The Deniz Göktaş Case and the Class of Humor

Deniz Göktaş Has Been Released

Eighty-eight days, four sentences, two convictions: the full text of the defense and a class reading

Dear Young Comrades

Comedian Deniz Göktaş was released on the afternoon of Monday, 28 September 2026, at his first hearing, after 88 days in detention. The Istanbul 14th Criminal Court of First Instance acquitted him of "praising a crime and a criminal"; sentenced him to 7 months and 15 days in prison for "degrading religious values" and to 11 months and 20 days in prison for "insulting the President"; and ordered his release. (Gazete Oksijen, Halk TV)

The message he wrote from prison the day before began, "After 88 days I will be handcuffed for the first time, and I will hear a car horn." This evening he will hear that horn from the outside.

Let us be glad. But let us put the gladness in the right place: release is not acquittal. The court largely adopted the formula the prosecutor asked for, that is, "a sentence, and release." Göktaş is outside; two convictions are on his record. In this piece we will first briefly recall what happened, then reproduce as they stand the message that came from prison and the defense he read in court, then give our class reading, and at the end set out, in every detail known as of today, the conditions under which the release took place.

What We Wrote Earlier in This File

This is not the first time we have written about Deniz Göktaş on these pages. This piece is the fourth link in a series that began 88 days ago:

• The Historical Materialist Evolution of Political Humor in Turkey and the Deniz Göktaş Phenomenon (27 June 2026): three days after "Ölü Deniz" was published, and before the detention. The tradition of political humor that runs from the "class madness" at the coffeehouse table onto the stage, and Göktaş's place as the voice of a precarious generation.
• The Deniz Göktaş Detention — Dialectical Laughter and an Epistemic Barricade (2 July 2026): the night of the detention at the airport. A state's "epistemic embargo" reflex against irony, once its capacity to manufacture consent is exhausted, and the anatomy of intimidation policies.
• The Illusion of Secularism and Social Hypocrisy in Turkey in Light of the Deniz Göktaş Case (4 July 2026): the day after the jailing. The political reflex behind the secular shop window, and a reading of the airport passport desk as a class border.

Much of what we foresaw in those pieces (that detention would be used as an instrument of intimidation, and that a charge built through religion would be chosen in order to feed polarization) has today been confirmed by Göktaş's own defense and by the court's verdict. The reading below is built on those pieces.

Summary of the Verdict

Charge	Indictment	The court's verdict
Insulting the President (Turkish Penal Code, TCK 299)	The "shy dictator" joke and a clip concerning Erdoğan	11 months and 20 days in prison
Inciting the public to hatred and enmity, or humiliation (TCK 216)	Jokes about fasting, the "fourth book," and divers	7 months and 15 days in prison (as "degrading religious values")
Praising a crime and a criminal (TCK 215)	The "Daltons" joke	Acquittal
Detention	Since 3 July, 88 days	Release

The two sentences add up to 19 months and 5 days. Some reports rounded the figure and gave it as "18 months in total." (Halk TV)

What Had Happened?

Deniz Göktaş was born in 1994 in Mamak, Ankara. He studied psychology at Middle East Technical University and film and television at Kadir Has University, and he began going on stage at open-mic nights about seven years ago. He does not sell his shows to paid platforms; he puts them on YouTube for free. "Selam Selam," in 2023, was watched more than six million times. (T24)

Date	Event
October 2023 – June 2026	"Ölü Deniz" was staged 198 times, before a paying audience of more than 100,000 across Turkey. Not a single complaint was filed.
1 June 2026	The show was recorded at the Cemil Topuzlu Open-Air Theatre in Harbiye.
24 June 2026	The 90-minute show was published on YouTube.
29 June 2026	The Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office opened an investigation.
2 July 2026	Göktaş, who learned of the investigation and returned from abroad of his own accord, was detained at Istanbul Airport; footage of him in reverse handcuffs was filmed.
3 July 2026	He was jailed on "suspicion of flight and of destroying evidence" and sent to Çorlu Karatepe High-Security Prison (a "pit-type" prison). An access block was placed on the video.
28 August 2026	On appeal, a release order was issued on two charges; before Göktaş could leave the prison he was jailed again for "praising a crime and a criminal," on the grounds of the "Daltons" joke.
31 August 2026	On the prosecution's objection, he was jailed again on the other two charges as well.
4 September 2026	The indictment was accepted by the Istanbul 14th Criminal Court of First Instance.
27 September 2026	A message from prison, the day before the hearing.
28 September 2026	The first hearing; the defense, the prosecutor's opinion, the verdict: two convictions, one acquittal, release.

Sources: Cumhuriyet, Evrensel, Medyascope, Euronews, Göktaş's defense (Halk TV)

The Day Before the Hearing: The Message from Karatepe

Deniz Göktaş's message, shared from his X account (@idgoktas) on 27 September 2026, as it stands: (Evrensel)

Greetings from Karatepe High-Security Penal Institution,

Tomorrow, Monday 28 September, I have a hearing at the Çağlayan courthouse at 10:00.

After 88 days I will be handcuffed for the first time, and I will hear a car horn. I have definitely not missed the handcuffs. Let us see whether I have missed the car horn.

I'm fine. It turns out you can live without the sun. The sun was an overrated bubble.

And a little news from prison: there is the thrill of moving up a class at Karatepe. A neighbor with two private jets has moved onto our block. Everyone is trying to behave in a way that suits a standard of living that rose, overnight, to a radical degree. In keeping with that, I picked a subject for this tweet that will count as a "rich person's problem": prison and music.

I was never the "I can't live without music" type. I can live without it quite well, in fact. It turns out I am the "I can't live 88 days without music" type. In one of my dreams, the moment I realized I had been released I put Peyk on at once, but something that was not Peyk was playing. There is radio, and there is Dream Türk, but something that is not Peyk is always playing.

I'm wary of praising things now. I praised TRT 2, and it has been gone for the last month. Bless Radyo 3: it played Gojira for an hour. Apart from miraculous moments like that, there is not much choice. So I had to get over the allergy to Turkish pop that I had carried, with adolescent stubbornness, up to this age. This week, while I prepared my defense, Dream Türk was on for 24 hours. I turn the TV off and go out to the yard only when my next-door neighbor Haluk Levent, "Mamak Türküsü," or "Haziran'da Ölmek Zor" comes on. The one good thing about the pit-type may be the acoustics.

If you watch Dream Türk for 24 hours you can see Ezhel four times. We missed him. Other than that, Turkish pop. There is an outbreak of girl bands, boy bands, and mixed bands. Everyone be careful. Do not enter crowded places. You may suddenly become part of a choreography.

My favorites:

• Eypio & Sibel Can – Kıyamam
• Mabel Matiz – Umrumdışı

I got caught by a prison guard while doing Mabel Matiz's "Ben büyüttüm boy boy" dance in my cell. I had also been caught once watching MasterChef on a derby day. That makes two.

Let me end this soft subject, which I chose so I could step away from the agenda before the defense, with a rap I wrote here. Bread is handed out at 9 in the morning. A few days a week poğaça comes with the bread, and we get to feel the joy of a croissant. On those days, first the sound of the service cart's wheels echoes in the corridor. Then the guard doing the rounds shouts a tune, like a street vendor calling his wares: "Bread and poğaçaaaa"

(In a Fuat Ergin kind of flow)

Bread and poğaça Time to spare If it weren't for Cicibebe What would become of us The menu is all carbs No cheese, no half-glass of Doluca Haluk [Levent], Cem [Küçük], Özkan [Yalım], me D Block, a four-leaf clover

Until we meet.

---

The Full Text of Deniz Göktaş's Defense

The text below is the whole of the written defense Deniz Göktaş submitted to the Istanbul 14th Criminal Court of First Instance on 28 September 2026 and read at the hearing. Halk TV published it under the heading "The full text of Deniz Göktaş's defense"; the subheadings are the defense's own. (Halk TV) Only a few spelling mistakes and repetitions were corrected; the content was not touched. The defense lasted about an hour and a half and ended with applause from the people in the courtroom.

88 Days

I was brought here from Çorlu Karatepe High-Security Penal Institution. Karatepe High-Security Prison is a prison known to the public as "pit-type." From 3 July until this hearing, my days passed in a cell that gets no sun, where I could communicate with no other detainee or convict. In this period, on grounds of high security and unlike in other prisons, I can speak with my family on the phone for only 10 minutes a week.

