Puns and pain in Palestine: black comedy as cultural resistance in Ahmed Masoud’s The Shroud Maker

Abstract

Ahmed Masoud’s The Shroud Maker packs a powerful punch in using the implicative potential of black comedy as a site of resistance. Masoud deploys black comedy to resist and assert control over the exploitative discourse and action against the Palestinians living in Gaza. He does this by using black humour as a tool of alienation to detach people from their trauma, break the fourth wall to make the audience complicit, as a weapon to challenge Israeli dominant discourse, and to assert Palestinian control over the war’s narrative. Dark humour walks the thin line between humour and conflict in the play where “battered by injustice, but still defiant,” the eighty-four-year-old protagonist, Hajja Souad, a shroud maker by profession, introduces trauma through humour and then tips the balance in favour of trauma. Through her offensive jokes and satiric thrust, the play confronts the desensitisation of violence against Palestinians by evoking a reaction in the audience—laughter, followed by reflection on their laughter. While the balancing act between humour and trauma is maintained, The Shroud Maker argues that humour is perhaps the most effective way of communicating and ascribing responsibility to its spectators. Ahmed Masoud puts forth an alternative way of discussing political violence and war beyond the dominant western narrative that marginalises the Palestinian voice. Relaying the tragedy of violence and culture wars through dark humour underscores the message of resistance, coping and persistence in Palestine.