The Historical Materialist Evolution of Political Humor in Turkey and the Deniz Göktaş Phenomenon

Now comrade, in our parts that flashy concept called "epistemology" is, in truth, the answer to precisely this question: "How exactly do we know about these disasters that befall us, the price hikes, the exploitation—and why, despite all that, have we not gone collectively mad yet?" In an ordinary, by-the-book capitalist country, the boss steals the worker's labor; the worker picks up a banner and goes on strike to claim what is owed. In our paradise of a country, the worker imitates the boss who has skinned him to the bone and tells the story to his friends at the coffeehouse. They all burst out laughing, slap the table, and then the next morning tiptoe off to the morning shift as if nothing had happened. It is our duty to examine this very class madness through a historical materialist lens—handkerchief damp with our tears.

It is at precisely this threshold of madness that the name Deniz Göktaş has spread from ear to ear in recent times, shaking YouTube screens and landing on the radar of censorship mechanisms with his latest show Ölüdeniz—the flesh-and-blood embodiment on stage of the collective helplessness rising from those coffeehouse tables. While everyone had grown accustomed to Cem Yılmaz's shiny, comfortable, apolitical middle-class cheer left over from the 90s, this young comrade stepped forward and thrust the dark, insecure truth inside all of us into our faces. One crowd has practically proclaimed him the political humor prophet of the new era; another watches in bewilderment, asking, "Comedy is supposed to be a bit cheerful—why does this kid act like he's being forced to speak on stage?"

But comrade, we are in no hurry. If we want to epistemologically resolve why Deniz stands on stage as reluctantly as a plaza wage-slave, and why the new generation now laughs through clenched teeth rather than with joy, we cannot leap straight to today. Behind this kid looms the ghost of an entire tradition. What did we laugh at on this soil yesterday, what did the rulers forbid us, who paid the bill, and how did we finally arrive at this point?

Come, let us first look at our history—turn page by page through those heavily censored, heavily beaten, but equally mischievous chapters of the old masters who know us better than we know ourselves; then let us all stretch out together toward today's Deniz Göktaş reality...

The Single-Party Era: "Subjects Waiting for Permission to Laugh"

The Republic was founded—fine. Our generals at the top and our fresh bourgeoisie said: "We will modernize the people, but we won't bore them to death." The official humor of that period (Akbaba magazine and the like) was like the state's salaried cheer officer. They mocked the peasant's torn trousers and the believer's beard, giggling elitely, "Look how modern and Western we are." In other words, the state dictated how the people were to laugh as well.

"If You Have a Problem, Go Tell Marko Paşa!"

Right then, our famous three musketeers—Sabahattin Ali, Aziz Nesin, and Rıfat Ilgaz—appeared. In 1946 they founded the Markopaşa magazine. Do you know why they named it Marko Paşa? You know that saying among the people, "Tell your troubles to Marko Paşa"... That's the idea!

Against the state's fairy tale of "Everything is wonderful, we are becoming modern," they wrote about the people's hunger, exploitation, and the sluggishness of bureaucracy in such a way that the magazine began selling out.

The Aziz Nesin Truth: The state saw that these leftists were waking the people while making them laugh, and immediately intervened epistemologically: they shut down the magazine, threw the men in prison, and that was not enough—they murdered Sabahattin Ali. In other words comrade, on this soil the first bill for speaking the truth through laughter has always been a heavy one.

Menderes's Tractor Fairy Tale: "A Millionaire in Every Neighborhood"

1950 came, the Democrat Party arrived. Our traitor Menderes stepped onto the stage, saluting the people in an American hat: "Good news, citizens—we are becoming Little America, we will create a millionaire in every neighborhood!" Marshall aid arrived, tractors entered the villages, the people renewed their fields and plows with debt and credit. An extraordinary cheer, a capitalist dream...

But if we said dream, waking up comes too. When the wheel turned on borrowed money jammed and the inflation monster began gnawing at wallets, Menderes's smiling face fell. "Investigation Commissions" were set up at once, newspapers were shut down.

What did the humorists of the period (Tef magazine school) do? They put on stage the helplessness of the people crushed beneath the dream of becoming a millionaire, waiting in line on the black market. The ruling class's "We are developing" lie burst open with the needle of humor.

