Humor against dictatorship

Dictatorships are serious and cynical. There is evidence that there were witty dictators, but their wit was exhausted in private circles. In public, they are serious, worried, puffed up, pompous...never funny.

Evo Incompetent, for example. His witlessness is sickening (as is everything else, anyway). This is why humor is the natural enemy of dictatorships.

There were impressive gatherings of citizens and the opposition against Vučić's dictatorship, but the absence of humor at those gatherings was one of the most significant flaws.

Nothing could be found on the rare banners, apart from scribbles and one-line phrases. There were no language games, irony, self-reflection, jabs. No one, in other words, was having fun.

Oh yes, we loved to be among articulate faces, to listen to speech instead of growling and muttering, to hear "sorry" if someone pushed or stepped on you, but trapped by pain, despair and worry, we were too serious, and dictatorships feed on the absence of citizens' energy.

That Ferrari flag, or the flag of Brazil, acted as a weak echo of the demonstrations against the butchery regime of Slobodan Milošević.

Studentism and the Renaissance

And then some young and smart world tried to hit the streets and took wit with them. Suddenly, comical statements began to be made ("The incompetent is not invited to the game of chess because the game is fair at Autokomanda"), and the banners came to life.

As we read on the banner from Kragujevac, "studentism and renaissance" happened. Those two words alone contain more energy, self-reflection, well-measured humor, than all the banners put together that appeared at protests against the dictatorship all these nasty years.

Because, in that joke, education, language play and content are gathered in such a way that they dismantle the dark dictatorship of simpletons and scoundrels with diabolical precision.

Humanism and renaissance are, of course, universal labels for getting out of the civilizational mire in which Europe has been floundering for almost 700 years, and now "studentism" appears as a condition for the possibility of revival (renaissance), as a movement that breaks the private property (feud) into which the dictator and his court retinue turned Serbia.

The same meaning is the transparency on which it is written "The air smells like people". Humanism is a term that marked the change of the central figure in the structure of the world: the ruler is no longer a god, but a man. The paradigm is no longer deistic, but humanistic.

Vučić's dictatorship dehumanized the public space and deified the leader who is asked about everything and to whom everyone prays. Instead of people shaped by civilization, a half-world whose civilizational characteristics cannot be easily determined crept onto the scene. Public space is depopulated.

And now, suddenly, the air smelled of people again. The entire twelve years of the dictatorship were summed up in those four words.

It's game over for you here.

There is hardly any need to talk about rhyming games. "Rockers with a Blockade" with the subtitle "For You, Game Over is Here" shows self-reflection and self-irony, but, implicitly, it also exposes one of the more insane actions of this dictatorship in which, under the guise of preserving the Cyrillic alphabet, the Latin alphabet is persecuted.

"Are you sweating when you count us" is a small but not harmless poke. The sheer number of citizens at the demonstrations draws attention to the unpleasant fact that sovereignty is in the hands of the citizens, not an incompetent usurper.

It is hardly necessary to talk about the cycle with Ćaci. Ćaci refers to the obvious, to the primitivism from which the dictatorship comes and which it unsparingly spreads. Ćaci makes visible what is right in front of our noses: people, are we held in power and fear by this half-literate bunch of ignorant and simpletons?

Michel Foucault formulated one of his important tasks as follows: to make visible what we see. Learn to watch. Ćaci is a kind of initiator of a revolution in viewing and understanding.

The banners, on the other hand, featuring the uncompromising prosecutor Laura Koveši and the uncompromising policeman Eliot Ness most directly point to the advanced cancer of society: corruption. "Here I am." Someone has to!" another is an expression of self-awareness and a kind of (self-)criticism of citizens' decades of passivity.

Against self-victimization

We could do it like this until tomorrow. The question remains: to what extent is humor effective in overthrowing a harsh and cynical dictatorship?

Psychological interpretations of humor note that it is important for getting rid of fear, that it is creative by definition, and leads to a kind of relaxation that helps a person on the ice not to be cramped and to walk more confidently. Even if it was just that, it would be enough.

But the humor brought in by these young people is substantially political, which is invaluable. Politically, this means that it serves as a connective tissue, as a sign of recognition of a group that opposes the dictatorship. On the one hand, it restores strength and keeps the tension high - because this fight will be long - on the other, it points precisely to the problem.

Finally, despite all the seriousness of the situation, the humor tells us that, on one level, these young people are having fun.

They sacrifice a part of their lives - although, in perspective, it is an invaluable gain of these generations - but they do not make martyr gestures out of the victim, refuse self-victimization, do not expose themselves to pathos and self-pity, but people, simply, pump.