Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January-February 2009, pages 35-37

Special Report

Searching for Comedy in the Muslim World: Reflections of a Harvard Joke Collector

By Zach Warren

	Zach Warren performs for children in Bamiyan (Photo Courtesy Zach Warren).

Az kujasti? Cherte ze? Da kudan daftar kar mekoni?

I EVADE THEIR questions. A group of Pashtun men ask me where I’m from, who I work with. They’ve surrounded me in a bazaar on Jalalabad Road, outside Kabul.  Would they believe that I’m working with the Afghan circus anyway? They push me into a car. A man in the front seat hides a Kalashnikov with his headscarf. He doesn’t make eye contact with me, but the message is clear. I am afraid. I have no gun. It would be days before anyone notices I’m gone. I get in the car, but not all the way—I leave my foot in the door. In my head I begin practicing the shahadah, the basic profession of the Muslim faith, wondering if I can convince them I am a Muslim brother.

But I try something else.

“Yak Afghan, yak Amricoi, wa yak Arucia da motor bishina budan,” I begin: “There is an Afghan, an American and a Russian guy sitting in a car.” I tell the first Afghan joke I can think of. Satan appears, and tells them he will eat them unless they can tell him something he can’t do. The American shoots a gun, and tells Satan to “fetch the bullets.” The Russian shoots a rocket launcher, and tells Satan to “fetch the shrapnel.” Satan retrieves both, eats them, then turns to the Afghan. The Afghan has nothing, no guns, no rocket launchers (remember, this is a joke—in truth, Afghans have lots of guns, far more available per capita than Americans or Russians, in fact). So the Afghan turns around and attacks Satan with a fart. Disgusted, Satan flees. The Afghan is saved by his own humanity. It’s not that funny, but in the circumstance, that didn’t seem to matter.

My would-be kidnappers sort of look at me like deer in headlights, or RCA puppies to the sound of strange music. Perhaps they’d never seen a foreigner, a khorigi, tell a joke in person. They’ve seen Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme tell one-liners in films dubbed in Dari, maybe, but not a skinny white American from West Virginia. I’m finished, I think. Now they really don’t like me.

Then they do something strange: they bust out laughing. Not just laughing, but hee-hawing like little kids. Seizing the moment, I quickly push the car door open, jump out, and run toward a crowded bazaar. An hour later, I am safely back home in Kabul, me and my bullet-proof fart joke.

Of course, jokes don’t stop bullets. One shouldn’t laugh at his executioners. But jokes and laughter do have their place in diplomacy, despite the proviso in the cross-cultural strategies section of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Handbook that one should “Avoid humor and jokes” and instead “Rely on pleasant facial expression.” True, jokes aren’t universal, and much is lost in translation. Americans joke in English, Taliban joke in Pashto, Arab mujaheddin joke in Arabic. But all of us are hard-wired to speak the language of laughter, those breathy grunt, snort and sometimes song-like exhalations of “ha-ha” that we share with our primate ancestors, chimps and gorillas, when they are at play. Humor can enable frank conversations, release tension, and create social bonds. As Victor Borge once said, “laughter is the shortest distance between two people.”

Weapons of Mock Destruction

Circus juggler...at play.

I first came to Afghanistan as a circus performer for children in 2004. In 2005, a children’s circus in Kabul asked me to teach its refugee students juggling and unicycling classes. Still in divinity school, I was without cash, but my university put up the money. With a duffle bag of plastic clubs and one-wheel bikes, I was on my way. What I didn’t know then was that I would become hooked on Afghan culture, and return six times before moving here permanently.

Being a circus performer is an unusual way of encountering the stomping grounds of the Taliban, mujaheddin and U.S. special forces. When I meet with a tribal elder—sitting before his weathered face, wizened eyes, and that somber look that comes from surviving darker days—words and formalities sometimes fail. How can I understand what this man or woman has endured? Often, I can’t. But a simple juggling or magic trick can transform his face, and sometimes the whole exchange. When he twists his weathered face upward into a smile, I relax as much as he does. 

I turned to Afghan jokes in 2006. Bob Mancoff, cartoon editor at The New Yorker, gave me a challenge: collect jokes and cartoons from the region, and bring them back. “Let’s see if they have any weapons of mock destruction,” he said. After the Danish cartoons insulting Muhammad roiled the Muslim world, including deadly protests throughout Afghanistan, Bob and I were curious to know what jokes and cartoons Muslims in Afghanistan would find funny. So I began collecting, editing and publishing books of Afghan jokes.

