Sit-Down Comedy and Writing Back to Authoritative Religious Discourse in Egyptian Digital Citizen Media

This chapter examines digital sit-down comedy in Egypt as a manifestation of digital citizen media, and discusses how the format’s distinctive features such as scriptedness, fictivity, and narrativity, in addition to humour, contribute to the creation of digital solidarities, which eventually influence the nature and dissemination of the knowledge created through the medium. The chapter also outlines one instance of Egyptian digital sit-down comedy: the YouTube series entitled Akhkh Kbir (Big Brother) produced by the independent news portal MadaMasr and written and performed by Egyptian cartoonist, columnist, and stand-up comedian Mohammad Qandil (aka Andeel) between 2017 and 2019. The discussion highlights mechanisms of the production of oppositional discourse, modes of engagement with the audiences, and channels of dissemination (and afterlife) of the material produced. The last part of the chapter details the challenges facing this kind of digital citizen media in the Egyptian context and assesses the possible impact of the knowledge created there.