CEBU CITY –Long before the toppled Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship, Egyptians used a weapon that Filipinos mustered against Marcos’ “New Society”: laughter. ”Every joke against Big Brother is a little revolution,” novelist George Orwell wrote.
One Internet joke has Russian president Vladimir Putin asking Egypt’s Mubarak: “Hosni, how do you always win with 99 percent of the vote? I wish I could get a similar landslide.” “No sweat,” Mubarak responds. “In your next elections, I’ll send my people to help you.” As the Russian election approaches, Mubarak has advisors fly to Moscow to help Putin. They succeed famously. . . Russians voted a 99 percent landslide — for Mubarak.
There’s a Filipino version of that gag on rigged elections. The late Jaime Cardinal Sin collars Elections Commissioner Leonardo Perez Jr. to say: “Leonie, if you ran the papal conclave, I would have been elected Pope.”
“Making fun of oppressive authorities has been an essential part of Egyptian life since the pharaohs,” Issandr El Amrani writes. “One 4,600-year-old barb, on papyrus, joked that the only way you’d get the king to fish was to wrap naked girls in fishing nets….
“In Egypt’s dense, hyper-social cities and villages, jokes are universal ice-breakers…They almost always remain the same: Our leaders are idiots, our country’s a mess, but at least we’re in on the joke together.”
Filipinos kid about everything, too, especially when pressed to the wall. Under tyrants, jokes express a muzzled people’s fears and resentments. Singing Bayan Ko or cracking a joke about the “New Society” invited a beating or detention, oftentimes both.
“We relearned what Japanese Kempetai brutality taught earlier: that political jokes are serious business,” Viewpoint noted (10 Oct 2007). “We hurt so much then, so we laughed.”
Remember the gag about emaciated and fat mongrels seeking visas at the US Embassy, off Roxas Boulevard? “Martial law has obviously been good for you,” the scrawny mutt told the obese dog. “So why do you want a visa?” The reply: “I want to bark.”
A similar yarn surfaced in Egypt. The US Embassy, in that version, is located off Tahrir Square. And 1981 emergency decrees replace martial law.
“Egyptians feel insecure when openly challenging the regime,” Ibrahim El Houdaiby wrote in the Guardian a year before the revolt: “So they resort to jokes, mixing bitterness with humor.” Poles, Czechs, and Russians did likewise. Filipinos wielded wisecracks as a rapier during the Japanese Occupation and under Marcos’ “New Society.”
A visiting European president once told Marcos that his hobby was collecting jokes about his administration. “And what is Your Excellency’s hobby?, he asked. “I collect people who make jokes about me,” Marcos replied.
Dictatorships clone similar abuses like corruption, nepotism, suppression. Continents apart, jokes reflect these cankers.
Imelda Marcos visits a corrupt Asian minister’s opulent residence. “I know your official salary,” Imelda whispers. ”How can you afford all these?” The minister leads Imelda to the terrace and asks: “See that bridge between those two mountains?” Imelda peers and nods. “Twenty percent,” the minister explains. A year later, Imelda hosts the minister at her even more lavish residence. “I know your salary,” the minister whispers. “How can you afford all these, plus 1,080 pairs of shoes?” Imelda ushers her guest to the terrace. “See that bridge between those two mountains?” she inquires. The minister peers but asks, “What bridge?” “One hundred percent,” Imelda replies.
That resembles the yarn of a dying Mubarak. “What would Egyptians do without me?” he frets. “Don’t worry,” cronies assure him.
“Egyptians are resilent and, in local jargon, could eat stones.” After a brief silence, Mubarak issues a presidential decree giving his son Alaa a monopoly over trade in stones.
“Can our vaunted Filipino sense of humor be harnessed to help us get through sickening corruption?” asked the late Jesuit Bishop Francisco Claver in his essay Of Laughter and Red Hot Coals.
Claver drafted the searing 1986 Catholic Bishops pastoral letter that denounced Marcos’s snap election as fraud-ridden. “Filipinos trade painful jokes for possible cathartic effect…Is it possible to creatively use humor as a means of purging graft?”
Corrupt militaries in dictatorships are the butt of jokes.
There was this captain who asked Ferdinand Marcos to promote him to general. “Answer one question, Captain,” the dictator said. “How much is two plus two?” Earlier, 53 colonels flunked that same question by answering: “Four.”
“Simple, Mr. President,” the captain replied. “Two plus two equals four — and all for you, Sir.” “Raise your right hand, General,” a beaming Marcos ordered.
With 350,000 officers and men, and sophisticated weaponry, Egypt is the most militarily powerful country in the region. Egyptian Emergency Law makes it a crime to “insult the armed forces”. As the military takes over, will it tolerate wisecracks?
Remember the Filipino farmer in the crowded bus? “You’re in the army, right?”, he asked the man with the crew cut next to him No, was the reply. Ten kilometers later, the farmer inquired: “In the navy?”, Again, no. “In the National Police?”, he pressed 10 kilometers later. Irritated, the man snapped: “No!” “Then, get off my foot!” the farmer yelled.
“In tyranny, political jokes are acts of defiance,” notes the book No Laughing Matter. And “Christ himself constantly used ridicule against his enemies among the Pharisees of his time,” noted Bishop Claver.
