Excerpt on the power of humor against silencing rhetoric
in Perfect Victims by Mohammed El-Kurd, 2025
A PALESTINIAN MAN WALKS HOME IN THE WARZONE. There are sirens and explosions in the distance and a military tank outside of his home. He approaches the Israeli soldier in the armored vehicle and scolds him: “How many times did I tell you not to park your tank in my driveway?”
Here, the man has created for himself a realm in which the mighty Merkava is but a boring nuisance, a bureaucratic measure, like doing your taxes. In this realm, the soldier’s domination does not permeate into the psyche, his rifle is but a toy gun, and the tear gas in the air is just someone’s nauseating perfume.
In other words, irreverence is a dignifying act of refusal, for those confined by siege or incarceration can be emancipated in the mind.
To dig a tunnel, one must first imagine it before clawing at the floor. Irreverence builds an alternative reality where the occupation is not impenetrable and the occupier is not indelible. The police officer is not all-knowing nor is the sniper omnipresent. Here the symbolic meaning of military barriers does not extend beyond the tangibility of their cement.
For the speaker (the young activist, the academic, or the taxi driver), irreverence is not just a rhetorical strategy but a form of self-preservation and defiance, a stubborn rejection of psychological subjugation. Irreverence is the discursive equivalent of standing tall. I am grateful for the opportunity to be flippant, to satirize and ridicule my seemingly invincible colonizers—to belittle them, to banish them outside of my inner monologues, to turn them into a punchline.
I know that the price of a joke is volatile. Sometimes it is libel, censure, harassment, even handcuffs. Other times, it is free. But that latitude, rare as it may be, is worth the gamble. In this realm, laughter is akin to faith in its ability to make wounds hurt a little less. ...And much like faith consoles a bereaved mother by promising that her slain child, who has been blown to bits, is actually whole, in a better place, a martyr in heaven, laughter brings that better place to earth.
The choice to be irreverent at the podium liberates both the speaker and their audience, albeit briefly. In the pause between the laughter that follows a sardonic observation, something sacred takes place in the unconscious. The grand stage becomes an intimate living room, and the tragedy at hand, whatever it may be, becomes a family affair. The speaker exiles the prestige of the podium from his mind, discarding the role he was coerced into rehearsing, proclaiming what he had been taught to whisper. The spectators are, for a moment, implicated in the spectacle, polluted by its imperfections, in on the joke. Something sacred occurs in the unconscious: a world without pretenses where we look each other in the eye.
