Humour, Jihad Al-Tabyyin and Performance Activism in Lebanon

Abstract

This article discusses how forms of humour have been mobilised to negotiate, subvert or sustain various paradigms of structural oppression. By so doing, it highlights the shift between the sacred and the profane; the religious and the secular in performance activism by looking into humour as a genre of Resistance Art, both among secular and religious actors. As case studies, ‘Christian’ comedians Charbel Khalil and animator Ralf Karam exemplify the former (the secular); and ‘Sunni’ Palestinians (involved in nationalist struggle) and the ‘Shi‘a’ resistance movement Hizbullah, the latter (the religious). The rapid evolution of Hizbullah from a marginal splinter group to a dominant segment in Lebanese, regional and international politics enhanced its orientation towards cultural and artistic productions by giving them more weight and visibility in public space. Hizbullah believes that art is the most eloquent and effective means of Islamic propagation; thus relating public interest (maslaha) to reform, resistance, mobilisation and political struggle. That might explain why Hizbullah invests heavily in performance activism. As a Resistance Movement, Hizbullah considers purposeful art, or ideologically motivated art, as Resistance Art. In its ideology, Hizbullah regards popular culture as a site of struggle between: (1) the ‘resistance’ of subordinate groups in society, the subaltern groups, or the ‘oppressed’, and (2) the forces of ‘incorporation’ operating in the interest of dominant groups in society, or the ‘oppressors’. As an Islamic protest (jihadi) movement, Hizbullah considers Resistance Art as counter-hegemonic art, which aims at rectifying individuals and reforming society by portraying art as pious–moral productions that provoke serious thought and discussion, rather than what it considers the ‘purposeless’ ‘art for the mere sake of art’. All of the above, including Hizbullah, consider humour as an ‘agency’; as a socially constructed phenomenon. Both Khalil and Karam support the dictum of ‘scourge of evil laugh’. Their works exemplify the theatre of the absurd: absurdist drama or tragic comedy, replete with oxymora, which Hizbullah also subscribes to. Since Khalil and Karam consider their comic works as ‘artistic resistance’ (muqawama faniyya), then how does their humour differ from Hizbullah’s Resistance Art? Unlike Khalil and Karam, Hizbullah does not consider ‘the widest possible spectrum of humorous expression an artistic, cultural, and social good’ (Schweizer, 2020, p. 36), rather only performance activism of Resistance Art and its derivatives of didactic and purposeful-oriented art and performances.