Two days before Albania marked one hundred years of independence, we asked the people of Prishtina to come to the square and walk with their moustaches.
That is the whole campaign. A black and white photograph in a barbershop, five men with moustaches in various states of grooming, one of them mid-shave in the chair, one hidden behind a newspaper. Above it, hand-lettered like a film title: “Për 100 vjet shtet.” For 100 years of statehood. Below it, the details of the event, a walk for the moustachioed, Monday 26 November 2012, midday, starting outside the Ministry of Culture and running down Bulevardi Nënë Tereza to Sheshi Skënderbeu.
The joke is entirely in the register of the copy. It is written in the exact cadence of national liberation rhetoric, the kind of prose Albanians had been reading in centenary supplements all month, and applied without a flicker of irony to facial hair:
For decades on end our moustaches suffered captivity. Countless moustache hairs were mercilessly sacrificed to the soulless razor in the name of moustachophobic propaganda. Now, with the tireless help of Movember and the many initiatives across our glorious social networks, moustaches have the chance to enjoy freedom, to enjoy the beautiful light of the sun. At last the hairs of the upper lip can draw the breath they have dreamt of for ages. And ahead of the hundredth anniversary of independence, at that.
Captivity, sacrifice, liberation, the hundredth anniversary. Every word of it is load-bearing somewhere else in the culture, and here it is deployed on behalf of moustaches. There is even a small handwritten note pointing at one man’s upper lip: moustaches, according to the rules of orthography.
Movember was the occasion, and it gave the thing a real and unarguable purpose to sit on. But the reason it worked in Prishtina in 2012 is that it came riding a moment everyone was already inside. The centenary was everywhere. Every institution in the country was producing solemn commemorative material at exactly that moment. Putting an absurd poster into that stream, in the same typographic voice, is how you get noticed without buying attention. You do not compete with the mood of the week. You climb onto it.
The other thing I remember about this one is that it was made for print, and I am glad it was. In 2012, running the digital side of things, my instinct was that a campaign lived or died on Facebook. This one ran as a double page in a newspaper, and there is a photograph of that spread lying open on a table that I still like better than any screenshot of the same artwork. A poster you have to unfold takes up space in a room. It gets left on a table and picked up by someone who was not looking for it. The scale is small and the encounter is real, which is the opposite trade to a feed.
What I took from it, and kept: the funniest thing you can do to a serious register is to keep it completely intact and change only its subject. We did not write jokes about moustaches. We wrote a liberation manifesto and let moustaches be the nation. The audience does the last step themselves, and the step they take on their own is the one they remember.
Also, take the photograph seriously. That barbershop picture is properly composed, properly lit, and shot in black and white like a piece of documentary history. If it had been a snapshot, the copy would have read as a random gag. Because the image looks like an archive photograph of a significant occasion, the copy reads like a caption to one. The production quality is not decoration on top of the joke. It is the joke’s straight man.
Written the same month a few of us started Partia e Fortë, which ran on very much the same idea.
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