Where does one find jokes? Radio and television is a start. On radio, Feetetype tells jokes during rush-hour traffic each morning. On TV there’s “Lahazaha” (“Moments”), a comedy show that features 30 minutes of “Candid Camera” jokes. More popular is “Zang-e Khatar” (“Warning Bell”), launched in 2003, that pokes fun at Afghan politicians and pop stars, expatriates, and other figures through impersonation. The show’s host, Hanif Hangam, is the Afghan equivalent of Jon Stewart or David Letterman. Another show is a comedy drama, first broadcast in 2006, called “Bujee Handa,” or “Bag of Laughter.” Not to mention “Handa Bazaar,” or the “Laughter Bazaar” show.

But that’s just a start. Jokes are heard in virtually every public place in Afghan society, from the streets and tea breaks to parliament meetings, when warlords joke about being sent to Guantanamo Bay. Everyone knows a jokester on their street or in their office. By comparison, American joke telling almost seems boring. There’s even a saying in Afghanistan that sometimes concludes a conversation: “Yak fakAi daren ludfan bugoyen, agane na daren, Khoda hafez.” “If you have a joke, please tell it. Otherwise, goodbye."

Jokes as Truth Serum

	Laughter at the circus.

There’s more to joking than a few laughs, of course. They often reveal realities about ourselves and our culture—our values, our assumptions of what’s normal and what’s not—without ever explicitly saying so. I remember wondering where in Afghan society women have power. They live underneath burqas and chadors, they aren’t allowed to drive cars or bicycles, and they must be accompanied by a man when traveling. Then a taxi driver told me this joke:

“Once, a Kabul man goes over to his neighbor’s house and knocks on the door. The neighbor opens the door and the man asks, ‘What was that loud noise last night?’ ‘Oh, that,’ his neighbor replies, ‘that was my wife when she threw my bedrobe down the stairs.’ ‘But a robe doesn’t make that kind of noise,’ the man says. The neighbor explains, ‘Yes, but I was in it.’”

In Afghan society, it seems, men dominate public spaces, and women—by joke reputation, anyway—dominate the home.

This method of understanding Afghan culture may appear unscientific to some, so in 2007 I conducted a scientific study on 100 Kabul University students. I asked participants to rank “who tells the funniest jokes,” and “who laughs the most.” The options I included were Pakistanis, Iranians, Indians, Afghans and, of course, Americans. Interestingly, participants ranked Iranians at the top. Second—and tied—were Americans and Afghans. Indians followed, with Pakistanis at the bottom.

The rank of Iranians didn’t surprise me, given the number of Iranian joke books I’d seen in Afghanistan’s book bazaars. But why, I wondered, were Pakistanis at the bottom? Humor is cultural, after all, and I expected Pakistani culture to be closer to Afghan than to American culture. I asked some participants why after the survey. “Because Pakistanis are dishonest,” one answered. “Because they are not good people,” another replied. Those answers have a historical context. After the fall of the Taliban, the Pakistani government forced many Afghan refugees out of their homes in a political campaign to purge the country. Many deep tensions and border disputes remain between the two nations.

Even so, having a sense of humor doesn’t require being honest, or morally upstanding. Or does it? Stalin and Hitler may have had a sense of humor, but nowhere in history books do we paint them as having one. One can find images of Taliban laughing in YouTube videos, and yesterday, I saw a video of a Taliban mullah dancing in a mosque. But when I asked the new Afghan government’s vice president, Zia Massoud, to describe humor among the Taliban, he said, “The Taliban believe laughter is a sin.”

In fact, Zia is wrong. Though the Taliban formally frowned upon cartoons, they did allow joke telling. In fact, even the Taliban’s Mullah Omar has poked fun in public speeches at his own disability—an injured right eye from a piece of Russian rocket shrapnel—describing the Taliban leadership as “the most disabled in the world.” That doesn’t justify his violence, but it does make him human.

Perhaps it’s that we perceive others as having a good sense of humor if we like them first. If we don’t like them, they don’t have a sense of humor. And when we don’t like them, their attempts at humor are, to us, sadistic. Americans see Ahmadinejad’s grin during nuclear technology discussions as a mischievous one, not a happy-go-lucky smile you’d want to see at your neighborhood barbeque. If an enemy laughs, that’s not ordinary laughter but schadenfreude.

What is the function of humor, anyway? The New Yorker’s Mancoff calls it a “rough and ready morality.” To that, I think the 12th century Muslim scholar Abdul Rahman ibn al-Jawzi sums it up in the Akhbar al-Dhiraaf wal-Mutamajineed (The Stories of the Humorous and the Witty). The purpose, he says, is “self-alleviation, for seriousness tires the soul.”

Sounds about right. The world needs Seinfelds and Eddie Izards. They lighten life up. For the most part, laughter is a currency that never loses its worth. And unlike money, we’re richer every time we share it.

Zachary Warren is a Sheldon Research Fellow at Harvard University, living in Kabul, Afghanistan. He has volunteered for aid organizations in Afghanistan since 2005, focusing on children’s development, and also conducts local research on humor for Bob Mancoff at The New Yorker magazine.

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