The Period When Humor Built Muscle (1960–1980): "They Roll Tobacco in the Factory, They Hang the System with a Cartoon!"

When the 1961 Constitution accidentally brought a bit of freedom to the country, the working class woke up—don't ask! Unions were founded, the left became a mass force. When the base (class consciousness) surged, the superstructure (humor) naturally took off as well.

• Our Aziz Nesin and Muzaffer İzgü: These brothers sat down and so thoroughly ridiculed capitalism's bewildered bureaucracy and the petty-bourgeois morality of "trying to get rich quick" in their stories... The clerks and managers in Nesin's tales were in fact tragicomic wretches crushed among the gears of the capitalist system yet fanatically defending it.
• Devekuşu Kabare and Haldun Taner: Theater left the salons of the rich and descended into the heart of politics. On the cabaret stage, Metin Akpınar and Zeki Alasya pelted the bourgeoisie's gilded world while the people laughed until they fell off their seats.
• And the Legend Gırgır (Oğuz Aral): A humor magazine selling one million copies a week! For God's sake comrade, today's X (Twitter) generation cannot even imagine this. Gırgır was the magazine of the poor living in shantytowns and the worker in the factory. The character "Avni" was the proletarian people themselves—crushed under savage capitalist exploitation yet thumbing their nose at the rulers every time.

THE COUNTRY'S VENTING DIAGRAM

Price Hike Arrives > People Grow Angry > Levent Kırca Does a Parody on TV > People Laugh > Anger Dissipates > Next Morning Another Price Hike (Infinite Loop)

The September 12 Lobotomy and Özal's "My Clerk Knows His Job" Theater

Then one morning we woke to the sound of tanks... The 1980 military coup rolled like a steamroller over the left intelligentsia and the working class to bolt Turkish capitalism onto the neoliberal world. Society was formally subjected to an epistemological lobotomy; thinking, questioning, and organizing were forbidden.

From the middle of this wreckage emerged Turgut Özal, ballpoint pen in hand: "My clerk knows his job," he said. In other words, he injected bribery, corner-cutting, and individual hustling into society as a new morality (in truth, immorality).

Humor changed gear dramatically in this period:

• Levent Kırca (Olacak O Kadar): In the single-channel television era, Kırca brought to the screen the petty clerk and retiree crushed by Özalism. But comrade, let us be honest: this humor did not offer systemic critique. On the contrary, it served a "venting" function by spewing the people's accumulated anger at price hikes onto the screen. The audience laughed, relaxed, and the next day quietly joined the queue again.
• Ferhan Şensoy (Ortaoyuncular): This man was not venting like Kırca; he was pulling the pin on the bomb. He offered an intellectual, linguistic, and structural anti-capitalist critique. In plays like Şahları da Vururlar or İçinden Tramvay Geçen Şarkı, with dialectical intelligence he thrust into our faces even then how the partnership of religion and capital would deliver this country to a future darkness.

Özal's "Tolerance" Cunning: Özal did not sue the cartoonists who drew him; he posed with them. Why? Because the system sold a fake "freedom simulation" by permitting humor that did not touch the essence of exploitation—humor that only mocked politicians' bellies and their folksy manner.

Neoliberal Paradise: Cem Yılmaz Comfort and the Holding-ization of Humor (BKM)

Toward the end of the 90s capitalism declared victory; songs of "ideologies are over, long live consumption" began to play. In this period humor was completely stripped of class anger and packaged as a shiny consumer object.

• The Cem Yılmaz School: The man launched stand-up into orbit but left politics on the ground. What was his humor? The sweet anxieties of the new, comfortable middle class living on credit cards created by neoliberalism... "Turks' trial by crisps," "Brewing tea in space," the lives of the rich... You would never see class exploitation or state violence on his stage. The audience went there, laughed comfortably without any guilt, without questioning property relations, and drove home in their luxury cars.
• BKM (Beşiktaş Kültür Merkezi): This is the holding-ization of political theater, comrade. They turned humor into a safe, family-friendly, sponsored product of the cinema and television industry. They melted class contradictions in a sweet sauce of "provincial-city sincerity" and converted them into box-office cash.