Today is 28 September. From 3 July to today, 88 days have passed. I have been detained for 88 days because of 4 sentences I spoke as a comedian, in my comedian's identity, in my stand-up show at the Cemil Topuzlu Open-Air Theatre in Harbiye. I was held in this high-security cell for 22 days per sentence. And these are minimum figures. For now, let us say 22 days per sentence.

Of course, as a comedian, it is a point of pride to see that the force of sentences can be this great. As a citizen, I am sad for my country's record on freedom of expression.

What happened to me increased my faith in my work. After I regain my freedom I will go on doing it with a greater appetite and a greater confidence. My only worry is that the courage of people who go on stage will be broken because of this case, and that they will turn more toward self-censorship. I hope everyone who writes, draws, and makes things will look at the full side of the glass. Every sentence of ours carries a greater potential than we think.

4 Sentences

If we asked someone who does not know this case to guess what 4 sentences, in 2026, require 88 days of cell confinement, we would probably get answers like a call for massacre by someone who has lost his mind, a hate crime, harassment. Whereas the sentences at issue in this case are nothing but jokes spoken in a stand-up show, which drew applause and laughter from the audience and do not even contain rudeness. I spoke these four sentences, offered as the grounds for my detention, on stage 197 times before the video of my show "Ölü Deniz," and I still stand behind my jokes, because my words do not contain the smallest element of a crime.

We Comedians

I want to say this about being a comedian and about stand-up show videos: we work in the opposite way from the order of releasing an album and giving concerts in music. Musicians first record the album and then release it, and after that they sing those songs together with the audience. Because when we go to a concert we want to hear songs we know and to accompany the musician. In music, familiarity and knowing the song are an advantage; in comedy, surprise and the wrong-foot are essential. Comedians first do the show live, in front of an audience, for years, and then, at the end of their tours, they record it on video. So the 90-minute show video at issue in this case is the final performance of a text that passed, over 3 years, through the live sieve of more than 100,000 spectators.

Under the name it was released with, I first put the "Ölü Deniz" show on stage at Harbiye in October 2023, in exactly the same way, with the same sentences. The last time, I staged it again at Harbiye in June 2026. From the first show to the last, I spoke these 4 sentences at issue in the case 198 times, before a paying audience of more than 100,000 across Turkey. Each time they were met with laughter and applause.

The number of complaints received in these 3 years about these sentences, each of which has meant 22 days of cell confinement: 0. In Samsun, Edirne, Mersin, Muğla, Çanakkale, Diyarbakır, Hatay, Trabzon, Adana, Çorlu, and Artvin, thousands of people did not see a sentence that required me to go to prison. These shows took place in the largest and best-known halls of each city. All of my shows were announced with posters and advertising. Spectators who came to the show from every part of society, far from complaining, were kind enough to recommend it to their friends and to the people they love. They came to the same show again and again with their parents, their children, their lovers. It is thanks to them that the "Ölü Deniz" show, including 2 Harbiye shows of 5,000 seats each, played to full houses for 3 years. The only complaint I heard in these 3 years was that people had trouble finding tickets. And that was because the tickets sold out fast. And, as I have just described, at the end of the 3 years I recorded this show as video on the evening of 1 June 2026, in the place where it began, at the Cemil Topuzlu Open-Air Theatre in Harbiye. Twenty-three days after the day it was filmed, on 24 June 2026, I published it on YouTube as 90 minutes, and events unfolded.

Trolls

I had also published the first show, Selam Selam, on YouTube in 2023, and it was watched 6 million times. So I expected this show to draw interest too, but it really did draw far more interest than I expected. Within 3 days millions of people watched it and shared it; programs were made about it, columns were written. But as we all know, trolls set the social-media agenda, and when there is an agenda outside their control that they do not like, they start attacking by using their operational accounts. The first post I saw from this troll team was the dictator joke, the one that is the subject of the "insulting the President" charge, shared by a troll account with a large following that uses the username Şamil Tayyar. They did not get the reaction they expected. On the second day they shared a part of the İmamoğlu joke and tried to put off the people who had claimed the show as their own. That, too, did not get the reaction they expected. Users who were evidently from the same troll team were begging their teammates: "Let us go at it from the parts about religion!" And on the third day they cut off the beginning and the end of the joke that became the subject of the investigation, tweezersed it, tore it from its context, shared it simultaneously from hundreds of accounts as "the comedian who degrades religious values," and started a complaint campaign to CİMER, the Presidency's public-complaint system. This is definitely not an organic reaction. That it is not organic can be proved with a small piece of research that scans the posts.

They showed this the next day with the false news they made. First the same accounts wrote that I had fled abroad, then they wrote that this whole show process was part of my plan to seek asylum. Whereas I published the show on 24 June, and on 22 June I paid the paid-military-service fee, nearly half a million lira, so that I could do my military service in 2027. I never had a plan to live outside Turkey.

Abroad, and the Return

Every year, the moment my tour ends, I go to stay with my friends abroad for a holiday. Right now we can divide people between the ages of 20 and 35 into 3 categories. 1: those who have moved abroad. 2: those who are trying to move. 3: those who are trying to talk them out of it so as not to be left alone in Turkey. I am in the third category. All of my close friends emigrated because they saw no future in Turkey. It was tragicomic to read the "he fled abroad" reports with the friends I was trying to persuade to return to Turkey. The more I try to stop the brain drain, the more Turkey gets in the way. Now I will try to persuade them as a comedian who has gone to prison for 3 months because of a stand-up show. We submitted to the court the false news and the manipulative posts about this whole process. Right after that, the "investigation" story came out. Before any official information reached us, I called my lawyer, Metin Bey. "There is no arrest warrant, but come back if you want," he said. After this news I cut my holiday short and, the same way I had gone, jumped on the first plane back to Turkey with three T-shirts in my backpack.

After I got off the plane I went to the airport passport police and said, "There may be an arrest warrant out for me." We checked together, and we waited. A police officer came to take me, and I walked with him to the airport police station. Meanwhile I greeted people at the airport who recognized me, and wished them a good trip. No one took my arm, and no handcuffs were put on. The officers at the station were astonished: "Deniz, why did you come back, are you crazy? If it were me I would never in my life come back." We waited, laughing, for the commissioner. I was surprised that even the police wanted to leave the country.

The commissioner arrived, and the first thing he said was "Cuff him." I said, "I turned myself in. There is no situation here that calls for handcuffs." He said this was the mandatory procedure. I said, "I do not consent. You will have to do it by force, then." At that the commissioner gave up, and they put me in the holding cell.

A while later a commissioner came from the Security Branch at Vatan, and again he said "handcuffs." I said the same things. This time the police had been dressed in shiny vests that were tight on them. I understood that a show was going to be made with video, and I said I consented neither to the handcuffs nor to being filmed. They did it by force. Because it was the first time in my life I tried not to have handcuffs put on me, I was able to resist for about 4 seconds. In the end I left, in reverse handcuffs and with my head pushed down, the airport I had entered saying "I guess there is an arrest warrant out for me." I congratulate the police force: they caught red-handed the crime machine armed with 4 sentences.

Vatan Police Headquarters and the Courthouse

They filmed me in reverse handcuffs from the front, from behind, and from the side. In all of them I lifted my head, found the camera, and smiled. I knew they would publish them. Because they could not catch the image of a humiliation ritual they wanted, they published a shot from far away and from behind. Then I was taken down from the un-air-conditioned officers' room at Vatan police headquarters to the air-conditioned supervisors' room, and from there to the holding cells underground, smelling of drugs and at full capacity. I am not exaggerating: every police officer asked me why I had returned to Turkey. If they had the means I have, they would not stay a minute. When we were children, parents used to say "Be a civil servant, your life will be saved." Now even they dream of leaving Turkey. Why should I live in exile for the rest of my life because I made people laugh at Harbiye? I was sad that people were this tired of the country.

In the lockup, the police officer charged with protecting us pointed at the man beside me and said, "If this psychopath kills you while you are asleep tonight, you will be a problem on our hands," and I passed from the state of the country to my own state. A while later they took me out again and took me to forensic medicine. Blood, urine, hair, and nail samples were taken. While the indictment and the investigation do not contain so much as the first letter of the word "drugs," I was put through a drug test with 0 evidence, 0 charges, and 0 concrete reasons. Eighty-eight days have passed, and we still do not know the result.

