Can the “Stripping of the Boss” be More Than a Joke?

Abstract

In January 2011, uprisings and demonstrations broke out in Egypt, and the reverberations of the revolution are felt up to this day. The events that lead President Hosni Mubarak to resign were violent, disturbing, and definitely serious, but at the same time they were fuelled by and caused a plethora of jokes and funny slogans which circulated among the protesters. Previous studies on the functions of humour have suggested that among other things, humour can be used to enhance group cohesion by lifting up the spirits or to attack the (political) enemy by sharp sarcasm, the duality of which is captured in the metaphors of a shield and a sword. The present article builds upon "Stripping the Boss: The Powerful Role of Humor in the Egyptian Revolution 2011" by Helmy and Frerichs (2013), offering another perspective on the functionality Egyptian political jokes grounded in the current sociological approaches to humour. It aims to argue that humour as an ambiguous phenomenon is unreliable in reaching serious aims and thus cannot be conceptualised as a predictably functioning tool in conflicts, although it can sometimes give insights into the functioning of a society as a mirror of the social reality.