This is a great topic for a volume. Humor or comedy—and the question of whether they are even the same thing—have rarely been touched upon as a unifying theme for Middle Eastern films. Pop culture students have succeeded, to an extent at least, in widening our frame of reference away from art-house/festival films toward more vernacular productions, movies made for local consumption and—yes—to hopefully turn a profit. In such studies, popular comic hits (and sometimes misses) have become increasingly prominent. Although this volume still leans toward the art-house, it is a welcome effort, pressing us to consider the place of humor as either genre or comic interlude.
It is also still rare for scholars, each of us coming from our own area of cultural and linguistic expertise, to look across our region as a whole. The authors herein stick to their particular turf, but with the distinct purpose of helping us to widen our gaze. The nine essays in this volume, penned by eight authors (co-editor Najat Rahman has contributed two), cover films from Palestine, Tunisia, Iran, Israel, Turkey, Egypt, and, in a deliberate leap of geographic faith, India. For both of these reasons, topic and coverage, the editors of this volume should be commended.
Many of the films/filmmakers will be well known to readers, especially due to the aforementioned bias toward art-house and auteur films. Although I do appreciate the impulse to decipher humor—sardonic, even slapstick—in such films, these are the essays that I actually find least satisfying, primarily because of their focus on auteur eccentricity and their lack of real engagement with either local or global comic traditions. Many of the authors are engaged far more in philosophical discussions on humor with Aristotle, Kant, Freud, Bergson, and Benjamin than with the academic or critical literature on film and comedy and/or the audience, especially local receivers. A number of authors treat aspects of irony or dark humor in sober films in which we might well expect a few light moments (can there be an Egyptian film without some degree of humor? Will Palestinians living under occupation not sometimes express sarcasm?), but which otherwise seem to be at best tangentially related to the deep-rooted comic conventions in each of the societies covered. Where are Parviz Sayyad, Ismail Yasin, Adil Imam, Zeinat Sedki, Dureid Laham, Shaike Ophir, or Ze'ev Revach?
This is particularly true for Rahman's essays, one on Palestinian film that focuses on Hany Abu-Assad's Al-Janna Alan (Paradise Now 2005), Rashid Masharawi's ʿId Milad Layla (Leila's Birthday 2008) and the work of Elia Suleiman; the second on several classic works of Youssef Chahine. Suleiman, a master of Keatonesque deadpan humor, but with a real ear for the satire of desperation, deserves deeper analysis, maybe his own essay. And Abu-Assad has been moving away from humor, if we start with his whimsical Al-Quds fi Yawm Akhir (Rana's Wedding, 2002) and end, to date, with ʿUmar (Omar, 2013), a shift that seems telling. Chahine's comic (and musical) insertions were often deliberate jolts, but with the exception of Inta Habibi (You're My Darling, 1957), an early madcap musical comedy, his humor is decidedly tangential. In any case, it is unfortunate to include him as the only representative of Egyptian, or non-Maghrebi, Arab cinema. Gayatri Devi's piece on Abbas Kiarostami's Bad Ma Ra Khahad Bord (The Wind Will Carry Us, 1999), the essay least rooted in local cinema production, is much more about the sublime than humor, and in a film that she herself describes, ultimately, as harrowing. In discussing ethnic portrayals in Jewish Israeli cinema Elise Burton casts a very wide net, conflating an infamous antiwar satire set on the Egyptian frontier with several post-“bourekas” (low-budget melodramas/comedies featuring Oriental Jewish stereotypes) homages and a depiction of Druze life in the Golan Heights that, some light moments aside, is a political drama. This is a rough mix caught between filmic depictions of Jewish and non-Jewish others, and Burton misses an opportunity to really explore Israel's rich tradition of social satire in which Mizrahi directors and stars have played major creative roles that are still too often overlooked.
The best essays in this volume—Robert Lang's on allegory and satire in the Tunisian film Al-Talfaza Jaya (The TV is Coming, 2006); Sony Kim's on comic meditations of the Iranian megahit Ekhrajiha (The Outcasts, 2007); and to a lesser extent Mara Matta's on Bollywood's Tere Bin Laden (Your Bin Ladin, 2010) and Cyrus Ali Zargar's on the Iranian comic Mehran Modiri—do add context, particularly in terms of explaining not only what constitutes humor but why certain movies, scenes, or jokes are indeed funny (Modiri, however, is known for Iranian TV sitcoms rather than movies, so Zargar's essay is a rough fit).
The most comprehensive treatment of a filmic comic tradition is Perin Gurel's essay on humor and anti-American tropes in Turkish cinema. Her focus is sharp and specific; she treats a number of popular comedies, none works of art. At the same time she covers an array of films, grounding some in the Yeşilçam studio golden age and others in contrast to the recent new wave of art cinema (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Fathi Akin, et al.). She provides a typology of classic comic characters rooted in folk culture (mock-modest man, trickster, wise fool) and a political economy for the industry since the 1960s. It is because of her article that I do not include Kemal Sunal, Şener Şen, or Cem Yilmaz in my “missing” comedians list above.
Mara Matta's article on the Bollywood B-hit Tere Bin Laden is included primarily to challenge the traditional borders of area studies. I am certainly sympathetic, but this is a misguided gesture. Does an Indian film made by a non-Muslim director that recreates Karachi in Hyderabad Deccan and lampoons foreign Muslim (rather than domestic Hindu) extremism, reifying Pakistan as part of a threatening external Middle East, really fit this volume?
Why end with such a loaded outsider gaze? Matta does delve briefly into issues of representation, especially with a Pakistani pop star in the lead role, but this film has much more to say about Indian views of self (what about Bollywood depictions, often comedic, of India's own minority populations?) than its Muslim-majority neighbor (often portrayed in Osama-garb, whether comically or not). If the editors really want to bend the borders of humor from within they might instead have encouraged someone to sample some Pakistani offerings, perhaps the horror send-up Zibahkhana (Hell's Ground, 2007) or the blockbuster urban caper Na Maloom Afraad (Unknown People, 2014). Such films, working at the most vernacular levels, evoke local visions and, above all, local senses of humor and self-deprecation.
