Jokestan
Humor isn't necessarily universal. This is one of the most important subtexts of Jokestan, an online humor spot for the Iranian diaspora. Take this joke, submitted by a Jokestan reader:
One day a Turk was walking with his son. The son says why is everyone making fun of me because I am Turk. The father says it's not because you're Turk it's because your name is Mazdak.
Mazdak! Get it? Mazdak.
Nonetheless, the site is worth a visit. Jokestan is one of the Internet's leading purveyors of Irancentric humor, a great big water cooler for Iranians in exile around the world. For non-Iranian readers, it breaks down barriers of misunderstanding and cultural blindness by building new, amusing monuments of befuddlement and cultural confusion.
Jokestan consists of a giant Iranian joke archive, a number of wacky photos, audio/visual clips, chatrooms and an overwhelming goulash of Iranian content. It's a hearty broth of miscellaneous, light-hearted stuff. The site is decidedly apolitical, and betrays no overt signs of the ongoing tension between Iran's increasingly reformist, secular-leaning educated middle class, and the fundamentalist ruling elite.
Jokestan's content is in Farsi, Farsi written phonetically with English characters and plain English. It's the sort of language soup appropriate to the trans-national information highway; inconvenient to everyone, accessible to all.
The language barriers take a toll on the humor. Written humor is based on shared references, wordplay, shared cultural understandings and deft timing conveyed through punctuation. Jokestan is able to deploy very few of these at any given time. But the punch of the site's visual humor is truly universal, and the intense awkwardness of some of its material causes it to wrap around the spectrum and become convincingly amusing.
As an example, I've trimmed the following comedic list from its original 15 items to a more carefully edited seven, and introduced some Western-oriented commentary to help make this review more of a dialogue.
Jokestan contributor Pir Rigi presents:
You know you are NOT in Iran (but in Canada when):
3. There is no Koubedeh around for miles.
Yeah, we've all been there.
6. Most men here don't have hairy chest and women like THEM better.
One has to wonder about the specific cross-cultural incident that produced this particular item.
7. Balochi people are making more money than you.
Oh, God! The Balochi! Don't get me started on them and their Balochistic ways.
9. You would like to have a white girlfriend but they are not interested in you.
Yeah. Hmm.
11. White women get all the attention in canada and get more respect than Iranian males do.
Some would actually argue that mounties get all the respect in Canada.
12. White women have better jobs than you do.
Well, that probably goes right back to the hairy chest thing. Say, what's with the "white women" hang-up, Pir?
15. You have a friend or cousin in the Iranian mafia in Montreal.
Well, that goes without saying.
The site is loaded with material as equally confusing or off-key, but that's okay; it's strange, and new. You can learn from it. There's also stuff like this:
Which, incidentally, makes a great e-mail postcard, especially when coupled with one of the enigmatic Iranian folk tunes the site places at your disposal.
Jokestan also makes an effort to collect some of the stories of Mullah Nasrudin, a legendary Sufi holy man whose wacky antics are often both deeply spiritual (akin to Zen, in many ways) and extremely funny. For example:
Nasrudin was carrying home a piece of liver and the recipe for liver pie. Suddenly a bird of prey swooped down and snatched the piece of meat from his hand. As the bird flew off, Nasrudin called after it, "Foolish bird! You have the liver, but what can you do with it without the recipe?"
Ah, ancient wisdom.
Jokestan is a strange place. It's not our place. It's not meant for our American eyes, really. But it does us good to explore an outpost on the Internet that wasn't built according to a Western outlook, that isn't based on a marketing plan and connects directly with a culture very distant from our own. Modern Iran is a complicated, sophisticated and strategically important nation, and we should avail ourselves of any chance to learn more about it.
