Authors

Iva Jelusic¹;  ¹ Christian Michelsen Institute, Norway

Discussion

While joking and laughing seem to contradict the common understanding of war and soldiering, they are ubiquitous to every war. Yet, despite the hyperproduction of content about the People’s Liberation Struggle (1941-1945) during the existence of socialist Yugoslavia, there are very few such texts. The focus of this presentation is on the 1962 novel Mačak pod šljemom (Tomcat under the Helmet) written by the author and Partisan veteran Joža Horvat and inspired by his experience of the war. It was an exceedingly popular novel that was adapted into a film during the same year, and then into a television series in 1978.

The protagonist of the novel is an unwilling hero as well as an inventive and cunning Partisan “tomcat.” He is also the possessor of a prickly sense of humor; in that, he is not unlike his creator, who was inconvenienced by it more than once. Importantly, this character is also the first literary Partisan soldier whose sense of humor presents his principal weapon in his daily contest with death. 

Through the analysis of the novel, the film, and the TV series, the presentation will particularly center on the representation of humor as a skill with which soldiers navigated between formal and informal norms as well as disciplining actions imposed by the communist leadership of the antifascist resistance movement. As it was a familiar type of military humor – often considered exaggerated, inappropriate, and rude – the presentation will aim to provide insight into changing possibilities for its representation in the Yugoslav media. To do that, it will particularly focus on the author’s joking at women’s expense.