Reply to Abedinifard

Abstract

Abstract The incessant telling of political jokes hostile to the regime over decades had no impact on the strength of the Soviet Union. If under these most propitious of circumstances jokes had no effect then Davies concludes that jokes never do have any macro-consequences. Abedinifard disagrees claiming, using Iranian jokes about the homosexuals of the town Qazvin as his example, that jokes can have consequences where they reinforce a growing local sentiment in this case Iranian homophobia. Davies’ reply is that in Iran as in the Soviet case jokes are a puny, unimportant and ambiguous force in a world of strong unambiguous forces, in this case punitive and lethal Islamic homophobia. Davies further points out that the Qazvin jokes are the same as the ones told in Pashto in Afghanistan about the city of Kandahar and refer not to gay men in the Western sense but to macho warriors who assert their dominance by penetrating young boys who are expected to submit to them. The rigorist Islamic Taliban used capital punishment to repress these pederastic same sex practices but failed. The Afghan jokes are very funny but utterly unimportant in such a world of strong forces.