“We Don’t Even Want It to Be ‘Nice’ Anymore. We Simply Want It to End”: Humor and Politics on the Terrain of Sofia

A central interest of this article is the study of the political potential of vernacular humour, which targets the urban ground as part of urban infrastructure in Sofia. Eccentrically and ambivalently, in instances of infrastructural breakdown humour proceeds by weaving together associations with other times and spaces, with territories that remain foreign and strange when superimposed upon the familiar territory of the city. In the article I first briefly engage with the „post-political“ paradigm in critical analyses of Bulgarian post-socialism. I argue that this theoretical framework, together with the opposition between the spheres of „culture“ and „politics“ in some of the analyses available to us, prevent us from developing a complex understanding of heterogenous political events and articulations; instead, they construct a homogenising and totalising narrative about the present. In the second part of this article, I examine with some instances of humorous interventions and appropriations of urban infrastructure in Sofia, discussing these vis-à-vis some theoretical and philosophical texts engaging with memes, mediation and humour.