Origins of Bosnian Humor and Its Role During the Siege of Sarajevo

Abstract

During the socialist period, under the rule of Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia has experienced an unprecedented peaceful period that lasted for several decades, however, it was followed by the disastrous Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s. The breakup of the state was not peaceful, especially for Bosnia and Herzegovina, which has gone through the ethnic conflict, four years of siege of its capital, and genocide of around 8000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. An interesting phenomenon is that despite these horrors jokes related to these events are widespread in Bosnia. At first glance it seems that humor in such context sounds inappropriate, but jokes related to the tragic events of the 1990s are numerous. A few years ago I came upon for the first time with the phenomenon of Bosnian humor. Specifically, I heard that people in Bosnia and Herzegovina tell jokes about the horrors they have lived through during the wars of the 1990s. While conducting a preliminary research one of the first jokes I found online was “How Auschwitz was better than Sarajevo?” and the answer is “At least there was gas.” The joke may raise moral concerns among outsiders, but it was, and still is, a normal phenomenon for people in Bosnia and Herzegovina to engage in self-deprecating humor. At the time, being unfamiliar with the humor research, it surprised me a lot. A layman, as I was one, usually assumes that horror and humor constitute conflicting mental states. That surprise rooted in my ignorance of the humor studies brought me to a current research.