That night I was not killed at Vatan, and in the morning I was brought to the Çağlayan courthouse. I explained the jokes to a prosecutor who had not watched the show under questioning, or even those sentences. While I was waiting in the courthouse corridor for the hearing after leaving the prosecutor's questioning, a commissioner, despite my saying three times, firmly and clearly, that I did not want to meet, presented me with a fait accompli and had me meet Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. As if reverse handcuffs were not enough, I was also forced, before the hearing, to meet Kılıçdaroğlu. Kılıçdaroğlu said, "Why did you come back from abroad? If I had the means I would not stay here a minute." No. Unfortunately he was not the only one who said that, among the people I spoke with through this process. I did not want to meet him, so that advertising would not be done over me while I was detained. When it happened by force, I spoke firmly, clearly, and negatively. They lied even about the conversation everyone witnessed. The officers asked, "Why did you say let go of the CHP?" While I could not even see my lawyers, why was I forced, hands cuffed, to meet Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in the courthouse? I am still curious.

Later, the court I was brought before jailed me on suspicions of flight and of destroying evidence. Yet the moment I learned of the investigation I had returned to Turkey, even though I had a talent visa, which I had obtained to perform at the New York Comedy Festival and which provides residence and a work permit.

In the same way, while an access block was placed by the official authorities on my show video, which is the subject of the case and its only evidence, and while they tried to black it out, I shared it myself from my other social-media accounts. Far from destroying the evidence, I did everything I could to protect it.

The Cell, and the Video Hearings

In my first week in the cell I watched my reverse-handcuff video, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu stubbornly denying the sentence I had said to him, and the false news about my father put out by the outlets running a CİMER campaign against me. This troll team's concern was very clearly not religion. It was to silence every critical voice by using religious sensitivities.

For 88 days I waited to come to this hearing. Preparing an indictment of 4 sentences took 64 days. While this uncertain waiting was already exhausting enough, psychologically, I was also released and then detained again. On the 57th day, a Friday, I was rushed to SEGBİS, the video-hearing room. As in the detention reviews, my lawyers had again not been called. The judge who had jailed me was across from me again. He said that, as a result of the appeal, I had been released on both charges. He gave a beat. After a short silence he stated that there was a request to detain me on a new charge. From the "Ölü Deniz" show in question, that is, in a sentence I spoke in the first 5 minutes of the same show, a new crime was detected two months after my detention, at the exact moment I was released, and after the 30 seconds of freedom I lived in the SEGBİS room I was detained again for praising the Daltons gang.

Afterwards, on Monday, I was detained again on the other 2 charges as well. While I was watching MasterChef by myself in the cell, I had been jailed on 3 different charges within 2 working days. I feel as if, had the 61st Criminal Court of First Instance never granted release, my total number of charges would have been smaller. And here I am. On me there is the ease of a person who was released from every charge 30 days ago, and the unease of a person who was detained again 3 times the moment he was released.

A Shy Dictator

The reason my mother and father came from Ankara to Çorlu 12 times, so they could see me for only 1 hour a week from behind a glass, is the first of the 4 sentences, the one I spoke about President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: "the passage from a shy dictator to a dictator at peace with his own identity is, if we do not think of what happened to us, a positive progress for a human being." And BAM! No sun for Deniz, for 22 days.

The description "a shy dictator" here was counted as an insult to the President, and the phrases "he definitely goes to therapy; the last video in which he laughed was in a cemetery" were also found wounding. "Dictator" is not an insult. It is a political characterization. In another work of art one could say autocrat; in a comedian's show one could say democrat, and get a bigger laugh than I do. The words chosen change according to the manner of the written text and of the artist.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is also the General Chairman of the AKP. As the most senior official of a party that has been in power for 25 years, and of Turkey, he ought to be open to the art of satire and to humorous criticism, a centuries-old tradition of this geography. The "dictator" comparison in the show is a comparison made often, all over the world, for every office-holder who displays authoritarian tendencies.

The place that appears as "laughing in a cemetery" is a reference to a video, known as "Dear Musa," in which Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, speaking with a reporter years ago, praises the work they have done on cemeteries. Because it is one of the rare images in which the President laughs with a genuine belly laugh, it is often shared on social media, and people allude to it. For that reason the telling in the show is a simple comic observation, rather than a wounding expression.

Therapy, meanwhile, is a psychological support service that is a natural part of life, and that everyone should go to and benefit from. As someone who has gone to therapy for years and who recommends it to everyone who has the means, I did not imply a psychological illness. As a psychology graduate, it is out of the question that I would use the act of going to therapy in a negative sense.

The indictment speaks of social values and of the need to protect them. Humor, too, and satire, too, are values of this geography spread across centuries. The sentence "we are the grandchildren of Nasreddin Hodja" is spoken often, and yet when the subject is something we do not want to hear, it is blocked, or it is treated as an entertainment that must be punished. Whereas if a joke bothers you, the penalties you can give are known, and they are quite enough. If you do not like a comedian, you do not laugh, you leave his shows without an audience, you criticize his jokes and his text with the same sharpness. But censorship, bans, and detention should have no place among the penalties to be given to a person who goes on stage. This sense of censorship and prohibition, this fear of being detained, is worrying for artists and for what they make, and for all citizens as well. Politicians, like every public figure, have to weather these criticisms.

The Humor of That Time, and Today

Across the first page of the indictment, the investigating prosecutor made long quotations from the articles of the Constitution that protect freedom of expression, and from the article of the Turkish Penal Code that draws the limits of the crime of insult. A comedian saying "dictator" in a stand-up show contains no element of a crime according to the quotations in the indictment either. Someone like me, who is not a lawyer, does not actually need this information in order to understand that. Because everyone who is not meeting political humor and satire for the first time knows that the dose of criticism in this joke is very light and very soft. When I was a child I grew up watching Levent Kırca on television and reading humor magazines. I watched Ferhan Şensoy's plays; I looked, in the archives, at the bound volumes of Gırgır and at the plays of Devekuşu Kabare. If those masters had watched me, they might have said "for a comedian you are too soft-spoken" and found me a coward. But in their period these criticisms were taken as normal by society and by those in office. Their works received criticism, but they did not become the subject of the judiciary. Whereas the laws in question in those years are the same as today's. Political humor that would have been found soft then puts the comedian in a cell today. The laws did not change. What did? Those in office.

The works and legends of dozens of satirists, from Nasreddin Hodja to the Republican period, are still remembered; even the names of the office-holders they criticized are recalled thanks to these critical works. Beginning with Ferhan Şensoy, who made me love Turkish and love humor, Sabahattin Ali, Rıfat Ilgaz, Aziz Nesin; the humor magazines Markopaşa, Diyojen, Akbaba, Gırgır, Leman, Penguen, Uykusuz: they have taken a place in this society's memory and culture more lasting than most politicians. While the names Ferhan Şensoy criticized, and that tried to censor him, have long been forgotten, there are people even in the youngest generations who know Ferhan Şensoy's plays by heart.

Satire, political humor, this social value, and the comedians who are alone on stage and in life, need the judiciary's protection against the holders of power who are bothered by their jokes and against angry crowds. An environment has to be created in which this critical culture, a value of these lands for centuries, can be practiced freely.

If political humor is not directly banned in today's Turkey, there is no element of a crime in this joke. Because a political-humor show in which the name of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as the chairman of the ruling party that has governed the country for 25 years, does not appear has neither a sincerity nor a connection to reality. As we know from Pertev Naili Boratav's collection, if Nasreddin Hodja, who did not hold his tongue before authority, did stand-up today, half the show would be about Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is, in the first degree, responsible for, the addressee of, or obliged to solve the reverse-handcuff practice I have described, the young people emigrating abroad, the civil servants who dream of emigrating, the self-censorship of artists, the economic conditions: every subject in Turkey that can be criticized and joked about. Naturally, and more aware of this responsibility than any of us, he ought to approach the criticism and the jokes made about him with maturity.

Despite this, in this 90-minute stand-up show, in which I talk about dozens of different subjects and people concerning Turkey and the agenda, all of 5 minutes are about him, and one sentence of those 5 minutes became the subject of the indictment.

That there is an office-holder who, despite having many statements of the form "if I were a dictator you could not say dictator," complains of his comedian because he called him "a shy dictator" in a joke, and deprives him of his freedom for 22 days per sentence, will also be criticized. I have no intention to insult. I ask for my acquittal.

CİMER, and the Other 3 Sentences

The remaining 3 sentences were taken up under "degrading religious values," and were later shown as the reason for my detention under the charge of "inciting the public to hatred and enmity." As proof that these 3 sentences, offered as the grounds for my spending 66 days in a cell, incited the public to hatred and enmity, the prosecution pointed to 185 CİMER complaints. On 3 July, the day I was detained, more than 100,000 spectators had watched the "Ölü Deniz" show live; on YouTube there were 6 million views, 100,000 likes, and more than 20,000 positive comments. On one side, these. On the other, 185 CİMER complaints.