The AKP Era and the Great Drought: Days When Laughter Was Counted a Crime

Then came the AKP era. Those bourgeois-liberal fairy tales of "we are becoming free" in the early years gave way to open authoritarianism together with the Gezi Resistance. Do you know what Gezi actually was, comrade? Humor turning into a mass weapon exploding in the face of the ruling class through wall writings and wit!

With that fear, after Gezi the regime stopped producing consent and put the apparatus of coercion into gear. Through paper crises, distribution monopolies, and countless "insulting the president" cases, they economically strangled and destroyed beloved magazines like Leman, Penguen, and Uykusuz. Mainstream media submitted, political theaters could not find stages. And in the middle of this pitch darkness, this great drought, a monotonous kid appeared on stage with a microphone in hand: Deniz Göktaş.

Epistemological Miracle: Why Did Deniz Göktaş Catch Fire So Hard? (Or: The Death of Petty-Bourgeois Illusion and Lessons from the Precariat)

Gather round comrade, gather... Now let us open our notebooks and books, take chalk in hand, and step out of that shallow "humor criticism" comfort zone into a real class lesson.

In this country there is a crowd that has been saying since the day Deniz Göktaş stepped on stage, "This kid is breaking the rules of stand-up, he's got a weird style." Bourgeois aesthetic theorists call it "style," "avant-garde," "new-generation humor." But if you put on historical materialist glasses, comrade, you won't see any style there; you will see the epistemological scream of a collapsing economic model, a proletarianizing generation, and a dying petty-bourgeois illusion.

So what does this mean? Come, let us examine Deniz Göktaş's monotonous, surrendered stage presence in depth and lay the class anatomy beneath it on the table.

Social Being Determines Consciousness: "The Epistemology of the 1+0 Studio Apartment"

What did the great master Karl Marx say in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy? "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness." The epistemological miracle begins precisely here. What a person accepts as "true and real" is determined by their position within relations of production—that is, by the money in their pocket, the hours they work, and the exploitation they endure.

• Cem Yılmaz Epistemology (90s and 2000s): A product of capitalism's period of financial expansion, abundant credit cards, and "hustling." The "social being" of that era was a rising middle class working in plazas but hopeful about the future—able to go on vacation on installments, able to renew the car. When Cem Yılmaz said from the stage "Aren't there some crazy people in business class on the plane?" the middle-class viewer giggled in their seat. Because they aspired to that world, felt they belonged there. Their perception of reality (epistemology) was built on comfort, consumption, and individual silliness.
• Deniz Göktaş Epistemology (2020s): A product of the crisis period in which that rising middle class was wholesale proletarianized—that is, workerized. Today before us stands a vast precariat (insecure educated working class): university graduates, bilingual, but earning just above minimum wage in a plaza, pounding Excel spreadsheets morning and night, searching not for a house to buy but for a room to rent.

Now I ask you comrade: how is the consciousness of this new working class, whose social being is besieged by metrobus queues, landlord terror, and futurelessness, supposed to laugh at Cem Yılmaz's joke about "Turks stealing bathrobes from hotels"? It cannot! Because the material world behind that joke no longer exists in this kid's life. Deniz Göktaş presents this insecure crowd with their own naked, poor, and dark truth. The audience goes there not to have fun but to hear the confession of their class dispossession.

Monotony as an "Aesthetic Strike" Against the Neoliberal Performance Regime

Sociologists talk at length about Göktaş's famous "lack of energy" on stage—keeping his hand in his pocket, never raising his voice, that "anti-showman" air of someone forcibly held on stage. To crack the class code here we must look at capitalism's present-day work regime.

Late capitalism (neoliberalism) does not demand only arm or brain power from the worker; it exploits the worker's emotions as well. There is one thing demanded of every young person working in plazas, the service sector, call centers today: "Toxic Positivity." You are expected to be energetic at all times, to embrace the company as your own, to distribute fake smiles to customers, to perform at a high level constantly. In other words the system turns your cheer and energy into a commodity (commercial good) as well.

EMOTIONAL LABOR AND AESTHETIC RESISTANCE

Capitalist Work Regime: "Keep smiling, be productive, shine!

