Matthew Helmke - Humor and Moroccan Culture

A look into the hidden aspects of Moroccan culture that are necessary for understanding local humor.

For more information about this book or to contact the author please write:

Derby & Wehttam 263, rue Toufah Hay Zaza Fes Morocco

matthew@derbyandwehttam.com

http://derbyandwehttam.com

Contents 2007 Matthew Helmke

Cover art by Matthew Helmke and 2007 Matthew Helmke

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First edition, published 2007 by Matthew Helmke.

ISBN : 978-0-6151-4284-5

Printed and bound in the United States of America by Lulu, Inc. http:// www.Lulu.com

A Moroccan edition is being prepared and will be published by Derby & Wehttam. http://derbyandwehttam.com

This book is dedicated ...

...to my amazing wife, Heather, for her patience and willingness to let me drag her all over the world on yet another adventure.

...to my wonderful children, Saralyn, Sedona, and Philip, whom I love dearly and am more proud of than words can possibly express.

...and to my grandfather, Philip Derby, who always believed in me and who always encouraged and supported my endeavors, even in those times when he thought I was wrong. Thank you for always letting me be me.

I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues who helped me edit, fact-check and prepare this book for publication. I sincerely hope I don't forget anyone. Thank you Ouazzani Chahdi Mouhcine for helping me find hundreds of great jokes in darija and for reading and correcting my Arabic transcriptions. Thank you Steve Jones, Mark Renfroe, and Doug Clark for reading my draft manuscript and making incredibly useful comments during the editing process.

I wish I could give credit to the people I interviewed during the research for this book, but nearly all of them wished to remain anonymous. So, I would like to thank all of my friends, who have names like Driss, Mohamed, Rabiaa, and Sanae, without whose openness and assistance this book could not have been written.

I benefited greatly from my time studying Arabic in Morocco at a school called DMG (arabophon.com) and I recommend it highly, especially if you want to learn the Moroccan dialect.

You might be interested to know that this book was created and formatted using free software called Open Office, available at openoffice.org, on a computer running a free operating system called Ubuntu Linux, available at www.ubuntu.com. The book was written and published with the kind assistance of my small business in Morocco, Derby & Wehttam, derbyandwehttam.com.

Table of Contents

Dedication 5

Acknowledgments 6

Preface 9

Being from Fez 15

I'm not sure that is Arabic 21

Always exceed expectations 27

Don't give me advice 32

Who are you going to trust? 38

I won't let you buy that 44

Respect is more important than truth 50

There's always a twist 60

Society's foundation 68

Your words don't matter 73

I'll do here what I did there 80

Who should I believe in? 86

Epilogue 93

Final notes and thoughts 98

Selected Bibliography 101

Fonts used. 108

T his book will explore and discuss the hidden aspects of Moroccan culture, things that people who grow up in Morocco seem to know inherently. I started on this journey because of a joke. I was living in Casablanca at the time and had been studying Arabic . My friend Mohamed told me a story and started laughing. He reached his hand out to shake mine in a gesture that has now become quite familiar I like to call it the we both enjoyed that joke handshake of congratulation and friendship. As with most handshakes, it is followed by putting your hand on your heart. Unlike other handshakes, it is usually followed by all the parties discussing the joke you just heard and why it was funny. This is to make certain everyone understood it and can be included in the fun. I found the experience enjoyable, even though I had no clue what the joke was about. I was missing something and I didn't know what it was.

I decided to do two things. First, I asked Mohamed to explain the joke to me, line by line. After I learned all the vocabulary and figured out what all the sentences meant, I still didn't think the joke was funny. Mohamed explained it to me, but I didn't understand his explanation. I continued by asking him to explain how things would have normally occurred in that situation and suddenly something clicked. Here was an aspect of Moroccan culture that I had been missing completely. Immediately the joke made sense and I appreciated the humor of it.

The second thing I decided to do was birthed out of that moment. I decided to ask people, everywhere I could, to tell me jokes. Then I would struggle through each one, trying to understand it, trying to figure out what made each joke funny in its original context. This has led me on a fun, and often difficult and overwhelming, journey of cultural and linguistic study.

Once I had acquired a repertoire of or jokes in Moroccan darija an expatriate friend asked me if I would consider writing them down for him to study. I hadn't thought of that earlier. Most of this still-growing collection was made for my personal benefit and stemming from my personality I tell jokes all the time in my native language and I love to use them to help make new friends wherever I go. Jokes lighten the atmosphere and mood and help lower defenses. This makes train rides, caf vis its, and queues to pay the phone bill much more enjoyable.

I wasn't sure how a collection of jokes in Moroccan darija by a foreigner would be received and was pretty skeptical of the idea, so I shelved it for several years. Occasionally, one of my friends among the expatriate community in Morocco would ask me to tell them one of the jokes they heard me laughing over with our mutual Moroccan friends. I would oblige and translate the joke into English for them. Invariably, the non-Moroccan would not laugh. They wouldn't laugh even when I told it in Moroccan Arabic and they knew every word. From those moments I had an epiphany you have to understand the cultural tidbit behind any joke for it to be funny. That brings us to the book you hold in your hands.