Radio Farda went out last week and collected some bits of humor now being heard on the streets.
Here’s one that refers to comments made by President Ahmadi-nejad after his 2005 election victory, when he said the country’s real problems were unemployment and the housing shortage, not how young people dressed or cut their hair.
That comment is now recalled by those who blame him for the economic free-fall. Says this humorist: “Remember the day when Ahmadi-nejad said, ‘Are the hairstyles of youth our problem? No, let’s instead fix the economy.’ Well, we were really lucky he didn’t want to fix our hair because, by now, we’d all be bald!”
Some jokes make fun of the fluctuation of the rial, which seems to be losing value against the US dollar from one second to the next:
“How many rials are in a dollar?”
“Now, or ……… now?”
In another joke, a man whose profession would normally promise a high standard of living for his wife-to-be feels the need to pretend he has a job that has suddenly become quite lucrative:
“A man goes to ask for the hand of a young woman. The woman’s family asks about the suitor’s job. To impress them, he says that he’s a currency dealer. Only later does the family learn that he’s really just an engineer.”
In Iran, as around the world, jokes about people of different nationalities dying and going to the other world are always popular.
“An Iranian, an American and a German die and go to hell. They each get permission to call home. The American is charged $1,000 for his call, the German is charged $2,000, but it only costs the Iranian $1 dollar to reach home. The American and the German ask why the Iranian was charged so little. They are told, ‘He made a local call’.”
Chicken is now priced like gold, not chicken feed, which obviously is fodder for humor. “A man takes his son to the zoo. He says, ‘Son, what you see there is a chicken. We used to eat them when we were rich’.”