"Deniz Göktaş's Stage: "I'm not laughing, I have no energy, I'm monotonous.

"Class Correspondence: Passive Strike Against Emotional Labor Exploitation!

Deniz Göktaş's monotonous, conscious surrender is a clenched silent fist against this toxic performance regime; a passive strike on stage. It tells the audience: "I will not expend emotional labor for you, I will not produce fake cheer, I will not shine here. Because I am tired like you." The viewer sees in that monotony their own shift crushed before the boss, their soul drained. Laughing at that cheerlessness is snatching the whip of fake cheer that capitalism demands from us at every moment and hurling it away.

Deconstruction of the Sacred and Exposure of Commodity Fetishism

In the third part of our class lesson, let us look at the thematic content of Deniz's jokes. While classical comedians amuse themselves with contradictions within the system (women are like this, men are like that, etc.), Göktaş dives straight into the ideological apparatuses of the capitalist state and the sacred objects they produce.

• Paid Military Service and the Illusion of Citizenship: The paid military service story he tells is in fact the stage adaptation of Karl Marx's theory of Commodity Fetishism. In capitalism everything becomes a purchasable object (commodity). Göktaş tells how the concept of "duty to the homeland," the state's greatest ideological sacred object, evaporates into thin air for the rich kid who can slap down the money. By showing how military hierarchy turns into an absurd theater among those who pay, he intellectually mocks the state's supposedly unshakeable apparatus of coercion.
• Collective Depression vs. Individual Psychology: The system always markets depression, anxiety, and suicidal tendencies to us as "individual psychopathology." "You are inadequate, go to a psychologist, take medication, self-actualize," it says. Göktaş tells suicidal tendencies and existential meaninglessness on stage in such a way that the entire hall bursts into collective laughter.

The epistemological break here is tremendous: The audience understands in that moment that this depression is not their personal incompetence. This depression is the collective class wound of an entire generation deprived of a future, whose labor has been stolen. Laughing together at that madness is exposing the source of the madness (the system).

From the Class Venting Valve to Class Consciousness: The Ölüdeniz Break

What was that Levent Kırca populism we have been describing from the start of this essay doing, comrade? It recounted price hikes and corruption, absorbed the people's anger—in other words it was the system's safety valve. Cem Yılmaz, meanwhile, removed us entirely from those contradictions and shut us inside a sterile comfort zone.

The point Deniz Göktaş reached with his latest show Ölüdeniz, which set censorship mechanisms in motion on Twitter, demolished both of these bourgeois strategies.

• Deniz does not relax the audience and send them home.
• He does not offer the audience a discharge zone (venting room).
• On the contrary, he tells in such a naked, such a clear language that nationalism, militarism, and state violence are in truth gigantic lies fabricated by the ruling classes to protect their property—that humor there ceases to be an entertainment tool and becomes a consciousness-raising act that shakes hegemony.

What the rulers fear and attack with the censorship apparatus is not this kid's intelligence, comrade; it is the class and materialist answer to the question rising from that stage and ringing in the ears of the precariat: "Why are we living this life?"

In short; Deniz Göktaş is not a miracle. He is a time bomb the angry, educated working class that capitalism created with its own hands, trained, and then cast into the street by leaving insecure has left on the stage. The pin on that bomb has been pulled by the material reality of this country itself.

What Awaits Our Young Comrade? (And Bending the Bars of Our Cell with Laughter)

Don't close your notebooks yet comrade—we have reached the most vital, most crucial part of the class lesson. Now let us put that famous question on the table: So what awaits our young comrade with the microphone, Deniz Göktaş, in the near and distant future ahead?

