Stripping the Boss: The Powerful Role of Humor in the Egyptian Revolution 2011

Abstract

The Egyptian Revolution 2011 has shaken the Arab world and stirred up Middle-East politics. Moreover, it caused a rush in political science and the neighboring disciplines, which had not predicted an event like this and now have troubles explaining it. While many things can be learned from the popular uprising, and from the limitations of previous scholarship, our focus will be on a moral resource, which has occasionally been noticed, but not sufficiently explored: the role of humor in keeping up the spirit of the Revolution. For 18 days, protestors persevered at Liberation Square in Central Cairo, the epicenter of resistance; at times a few dozens, at times hundreds of thousands. What they did was to fight the terror of the regime, which reached absurd peaks during those days, with humor-successfully. We offer a social-functionalist account of the uprising, which includes behavioral as well as cultural levels of analysis, and illuminates how humorous means helped to achieve deadly serious goals. By reconstructing how Egyptians laughed themselves into democracy, we outline a social psychology of resistance, which uses humor both as a sword and a shield.

Political Movement and Electionlore

“…In line with recent studies of political humour in Serbia (Sørensen 2008), Norway and Sweden (Sørensen 2016), Azerbaijan (Pearce and Hajizada 2014), Zimbabwe (Musangi 2012), Egypt (Helmy and Frerichs 2013), and Mexico (Schmidt 2014), my study not only broadens the scope of American-and Soviet-Union-centered scholarship in humour studies, but also provides a contemporary contextualized case study in which jokes appear not merely as decoration; rather they play effective and active roles in bringing political changes such as mobilization and dissent.…”

The Role of Employee Trust in the Relationship Between Leaders’ Aggressive Humor and Knowledge Sharing

“…In line with these arguments, Robert et al (2015) stated that negative humor might lose its negative effect and gain positive humor characteristics in stable relationships (Trust). Perhaps what helped the trust variable change the negative effect of aggressive humor on knowledgesharing into positive is that the Egyptians are noted for their enthusiasm for all things humorous; jokes, witticisms, the pun, and so on (Helmy and Frerichs, 2013). According to Blomme et al (2010), hotel staff suffering from mistreatment of their leaders/ supervisors, Antisocial working hours (Lub et al, 2012), heavy workloads, work-tofamily conflict, low salaries (García-Cabrera et al, 2018).…”

Egypt’s Neoliberal Reforms and the Moral Economy of Bread

“…Morsi's reign was short-lived; the revolution continues (Elwy 2013). Both the availability and affordability of bread, and bread as a symbol for the living conditions in general, in the cities as well as in the countryside, play a role in explaining the public discontent which was forcefully and creatively expressed in the uprising (Helmy and Frerichs 2013). This paper has reconstructed Egypt's neoliberal reforms of the last four decades in light of the moral economy of the Egyptian people in order to illuminate the loss of entitlements that the reform process entailed.…”