These 185 CİMER complaints, entered into the procedure, are in the case file. Because I had plenty of time in the cell, I glanced at all of them. The show is shared on 24 June, it is the agenda on the internet and in the media for 3 days, and in 3 days it is viewed about 4 million times. Guess how many CİMER complaints arrived in those 3 days. Only 1. And that one was not about religious subjects. It was about the President. As I said at the beginning, an artificial discomfort that began when the trolls, whose attacks did not hold for 3 days, said "Let us go at it from religious subjects." The public has no complaint. We understand this both from the dates on the complaints and from the images attached. The overwhelming majority of the people who complained had not watched the show. They came from manipulative video clips, beginning and end cut off, under the heading "the disgusting comedian is insulting our religion," put out by operational accounts on social media. We submitted to the court the screenshots in the CİMER complaints that show this. But they do not stop at the video either. Look, for example: there are many CİMER complaints from people who saw it on the page "okadirmisiroglubey." In the screenshot we see that the page wrote, "Report it to CİMER, do not just tag and move on, do not take the easy way."

These complaints are not organic. They are an artificial campaign by pages whose only relation to art and to humor is writing complaints, clipping and trimming the videos and directing their followers. Now let us imagine a scene. There is a religious figure whose talks and ideas you like. A group that loves that figure has set up an Instagram page where they compile and share their teacher's talks. You, too, follow the page, together with 100,000 people, for those religious talks. Then one evening a post is made outside the normal style of publication: a video headed "Report this bastard," and under it, "Report it to CİMER." You watch the video. A young man with a mustache says something in a manner you are not used to, and thousands of people laugh. Say you did not see an insult, but it grated on your ear. Would you have listened to the page you love and gone to CİMER, or would you have been curious about what was really going on and gone to YouTube? And despite all this effort and manipulation, only 185 complaints! Because in these sentences there is nothing in the name of degradation or disrespect. Despite dozens of accounts with large followings pointing the target, they managed to convince only 185 people. On the other side, we are talking about a political-humor show watched 15 million times, written about, occupying the agenda. If the world's most peaceful cartoon were this much of an agenda in Turkey, 185 complaints would have come in.

You have surely examined the CİMER complaints in the case file. The people who ran this campaign are not accounts interested in art or following stand-up. They have no record of praising any work of art, or even, if it was negative, of making a criticism. We all know these accounts. Their only interaction with art and with humor is women artists' clothes, and calls for bans. Tomorrow they can call for concerts to be banned, and the next day for stand-up to be banned. They do not represent the public.

Likewise, while I was inside I saw on TV that the most famous of the newspapers that pointed at me as a target started a "Abolish Coeducation" campaign. I am sure it has passed 500 CİMER complaints. I hope it is not abolished on their say-so, with the words "the public wants it this way."

To understand the expression that hurt the people who complained, I looked at the complaints one by one. One of the 185 complaints: "He compares the Seljuk state to a salad." There is no such charge in the indictment. I did not understand why the prosecution included it. Another complained, "The person's Instagram following falls by 100,000 and rises by 200,000. Only a foreign lobby could do these things," and the prosecution took it as one of the 185 complaints. These got lost in the pile. It can happen. Forget the indictment: there is no such crime.

But there are two complaints that really upset me, and that I will quote with no exaggeration at all. Two people from a section of the public I am accused of inciting to hatred and enmity asked that I be executed. They are in the case file. "I want him deported, or, if you take an interest in this subject, executed, as soon as possible." Someone else said, "Let him be executed in a country that has the death penalty. Thank you."

First of all, no one can incite this citizen, let alone me, to hatred and enmity. The hatred in him would be enough for the whole Middle East. He has innovated in hatred: you are a country with no death penalty, but you have a comedian fit for execution on your hands; in the other country there is a death penalty, but no criminal comedian. He is demanding an export trade in comedians fit for execution. And under this complaint it says, "Your complaint has been taken up." The prosecution points to this CİMER complaint as a reference, saying "the public was disturbed by Deniz." Is that not legally grave? Or does it seem so because the subject is me?

The Suicide-Bomber Joke

I do not think I encouraged hatred and rage in the way the charge says, in any form. My going on stage, city after city, in huge halls, while openly degrading religious values, does not fit the ordinary course of life, and it is not believable. Are the 185 people at CİMER the public, and are the 100,000 people who filled the halls to watch the show, the 20,000 people who left positive comments, the 15 million people who watched the video, not the public? But of course, let there be no misunderstanding: I have absolutely no claim of the sort that no one should be bothered by these two sentences. On the contrary, I understand. Religious belief is people's red line. A person may want these subjects not to be entered in a comedy show. That is, of course, their preference. Even if there is no negative or degrading word used in the show, there may be sentences that are not what people are used to. Then, not watching, and making a criticism, are their most natural right. But I reject the claims that there was any degradation or disrespect. No one can show it either. They are all exaggerated and forced readings.

On MasterChef, when Armağan was arguing with Eyyüp Can, he said, "I am responsible for what I said, Eyyüp Can, not for what you understood." With that intention, I too will explain the sentences I am responsible for.

First of all, the quotations in the indictment are very incomplete and very leading. It is sad that, in a charge that will deprive a person of his freedom for years, they begin from the middle of the sentences. In the joke I list the things I am afraid of when I go out on the street. The riot police, bus drivers who are fasting (that this is not in the indictment can cause a great misunderstanding), and suicide bombers, but most of all suicide bombers who are fasting. There is a simple play on words here. I really am afraid of these three things. The irritable state of people who are fasting is well known. Just as, when I say bus drivers who are fasting, I am not claiming that people who fast are more apt and more suited to being bus drivers, so when I say suicide bombers who are fasting there is no such implication or association. It is only a simple joke in which I join a fit of nerves with exploding. There is no intention or implication of degrading religious values.

4 Books

I will continue with another of my sentences that became the subject of the indictment, but I want to note this: while over these 3 years I took the "Ölü Deniz" show from city to city and played it to hundreds of thousands of paying spectators, if a spectator had said they were hurt by the telling I put on stage, I would of course have been sorry.

In another related joke of mine that appears in the indictment, I say "the fourth book is my favorite" and "by a clear margin the best of the four books." Here I am in no way aiming to belittle the sacred book or the people who believe in it. A sign of such belittling, and, as I said a moment ago, going from city to city and taking the stage while degrading people's values of belief, and then selling tickets and filling every next show again and again, is just as contrary to the ordinary course of life, I think. I certainly have no aim of degrading the values of a person of faith. I want what my words mean to be assessed together with the whole of the joke and with the telling on stage.

There is a spiritual-guidance service in the prison. The religious official there knew me. He asked, "You are a very good comedian, but why did you make that joke?" I said, "Teacher, where is the disrespect?" He said that by saying "author" I had attributed a human quality to God. Using "author" may be a wrong usage from the point of view of religious terminology, but it in no way contains a negative, mocking, or degrading meaning. I have no such intention, and I found it strange that it should be understood that way. The "Ölü Deniz" show, as I have repeated often in this defense as well, is a stand-up show. It is an artistic production. It does not carry any aim of religious instruction. The choice of word can be found mistaken or unusual, but that does not mean it is disrespect or degradation. In this whole joke there is a single negative expression: "the first three books were good, the translation of the 4th is weak." Here, too, the reference is not to the sacred book itself, but to the debates over rendering and translation that I have heard for years.

The Diver Opening

The 3 sentences I have defended so far, though grave from the point of view of freedom of expression, are to some extent familiar debates, and the ones I expected. Can the President be criticized? What is an insult? Can humor be made about religious subjects? Is it disrespect? What is the limit of freedom of expression? And so on. But the third sentence, about "the divers," which I will speak of now, is shocking for me and for everyone who knows Turkish. Because here I am being judged for the exact opposite of the meaning I clearly stated, and even underlined in thick strokes. I had seen the reactions to the other three sentences on social media before I was detained.