The pitiless dialectical laws of historical materialism teach us that ruling classes never leave any truth that threatens them to its own devices. Deniz is now walking a tightrope, and on both sides of the rope two gigantic bourgeois traps have been set:

• The State's Iron Fist (Apparatus of Coercion): The more Deniz lays bare hands on the system's institutional sacred objects, militarism, that fake nationalist bombast—as he did in Ölüdeniz—the state's punitive mechanisms will begin clicking into place. "Insulting the president" cases, venue cancellations, financial audits, digital platform bans... The system will try to shut that dangerous mouth by criminalizing him, isolating him, and frightening him.
• Capitalism's Golden Cage (Commodification Trap): This is a trap far more insidious and far more dangerous than the first, comrade. Capitalism's stomach is very wide; it takes even the most hostile, most revolutionary idea, digests it, packages it, slaps a barcode on it, and sells it back to us. What will happen when one day big capital groups or global digital monopolies (Netflix, Disney, etc.) put million-dollar contracts before Deniz? The system will whisper to him: "You're criticizing beautifully, kid, you're a wonderful dissident—come, let's sell this anger of yours on our platform, you get rich too, and we'll organize venting sessions for the precariat through you." At that moment, the vital test will be whether Deniz can preserve his radical, class essence, whether he can pay the price like Ferhan Şensoy and remain behind his own independent aesthetic barricade.

What Literature and Humor Must We Defend?

Precisely for this reason comrade, beyond individually praising Deniz Göktaş today, we must give a class answer to the question "what kind of literature and what kind of humor should we defend?"

The humor we must defend is not the bourgeois toady populism of the Özal era—"Oh, the clerk knows his job too, what's the big deal"—nor Cem Yılmaz's sterile comfort of "The rich eat caviar on yachts, we eat kısır at home, how silly we are." The literature and humor we must defend are nothing like that fake "art" illusion that beautifies the cell we are in, painting the bars pink!

The humor we will defend is the humor that bends the bars of that cell with laughter! Real revolutionary humor and literature shatter the fake reality (simulation) produced by the rulers, expose the essence of exploitation, and above all create a leap of class consciousness in the viewer/reader. It is that social-realist vein that tells us "Yes, life is terrible, but look—you are not alone, this exploitation is a collective mechanism, and bringing down this mechanism is in our hands." This is exactly the legacy of Aziz Nesin, Sabahattin Ali, and Oğuz Aral; and the deconstruction Deniz Göktaş performs on stage today can be defended only by claiming that legacy and enlarging it.

Breaking Free from Madness and Preserving Mental Health

Now come to that famous state of "madness" belonging to you and me—the modern proletarian who wakes every morning to the job they hate, who cannot sleep at night for thinking about the bills...

The system tells us this lie every day: "If you are unhappy, if you have anxiety, if you are depressed, it is your fault. You don't work hard enough, you don't think positively—go to a psychologist, take your pills, self-actualize." When we go to Deniz Göktaş's stage and laugh together at those suicide jokes, those stories of helplessness, we experience a tremendous catharsis (purification)—true. We feel ourselves lightened for a moment.

But let us be honest comrade; the spell breaks the moment you leave the stand-up venue and board the metrobus. The laughter thrown on that stage may pull us out of our momentary state of madness, but it is not enough on its own to preserve our mental health. Because the laughter in that hall is the helpless solidarity of individuals left alone.

MENTAL HEALTH AND A FREE FUTURE

Individual Laughter (In the Venue) > Temporary Relief (Catharsis)

Collective Organization (In the Street) > Structural Transformation (Freedom)

Goal: Break free from class madness, preserve mental health!

We must keep our class consciousness upright and unshakeable. The sole armor that will pull us out of that collective madness whirlpool and protect our minds and souls against the savage exploitation of late capitalism is not a two-hour stand-up show but organized struggle!

What will preserve our mental health is laughing at our helplessness not alone but leaning on the shoulder of the comrade beside us. It is transforming that passive, monotonous, nihilist laughter that says "nothing we do matters" into organized power in the factory, the plaza, the campus, the street—that is, into a founding will.

Do not forget comrade: the ruling classes do not fear our suffering; they fear our becoming conscious enough to mock our pain and misery, and our ability to turn that consciousness side by side into organized rebellion.

The pin on the time bomb Deniz Göktaş left on stage is in our hands. We will not leave that bomb on capitalism's shop window as a consumer object. We will keep our class consciousness firm, we will not let that fake performance frenzy drive us mad, and breaking free from that state of madness we will walk together with laughter toward that organized, classless, exploitation-free, and truly free future in which we have nothing left to lose but our chains!

Come, let us rise now—the tea has gone cold, but our glorious class anger is still burning hot...