State of the Egyptian Joke

Egyptian humor is as old as the pyramids--as old as images of lions and unicorns playing chess or of mice and cats pictured as captors and captives, as if Animal Farm really had its prequel 3,000 years ago. These days humor is the pressure valve that steams past censors, prejudice and increasingly oppressive Islamic mores. Ali Salem, one of Egypt's great playwrights, was commissioned to make a documentary to encourage Egyptians to vote, so he worked up a scene depicting masked robbers stuffing a ballot box while Egyptian soldiers and election observers stood by. (Salem visited Israel in 1994, and for that got expelled from all Egyptian cultural circles.)

Even Bob Hope was seduced by Egypt's humoristic temptations. In 1978, when President Carter was brokering what became known as the Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt (between Israel's Menahem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat), Hope joked: "A lot of the Arabs are upset with Sadat. He has to be careful every morning when he starts his camel." Like all good jokes, that one had more than an element of truth to it. (Sadat was assassinated in 1981.)

My favorite joke isn't a joke in the traditional sense. It's not even funny in the ha ha sense of jokes. More like an inversion of a joke: It's Cairo's Cities of the Dead, the cemeteries of the city filled with hundreds of thousands of actual (live) inhabitants, a custom dating back hundreds of years. It should be a joke, but it may well be one of the world's great wonders of self-regulating ingenuity. In a society hammered by housing shortages, the dead are the mother of invention.

But I'm hogging the stage here. I mean all this to be an introduction to Middle East Issues' first contribution from Catherine Manfre, a Cairo-based writer and editor who blogs at Catherine's Place and free-lances for The Economist Intelligence Unit, and who just filed a piece on the state of the Egyptian joke. So rear back and enjoy "State of Stand-Up: Egyptian Jokes and Humor." No translation necessary.