I came across this sentence about the divers being interpreted 180 degrees the other way, completely wrongly, one more time before the prosecutor's questioning. In a comment by Nagehan Alçı. I did not dwell on it, because she is a victim of mental retardation. But when I heard the sentence in question as a charge, in the prosecutor's questioning on the day I was detained, I was surprised and asked, "What is the charge?" He said it was discrimination against women in haşema, the full-body swimwear. Afterwards he said he had not watched the show and had read it from the text. From then until the indictment was prepared, I thought, "Surely there was a mix-up that day in the rush; it will not go into the indictment." I never expected this tragicomic and forced charge to get this far. A black day for Turkish.

Lenny Bruce, and the Diver Closing

As I said, even though a meaning opposite to the charge comes out even in the quotation in the indictment, I still want to repeat the joke by explaining it in the form it has on stage.

The American comedian Lenny Bruce, who was prosecuted for his jokes, had a similar problem. On his jokes being assessed in court through transcripts, he said: "Reading a stand-up show from a text is like listening to the soundtrack of a film." Because the comedian's manner in the show, his beats, the reaction that comes from the audience, what he tells before and after, create the whole context and meaning of the performance. Just as, in a film, the lines and the words take on a body through the performance of the actor who delivers them, so in comedy, for the comedian who exists on stage, performance and acting are that essential. Comedy is also, a little, speaking wrongly, or pretending to speak wrongly. Sometimes you can find the wrong by cutting off the end and looking only at the middle.

People say about my case, "In Turkey a comedian is on trial for what he said, look at the state of us. Where is freedom of expression?" But as can be seen in this example I have given, the prosecution of comedians is not peculiar to Turkey. The American comedian I mentioned, Lenny Bruce, is also prosecuted for his jokes, in 1965! The Governor of New York, to whom the New York court that prosecuted him is attached, apologizes to the comedian 40 years later because of this prosecution.

Anyway, the joke goes like this. I am telling about the holiday I went on to get out of the depression after the election defeat of 2023. "I stretched out on the sunbed. All right, I said, Deniz, this is life, everything is behind us, Turkey, the election, politics… I will pour the whole year's stress into the sea." There is an oppositional, secular character who has lived through an election defeat. Just as he is about to find peace on holiday, something happens. "Just as I was thinking this, a few people came out of the sea. Their hair cannot be seen. A black garment covering their whole bodies."

Because I had fled a little from the election and from politics, a great tension arises in the audience. Ninety percent of them think the profile I am describing is women in haşema. Because this caricature and this stock image have marked the years as a cultural debate. And the tension in society is very high. The conservative, the libertarian, or the feminist ones among the spectators… hold their breath, thinking "but if you are someone like this, Deniz, you are a great disappointment." The rest think "you are an idiot, is this what it's about?" And maybe one in a thousand says "hah, at last someone who thinks about people in haşema the way I do." I give a beat. Everyone feels the silence. They grow tenser still, and then I say "those fucking divers," and it becomes the place in the show where people laugh and applaud the most. Because I wrong-foot everyone. Hair that cannot be seen, a black garment covering the whole body… It really does also fit the description of a diver. Most haşema are not even black. In that respect the description fits divers better. The audience both applauds the wrong-foot and is surprised at having been so sure of the possibility of haşema rather than divers. At the same time they feel a great psychological relief, because I did not disappoint them and did not utter a discriminatory sentence. Five thousand people, each different from the next, understand these sentences they are hearing for the first time and react within seconds, but for some reason the people who prepared the indictment, despite listening and reading many times, and despite my explanations in my defense statements and in the detention reviews, insist on not understanding.

Come, up to here the sentences are clear, but you are doubtful about my intention, you sense a sinister implication in me and in the 5,000 spectators. The rest of the joke is, for a comedy show, far too underlined and far too plain! The prosecutor, bless him, put this part into the indictment even though it collapses the charge: "Do not applaud for nothing, you failed the test." I am saying that this is a test, and that the audience remained on the wrong side of the test. "So we have gotten to know you too," plus "Harbiye lived up to its name." While alluding to the old army-and-headscarf agenda, when I say "Deniz Baykal is not dead, he lives in your subconscious," I am also recalling Deniz Baykal, one of the symbolic names of the headscarf-ban debates, as the cause, down in the subconscious, of the prejudices, as their leftover effect. Everything, and my position, is quite clear. But I go on, analyzing why I like telling this joke: "The majority of the audience are sweet people, they get extremely tense"? By speaking of as "sweet" the people who shrink from the possibility that I will say women in haşema instead of divers, the people who are afraid that I will make a discriminatory remark, I also state my position in the debate in a clear way. And afterwards I explain the reason I really hate divers. The hatred is of course something exaggerated so that it will be funny, but it is another proof that when I say divers I mean divers.

Stand-up and Society

Why do I make a joke on a subject like this? Comedy and stand-up are, in some people's eyes, a field that mocks soap-bubble subjects and provides entertainment by escaping reality. Whereas for decades, like the other stage arts, like cinema, like the novel, stand-up too has produced very powerful works of art about personal and social subjects. Personally, I find stand-up stronger than other tellings and their works, especially on subjects counted as taboo, conflicted, sad, tense. If you ask why: because laughter is a reflex, a controlled reaction is not possible. And that makes it possible to get free of some filters. In my 90-minute show, my personal shames, contradictions, taboos, fears, and conflicts take their place together with social conflicts, tensions, taboos, and contradictions. The fear that suicide bombers or street gangs create in us in daily life, media figures, political figures, my internship at the psychiatric hospital, and so on: all of them have a place inside the show.

In this joke, too, I do something similar through the subject of clothing, which for some reason occupied a place in the history of Turkey for a great many years. Women's clothing was a subject that male politicians talked about for years. We watched, too. What some acquaintances of mine who passed for libertarian said by way of "haşema" always seemed contradictory to me, even when I was a child. I may no longer run into people I could call a "secular caricature," and I do not think they are among the spectators either, but a residue of that tension and of those debates remained in all of our subconscious. That, on its own, is a comic situation. I am happy to have brought it out with a joke like this. It is one of my favorite places in the show.

The strange part is that this is also the favorite part for my spectators who define themselves as religious or conservative. They feel that they are seen. Someone, for example, had said, "I knew you would not say haşema. I told the person next to me, too." So I am being prosecuted for degrading the religious section of society, on account of the joke conservatives love most. If I am being prosecuted on a charge of degrading religious values for these sentences, then right now everyone in Turkey, and when I say everyone I really mean 86 million people, can be prosecuted for degrading religious values with every sentence they speak. Drawing this meaning is that forced, and that shameful.

I gave the longest time to this joke because for me this is the most sensitive subject. While the other charges are about the limits of freedom of expression, here I am accused of something that does not fit my view of life or my show. At the same time, that this sentence was added to the indictment is a piece of luck for me. While the charge is discrimination against the religious section of the public, what is visible here is a criticism of the secular section. The charge dissolves inside itself. I have no enmity toward any section.

I have criticisms of those in office, and I also have jokes about every subject concerning Turkey. The ordinary person is not my target, and is, naturally, my audience. The indictment writes that in the prosecutor's questioning I accepted that when I said diver I meant women in haşema. This is either a great mistake or a comment made in bad faith. I remember the questioning. I did not say such a thing. According to my statement, which went into the record, what I said was: "Here I am making a criticism of the prejudice shown against people who go into the sea in haşema. If you examine the whole of the remark, I am in fact criticizing the people who are prejudiced against people who go into the sea in haşema. In the remark, by saying 'those fucking divers,' I wrong-foot the audience. At the beginning of the remark the audience thinks I am going to talk about people who go into the sea wearing haşema, but by bringing the subject around to divers I put on a critical show, confronting the audience with their own prejudice. And in the continuation of the remark, by saying 'Harbiye, you failed the test,' I think I made it plain that what I meant was to exhibit the audience's prejudice."

As I said, touring all of Turkey, insulting people in haşema, and being applauded for it does not fit the ordinary course of life. It is a paranoid and archaic fantasy: that when I said "those fucking divers" I meant people in haşema, and zero complaints.

The 3 sentences included in the charge of encouraging the public to hatred and rage consist of nothing but my being pointed out as a target, artificially, by social-media trolls who dislike me for political reasons and who want to discredit me and have me punished. In the fasting there is a reference to the irritability of hunger; in the 4th book there is no disrespect; and the diver joke is a mistake these accounts, approaching with hostility, made in a rush. The public does not consist of 500 CİMER complaints. I think the way should not be opened for me to be pointed out as a target by a campaign. I stand behind my sentences. I ask for my acquittal.

The Daltons

The 4 sentences I have defended myself on so far are both the charges that caused my detention and the charges on which the 61st Criminal Court of First Instance issued a release order about me 30 days ago. Fifty-seven days after my detention, on the very day I was released, I was jailed on a third charge, on the grounds that I praised the Daltons gang, from the same show.

