Al-Hamdania (lemonism): Failed humor, precarious futurities, and the cultural governance of laughter and unlaughter in contemporary Morocco

This article proposes Al-Hamdania (lemonism) as a name for a Moroccan regime of humor in which the joke no longer arrives as gift, but as obligation, and in which laughter is compelled, suspended, or withdrawn. Lemonism tracks a passage from taste to power. First, it reads failed humor and unlaughter as a public verdict on the collapse of quality, a sensory critique that registers in the sour face and the refusal to play along. Second, it takes the vernacular qadiya ḥamda (the situation is perilous) as a temporal intimidation, a warning that the present has begun to blackmail what is to come, such that futurity is felt less as promise than as risk. Third, it treats humor as a governed field, where platforms, campaigns, and moral repertoires police the boundary between the merely ridiculous and the punishable, sorting jokes into visibility, shame, and sanction. Working through cartoons and popular performance as diagnostic scenes, the article argues that sour humor is not a marginal mood but a political sensorium, a way a social order manages contradiction while continuing to demand laughter at the very point where belief, legitimacy, and the future fray.