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akademiskacademic quarterkvarterThe Rise of the UndergroundMoulay Driss El MaaroufFestival Doppelganger: The Interfacebetween Laughter and ViolenceA Humor is the Biasse of the MindBy which, with violence, ‘tis one way inclin’d 1Music and music festivals witnessed radical changes in their corereason of being, marking a shift from innocent celebrations of beauty,love and the arts to celebrations in the times of demise of innocenceand the contamination of beauty, love and the arts by thepolitical and the ideological. The death of the festival as beauty followedthe failure of organic society, where the concepts of the harvest,the crops, the moussem, blind marriage feasts, the halqa,country dweller, merchant, festivities for blind marriages have beentainted by discursive power, control, antagonism, cynicism and distrust.In fanatical reaction to unsettling local traumas (terror), politicaldisturbances (the bloody quest for democracy in the Arab worldin general and the North Africa in particular) and social anomaliessuperseded by petrifying episodes of social authoritarianism andthe widening of underclass anxiety , music and music festivals havegiven way to profane and violent modes of comic jesting.Dundes in Cracking Jokes, (1987, p. vii) departs from the assumptionthat nothing happens in a vacuum, asserting that ‘no piece offolklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something--even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate whatthat meaning might be.’ Humor as protest in the festival cameralcomes heterogeneously pregnant with symbolic and literal violence.Either through theatrical gestures and through music or anyother comic manners, the incarnation of violence characterizes thebirth of laughter from within a violent language of language (musicaltext for instance), the body (attires or posture), the social milieu(urban structures, graffiti, urban incongruities between places andconcepts). Protest itself signals an amount of counter-violencemounted against existing modes of violence. Protests, either ledpeacefully through art or violently through blood, capture the violentmindset of the protestor whose gesture hints at a burning desirefor change and the sense of struggle that goes with it. Humor’speculiarity lies in its elastic polarity: it can operate for or against,deny or affirm, oppress or liberate. On the one hand, it reinforcespejorative images; on the other, it facilitates the inversion of suchVolume03 35