I spoke, within the frame of my profession and in a humorous and allusive manner, of an important and current problem of the society I live in. What I wanted to do with this joke, as a comedian, is the same thing a journalist who explains how these crime networks work, or a prosecutor who draws up an indictment about them, does to the extent that they do their job properly.

For the reasons I have stated above, I do not accept the charges laid against me. I ask that a verdict of ACQUITTAL and RELEASE be given in my case.

28.09.2026

İMRAN DENİZ GÖKTAŞ

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Spoken Additions

According to journalist and Workers' Party of Turkey Istanbul MP Ahmet Şık, who watched the hearing, and according to the agencies, Göktaş also said the following outside the written text:

• Pointing to the example of a ruling-party official, named in allegations of a fund embezzlement, who instead of resigning or offering self-criticism "asked to be excused from office": "That is, this is something that can happen only in the country of a leader with authoritarian tendencies… I think that a shy dictator is still a valid joke here." (Gazete Oksijen)
• He said that a retired police officer in hardship losing his life was also the responsibility of those who govern the country, and he added that he would go on criticizing economic problems in his shows: "Everything I do and everything I say is political humor and criticism. When I get out of prison I will continue this." (Kırşehir Çiğdem, as relayed by Ahmet Şık, Gazete Oksijen)
• "In other cases there is a secret witness. In our file there is basically a secret defendant." (Halk TV)
• "The diver friend who filed a complaint understood what I said more correctly than the person who wrote the indictment. Because if there is an insult, it is to the divers." (Halk TV)
• And at the close: "Three months were stolen from my life, but I quit smoking in prison, and in this way I will make up for those three months. I ask for my acquittal and my release." (Kırşehir Çiğdem, as relayed by Ahmet Şık)

According to Ahmet Şık's account, the presiding judge said to Göktaş during the defense, "Even your stand-up show lasts an hour. You have been talking for an hour and a half. Finish it now." (Kırşehir Çiğdem)

Our Class Reading

Young comrades, you can read this defense as a legal text, and also as an art manifesto. We will read it with a third eye, as a class document. Because the 88 days Göktaş describes are, beyond what happened to a single person, a small but complete map of how power works in this country.

The Division of Labor among the Apparatuses

Read the defense from beginning to end, and look at who does what work:

Stage	Subject	The work it does
Pointing the target	"Operational" troll accounts	For three days they look for an anger that will hold. When they cannot find it they say "let us go at it from the parts about religion," and they clip the video.
Denunciation	CİMER, and the followers directed to it	185 complaints against 15 million views; only 1 in the first three days.
Prosecution	The prosecutor's office	Without watching the show, reading from the text, it builds a crime by turning the joke upside down.
Spectacle	The police	Forced reverse handcuffs on someone who came on his own feet, shiny vests that are tight, filming from the front, from behind, and from the side: a "humiliation ritual."
Isolation	The prison	A cell that sees no sun, 10 minutes of phone a week, a one-hour visit a week from behind glass.
The revolving door	The judiciary	A new charge at the moment of release; three detentions in two working days.

In the piece we wrote on the night of the detention, "Dialectical Laughter and an Epistemic Barricade", we called this picture "the anatomy of intimidation policies." The defense documents that anatomy from the inside, step by step. Louis Althusser speaks of two kinds of apparatus of the state: repressive apparatuses (police, court, prison) and ideological apparatuses (the media, religious institutions, the school). The Göktaş case shows how these two work like a single production line. The "anger" produced by troll accounts and by the partisan media is the raw material. CİMER turns it into a denunciation, the prosecutor's office into a crime, the police into footage, the prison into fear. The product is the self-censorship in the head of every young person who will go on stage. What Göktaş calls "my only worry" is exactly this.

This line also has a labor dimension inside the ideological apparatus. The accounts with large followings named in the defense, the pages that say "report it to CİMER, do not just tag and move on," are not a popular reaction that arose by itself. They are a form of organized ideological labor. Power divides the labor of producing anger on the street as well. Göktaş sums this up in a single sentence: "This troll team's concern was very clearly not religion. It was to silence every critical voice by using religious sensitivities."

Among the complainants in the indictment there was also the "Union of Spiritual, Principled, and Meritorious Employees of the Directorate of Religious Affairs and of Foundations." (BirGün) The job of a public employees' union is to defend its members' wages and security against the state, which is their employer. A union that complains to the prosecutor's office about a comedian who criticizes the head of the employer has ceased to be an organization of the class and has turned into a cog of the ideological apparatus. This used to be called yellow unionism. Today we are one step further. The interest of the contracted, insecure employees of an institution that in 2026, with a budget of 174 billion lira, left many ministries behind (Diken) does not lie in a comedian staying in prison.

The Verdict Itself: The Charge That Ended in Acquittal, and the Remaining 31 Days

The place in the verdict that needs to be talked about most is the place talked about least: the acquittal on "praising a crime and a criminal."

Remember: on 28 August, Göktaş had received a release order on two charges. Before he could leave the prison, after "30 seconds of freedom" in the SEGBİS room, he was detained again because of the "Daltons" joke in the first five minutes of the same show. As he tells it in the defense: "A new crime was detected at the exact moment I was released."

Today the court saw no crime in that charge. That is, the charge that started Göktaş's last month of detention, from 28 August to 28 September, ended in acquittal. The "crime" that no one saw for two months was discovered at the exact moment of release, and disappeared a month later. The name of this is not law. It is an instrument for holding. There can be no clearer proof than this that detention was used as punishment in advance, and not as a measure.

The second point is the "sentence, and release" formula itself. The prosecutor asked for both a conviction and release, and the court largely did this. At first glance it looks contradictory, but it is not. This formula meets power's need exactly: when the public cost of continuing to hold the person inside rises, you let them out, but you write the conviction onto the record. The deterrence continues on the record, not in the cell. At the next show, in the next "dictator" joke, that record stands over one's head as a threat. And every young comedian preparing to go on stage learns this: acquittal is not possible. At best, you are released.

"Why Did You Come Back?": The Class of Emigration

The most striking part of the defense, and the part least related to the law, is about emigration. The police at the airport station say, "Deniz, why did you come back, are you crazy? If it were me I would never in my life come back." The officers at Vatan police headquarters say that if they had the means he has, they would not stay a minute. Even Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the former leader of the main opposition, brought before him by force in the courthouse corridor, says the same thing: "Why did you come back from abroad? If I had the means I would not stay here a minute."

Let us read this scene in class terms:

• The state's own workers want to leave. The promise "be a civil servant, your life will be saved" is over even for the public employee. A wage melting under inflation, and security losing its meaning, make even a police officer someone who would leave "if he had the means." The example of the retired police officer in Göktaş's spoken addition is the most bitter edge of this picture.
• "Brain drain" is an export of labor power. In a country where broadly defined unemployment has passed thirty percent, Göktaş's division of the generation between 20 and 35 into three (those who have gone, those who are trying to go, those who try to persuade them to stay) is a sociological observation. The labor of engineers, doctors, software workers, and artists that Turkey trained with public resources is transferred, free of charge, to core countries that offer higher wages and security. What is lost here is not only "brains." It is a generation that could have been organized. The one who leaves does not come to the union, to the assembly, to the street.
• Between exit and voice. In the famous distinction of the economist Albert Hirschman, there are two responses to dissatisfaction: exit (leaving) and voice (staying and objecting). That even the leader of the opposition says "I would not stay a minute" shows that exit has been normalized as a political attitude. Göktaş's choice is the reverse: to return, to stay, to go on stage. For that reason, taking him inside punishes not only a comedian but an attitude that chose to stay and to make a sound.

One more detail: one of the things Göktaş tells in order to prove that he "would not flee" is that on 22 June he paid a paid-military-service fee of about half a million lira, so as to do his military service in 2027. This sentence, without his noticing, also shows the class of military service: the one who can pay half a million lira cuts his service short; the worker's child who cannot pay goes for the long term. The debt to the homeland is on the market too.

The Culture War Covers Over Class: The Diver Joke

The longest part of the defense is given to the diver joke, and this part is a lesson in ideology criticism as much as it is a lesson in humor.

