direct links between humor and collective
suffering and exile (see Lionis, 2016); less has focused on the relationship between humor and
power in the context of the colonial encounter.
24. See Goldstein’s (2003) discussion of laughter in Rio’s favelas.

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Lisa Bhungalia is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kent State University. Her
current research explores the relationship between national securitization, liberal warfare,
and transnational linkages and encounters between the U.S. and the Middle East. She is
currently completing a book manuscript on the entanglements of regimes of war, policing,
and aid in Palestine with attention to the role of humanitarianism and development in
liberal strategies of warfare. Her work has appeared in Geopolitics, Political Geography,
Environment and Planning A, Society and Space, and Middle East Report, among
other venues.