Vaudeville Ideology and The Unconscious of Crime Comedy: A Postcolonial Arab Contribution

Abstract

This article proposes two theses: 1) Arabic postcolonial crime comedy articulates a social Unconscious expressed in cinematic “lapsus”. This Unconscious bears an unspoken desire of putting and end to authoritarianism and the police state, materialized by the omnipresence and omniscience of police in crime comedy; 2) Arabic crime comedy is a vehicle for a propaganda discourse at the service of “the ideology of vaudeville”. This ideology is carried by a discourse where the film promises citizens access to vaudevillesque luxury, such as wealth, sophisticated women, and even guilty pleasures, as well as integration into the fabric of the new middle class established by the postcolonial state’s policies, in exchange of their loyalty to the regime and adherence to its discourse of national liberation. Two Egyptian films are analyzed to make this case: Nizai Mostafa’s You killed My Dad (1970); and Najdi Hafez’ The Funny Crime, also translatable as Crime Comedy (1963). You Killed My Dad “dreams” of the death of the Father, arguably an unconscious materialization of the symbolic death of the Dictator. Crime Comedy stages a situation where the main character can literally get away with murder, be rewarded by marriage to a wealthy, beautiful, upper middle class young woman, simply because as a TV producer, he is part of the postcolonial state propaganda machine.Postcolonial Arab cinema – Crime comedy – Arab modernity – Vaudeville ideology – Middle class