The structure of the joke is this. An "oppositional secular character" looking for peace on holiday after the 2023 election defeat describes people coming out of the sea, their hair not visible, their whole bodies covered by a black garment. Ninety percent of the audience think of women in haşema and grow tense. A beat. Then: divers. The hall collapses in laughter. In Göktaş's words, the audience confronts its own prejudice. The target of the joke is not people in haşema. It is the "secular caricature" prejudice toward them. This is also the favorite place for his conservative spectators: "I knew you would not say haşema."

The indictment read this joke in reverse and accused Göktaş of degrading religious people. The court tied this charge to a conviction as "degrading religious values." Why?

Because what power needs is that the secular–religious polarization continue. In the piece on secularism we wrote the day after the jailing, we named this reflex "the political reflex behind the secular shop window"; the conversion of the diver joke into a conviction is that same reflex inside the courtroom. This polarization is the thickest curtain laid, for thirty years in Turkey, over the class contradiction. The more the debates over the headscarf, haşema, alcohol, and coeducation grow, the less the minimum wage, rent, the pension, and workplace murder are spoken of. Two workers who pay the same rent increase, work in the same factory, and wait in the same hospital queue are split into two separate "camps" because one wears a headscarf and the other is bareheaded. Göktaş's joke tears exactly this curtain: it makes both camps laugh at the same time, and it says to both camps, "the residue of this debate is in your subconscious." A joke that dissolves polarization with humor is a real threat to a power that feeds on polarization. For that reason the indictment had to read the joke in reverse.

And the following sentence in the defense is perhaps the sentence that best summarizes the class of humor: "I have criticisms of those in office… The ordinary person is not my target, and is, naturally, my audience." What determines the class of humor is whom it laughs at. Humor that laughs upward disturbs power. Humor that laughs downward feeds it. The target of Göktaş's fourth sentence was "up above." For that reason he was punished.

Moving Up a Class at Karatepe

Remember these lines from the message that came from prison: "There is the thrill of moving up a class at Karatepe. A neighbor with two private jets has moved onto our block." The allusion was to the managers of Pusula Portföy and Tera Yatırım, detained within the scope of a fund investigation. (Evrensel)

In his spoken addition in court he stayed on the same line: he pointed to a ruling-party official, named in allegations of a fund embezzlement, "asking to be excused from office" instead of resigning, as proof of why the "shy dictator" joke is still valid.

We wrote in detail, in our stock-market dossier, whom the fund crisis hit and who got out before the door closed. When these two sentences are placed side by side, the picture becomes clear. In the same corridor of the same prison there were two kinds of detainee: one because of four sentences he spoke on stage, the others in the investigation of a crisis in which small savers' savings evaporated. One's "crime" is speech. The others', if the allegations are true, is a game played on the accumulated labor of millions. Göktaş's joke turns the promise of "moving up a class" upside down: the only place in this country where moving up a class actually happens is a high-security prison that neighbors with private jets move into. Here is a consciousness that can see class, show it, and make people laugh at it even from a cell. This is what the people who put him inside were afraid of.

The Stage Is a Workplace, the Show Is a Commons

The "We Comedians" section of the defense tells us that stand-up is a labor process: a text takes shape over three years, in 198 shows, by passing through the "live sieve" of more than 100,000 spectators. This says something very familiar to a Marxist: a work of art is the product of a social process, not of a single genius. Every sentence of "Ölü Deniz" was carved by the reaction of the hundreds of thousands of people who laughed at that sentence or did not. The four sentences that were convicted are in fact four sentences that had passed the approval of 100,000 people.

Behind this process there is a chain of labor: open-mic nights, comedy clubs, sound technicians, camera operators, editors, ticket attendants. Most of it insecure, project-based, off the books. The detention sent a message to this entire chain: choose which comedian you will put on stage, and which sentence you will cut in the edit, with Karatepe in mind. Censorship works most effectively through the employer's supervision of the worker. The state cannot send police to every show. If it frightens the owner of the venue, it has no need of the police. For that reason the organization of cultural workers is not only a question of wages. It is a question of freedom of expression.

And there is this: Göktaş publishes his shows for free. Those who have money and those who do not can both watch. This choice turns the show into a cultural commons. The access block is the enclosure of this commons by a decision of the state: the state gives the decision, a private monopoly (YouTube, that is, Google) carries it out, and no one is left to be held to account. In his defense Göktaş says that, far from destroying the evidence, he "did everything I could to protect the evidence" by sharing the video again from his own accounts against the access block. The one who wanted the evidence destroyed was not the defendant. It was the state.

TCK 299 in Figures: An Industry

Deniz Göktaş is not an exception. According to Ministry of Justice data, the files under TCK 299 and 301, which include the crime of insulting the President, grew like this:

Year	Number of files
2017	27,396 (at prosecutors' offices)
2018 (the first year of the presidential system of government)	36,664 (at prosecutors' offices)
2025	82,992 (in total, at prosecutors' offices and criminal courts)

In 2025 alone, 28,105 new files were opened at prosecutors' offices under these two articles. That means an average of 77 new investigations a day. (T24) In its Vedat Şorli judgment of 2021, the European Court of Human Rights said that an insult provision of this kind, giving special protection to a head of state, is incompatible with freedom of expression. (HRW) The article stays in place. Its use has tripled. This is not the working of a rule of law. It is the working of a disciplinary apparatus.

The observation in Göktaş's defense is the key here: "The laws did not change. What did? Those in office." The laws of the period of Levent Kırca, of Ferhan Şensoy, of Gırgır are the same as today's. What changed is to whom, and how often, the law is applied. A rule that is not applied to everyone is not a rule. It is an instrument of selection. The same TCK 216 is almost never operated against the hate speech that comes from official mouths and targets Alevis, Kurds, LGBTİ+ people, and migrants. We followed this closely in the operations against LGBTİ+ associations.

The Jokes about Religion: Our Position of Principle

We have to be plain here. Defending a comedian is not approving every joke of his. There may be people of faith who are bothered by the jokes about fasting, the "fourth book," or the divers. Göktaş accepts this in his defense too: "Religious belief is people's red line… not watching, and making a criticism, are their most natural right."

But let us set this distinction down clearly:

• Degrading a person who believes, and satirizing the political use of belief, are not the same thing. The devout neighbor on the block and the state's ideological apparatus are not the same thing.
• The answer to a word found hurtful is criticism, not a cell. As Göktaş says: "If you do not like a comedian, you do not laugh, you leave his shows without an audience." Carrying into criminal law a matter that will be settled in the field of social debate is ending the debate.
• Whom the vague article is applied to today is secondary. That it is seen to be applicable is primary. The history of the workers' movement is the history of a struggle with vague crime definitions such as "inciting the public to hatred and enmity" and "disturbing public order." The article read to a comedian today will be read tomorrow to a unionist in a strike tent.

The Class of Humor

Finally, let us come to the philosophical point that ties all of this together.

Every ruling class wants to present its own power as natural, eternal, and untouchable. What we call ideology is exactly this operation of naturalizing. Humor reverses the operation: it shows the untouchable as touchable, the eternal as ridiculous, the natural as arbitrary. You can no longer fear a thing you have laughed at.

In 1842, in his first political writings in the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx, criticizing Prussian censorship, wrote that censorship punishes not the deed but the tendency, and that for this reason it is not a law but a police measure. A hundred and eighty-four years later, an indictment draws an "intention" out of a joke and reads the joke as the exact opposite of what was said. Mikhail Bakhtin's observation on the medieval carnival is a guide here too: the rulers permit the carnival, so long as it stays limited to the calendar and the square. The problem begins when the carnival overflows. When "Ölü Deniz" stayed in the halls for three years, the number of complaints was zero. When it went onto YouTube and reached the tens of millions, the carnival overflowed the square.

Three days after the show was published, in "The Historical Materialist Evolution of Political Humor in Turkey", we treated this tradition in detail. The tradition Göktaş lists in his defense (Nasreddin Hodja, Aziz Nesin, Rıfat Ilgaz, Sabahattin Ali, Ferhan Şensoy, the humor magazines from Markopaşa to Uykusuz) teaches us this: satire was prosecuted in every period of repression, and in every period it outlived those who prosecuted it. The sentence "while the names Ferhan Şensoy criticized, and that tried to censor him, have long been forgotten" is a defense sentence, and it is also a law of history.

Under What Conditions Did the Release Happen?

The Day of the Hearing, Hour by Hour

• Morning: It was announced that the hearing would be held, because of capacity, in the courtroom of the 4th High Criminal Court rather than in the courtroom of the Istanbul 14th Criminal Court of First Instance. A restriction was placed on entry to the courthouse; the entry of journalists without a press card into the courtroom was limited. (Halk TV, Medyascope)
• In front of the courthouse: A crowd, political parties and unions among them, made a press statement and asked that the detention end that day. (Halk TV)
• 11:25: The hearing, expected to begin at 10:00, began at 11:25 because bringing Göktaş from Çorlu took longer. (Halk TV)
• The defense: Göktaş read his written defense for about an hour and a half; the presiding judge at one point gave a "finish it now" warning. The defense ended with applause in the courtroom. (Kırşehir Çiğdem, as relayed by Ahmet Şık)
• The complaining side: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's lawyers asked to join the case as an intervening party, and said, "Our complaint continues." (Medyascope, Halk TV)
• The lawyers' defenses, and then the prosecutor gave his opinion on the merits.
• The opinion: The prosecutor asked that Göktaş be punished on all of the charges of publicly insulting the President, of publicly inciting the public to hatred and enmity through the press and broadcast media, and of praising a crime and a criminal, and that he be released together with the judgment. (Halk TV, BirGün)
• A recess: The court panel recessed the hearing in order to announce the verdict.
• The verdict around 14:30: The court ruled for release. The reports were updated between 14:39 and 14:42. (Halk TV, Gazete Oksijen)

The Content of the Judgment

The judgment as it reached the press is as follows: (Gazete Oksijen, Halk TV)

• Praising a crime and a criminal (the "Daltons" joke): Acquittal. That is, the court saw no crime in the charge that was the basis of the re-detention on 28 August.
• Degrading religious values: 7 months and 15 days in prison. The indictment's charge of "inciting the public to hatred and enmity, or humiliation" appears in the judgment that reached the press as "degrading religious values." This corresponds to the third paragraph of TCK 216. Whether this part of the verdict is a change in the legal qualification of the crime will become clear in the reasoned judgment.
• Insulting the President: 11 months and 20 days in prison.
• Detention: Release.

A note on where the figures come from: both sentences match exactly the result of starting from the statutory minimum and then applying an increase and a reduction. In TCK 299 the minimum is 1 year; where the crime is committed publicly the sentence is increased by one sixth (14 months), and under TCK 62 it is reduced by one sixth through a discretionary reduction: 11 months and 20 days. In TCK 216/3 the minimum is 6 months; where it is committed through the press and broadcast media it is increased by half under TCK 218 (9 months), and with the discretionary reduction it is reduced by one sixth: 7 months and 15 days. This calculation is one we reconstructed. Which provisions the court applied will be settled by the reasoned judgment. But the picture is clear: on the crimes for which it convicted, the court also moved from the very bottom of the scale.

What Is Not Yet Known

Some critical details of the verdict had not reached the press at the hour this piece was written. Let us state them plainly:

• Deferment of the announcement of the verdict (HAGB), suspension, or conversion to a judicial fine: That both sentences are under two years makes these options legally possible; whether the court applied one of them is not known.
• Judicial supervision and a ban on leaving the country: It was not announced whether the release was tied to any condition of judicial supervision.
• Credit for time served: Deducting the 88 days spent in detention from the sentence, if it becomes final (TCK 63), is what the statute requires.
• The path of appeal: The judgment is not final. Göktaş's lawyers may apply to the regional court of appeal for acquittal, and the prosecution, together with the President's lawyers in their capacity as an intervening party, may apply for a heavier sentence.
• The access block: No decision was announced about the status of the access block placed on the "Ölü Deniz" video.

When these details become clear with the reasoned judgment or with a statement by the lawyers, we will complete this piece.

Our Position

• Release is not enough. Acquittal is required. There was no legal ground for even a single day of detention of someone who returned of his own accord and who had been staging the same show for three years. An accounting must be demanded for a detention prolonged by a charge that ended in acquittal.
• TCK 299 should be repealed. An insult article that gives special protection to a head of state is compatible with monarchy, not with a republic.
• The vague language of TCK 216 should be narrowed in favor of freedom of expression, and the article should be applied equally, not selectively.
• Detention cannot be used as punishment. The revolving-door practice, "pit-type" isolation, and the handcuff spectacle are an open violation of the right to a fair trial.
• The access block on "Ölü Deniz" should be lifted. Cultural commons cannot be enclosed by a decision of the state.
• Disliking a joke is everyone's right. Putting a comedian in prison is no one's right.

Concrete Tasks

• Read the defense, and have it read. The text above is one of the plainest documents written in recent years in this country on freedom of expression. Read it together, and discuss it, on campus, in the association, in the union.
• Go to his stage. Göktaş is outside. The best answer to give an artist whom they wanted to frighten is a full hall.
• Claim the open-mic stages. The strongest antidote to self-censorship is that the stage does not stay empty.
• Follow the appeal. The case is not over. Follow the appeal stage, and publish accurate information.
• Support the organization of cultural workers. Make visible the unionizing efforts of comedians, musicians, and stage and set workers.
• Ask your union. The article read to a comedian today will be read to you on a strike tomorrow. Freedom of expression is a labor right.
• Keep the list of the vague articles. To whom, how often, and on what grounds are TCK 299, 216, 215, and 301 applied? Collecting the data is producing a knowledge commons.

The Handcuffs Opened. The Articles Remain.

Dear young comrades,

Eighty-eight days ago, Deniz Göktaş had been taken out in reverse handcuffs from the airport he entered saying "I guess there is an arrest warrant out for me." The cameras wanted to film him with his head bowed. Each time, he lifted his head and smiled. Today at Çağlayan he spoke for an hour and a half, the hall applauded, and he walked out the door.

Something was won: one person's freedom is the labor of those who waited in front of the courthouse, of those who staged the show again in Europe, of fifteen million viewers, and of everyone who did not fall silent through the 88 days. Something was not lost, either: in Göktaş's own words, "After I regain my freedom I will go on doing it with a greater appetite and a greater confidence."

But the articles that made the handcuffs possible are still in place. For the next comedian, the next student, the next unionist, the same line will work again: troll, CİMER, prosecutor, camera, cell. The only thing that will stop this line is a social force that makes it visible and organizes against it.

The handcuffs clamped onto laughter opened today. Now it is the turn of the articles that made the handcuffs possible.

Knowledge belongs to everyone. So does laughter.

Sources

• Halk TV — Deniz Göktaş before the judge after 88 days (the full defense and the verdict, 28 September 2026)
• Gazete Oksijen — Release order for Deniz Göktaş after 88 days
• CGTN Türk — Deniz Göktaş has been released
• Kırşehir Çiğdem — Deniz Göktaş's defense (as relayed by Ahmet Şık)
• Son Dakika / ANKA — Comedian Deniz Göktaş made his defense: "My words in the show are political criticism and satire"
• Medyascope — Deniz Göktaş before the judge: the prosecutor asked for Göktaş's release
• Medyascope — Deniz Göktaş before the judge (the Kılıçdaroğlu account)
• BirGün — The prosecution asked that Deniz Göktaş be sentenced on all charges and released
• Diken — Deniz Göktaş's defense: political humor in which Erdoğan's name does not appear has no meaning
• Deniz Göktaş's post on X (@idgoktas, 27 September 2026)
• Evrensel — A new post from Deniz Göktaş before his first hearing: "The thrill of moving up a class at Karatepe"
• Cumhuriyet — 88 days in a "pit-type" prison: Deniz Göktaş will face the judge for the first time
• Medyascope — The indictment against Deniz Göktaş has been accepted
• BirGün — The indictment against Deniz Göktaş has been accepted
• Euronews — Comedian Deniz Göktaş has been jailed (3 July 2026)
• T24 — Who is Deniz Göktaş, the comedian Turkey is talking about?
• T24 — Ministry of Justice data: a rise in files that include the crime of "insulting the President"
• Human Rights Watch — Prosecutions for "insulting the President" continue in Turkey
• Diken — The 2026 budget: 174 billion lira for the Directorate of Religious Affairs

Related pieces at Knowledge Commons

• The Historical Materialist Evolution of Political Humor in Turkey and the Deniz Göktaş Phenomenon (27 June 2026)
• The Deniz Göktaş Detention — Dialectical Laughter and an Epistemic Barricade (2 July 2026)
• The Illusion of Secularism and Social Hypocrisy in Turkey in Light of the Deniz Göktaş Case (4 July 2026)
• Who Got Out Before the Door Closed?
• Whose Family Is Safe?
• Reading the İHD 2025 Report Through a Class Lens
• TÜİK: Two Figures, One Country: 8.1% and 30.6%
• 12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup