There is a persistent critique that Filipinos are too soft when it comes to protest. Commentators often point to Nepal and Indonesia, where spontaneous, incendiary demonstrations, sometimes escalating into looting or violent clashes, have forced governments to concede.
By contrast, Filipinos, the accusation goes, spend more time crafting witty placards or consuming memes than confronting authority head-on. That critique misses the point. Protest in the Philippines is not about apathy but about exhaustion and reinvention.
Six years of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency denigrated rallies as communist plots, and demonstrators were smeared as criminals or “paid actors.” This left a heavy residue. The once-revered memory of the 1986 People Power uprising was systematically eroded, recast as irrelevant theater rather than living democratic muscle. Against this backdrop, it is remarkable that large-scale protests have again filled the streets, in Manila and beyond.
Last Sunday’s rally was not only massive but distributed: students and workers marched in different regions, a drag queen led chants in Cebu, and Filipinos abroad organized solidarity actions.
Yet detractors, particularly the DDS propaganda machine, immediately sought to discredit these mobilizations. They insisted the rallies were “inorganic,” orchestrated by celebrities and opposition figures, unlike the supposedly “authentic” uprisings in Nepal and Indonesia.
But even their examples betray selective memory. Indonesia’s recent protests were sparked by the killing of a Gojek rider by police. Nepal’s began after social media access was cut off. Both began as rallies before they escalated. Anger always needs a spark; it rarely arrives fully formed.
What truly stood out in the Philippine protests was not a lack of passion but the deliberate use of humor. Placards were crafted as memes brought to life, drawing laughter in the streets before circulating back online as viral images. This interplay of physical and digital space created a feedback loop: wit sharpened outrage, outrage fed virality, and virality pushed the message further than any single march could.
Some traditional activists worry that being funny trivializes the seriousness of protest. Yet humor does not erase anger; it channels it. Psychologists note that nervous laughter often surfaces when facing overwhelming power, functioning as a release valve. In politics, humor unsettles precisely because it punctures authoritarian pretensions of control and gravitas. Autocrats thrive on fear and solemnity; laughter makes them ridiculous.
This is hardly new in the Philippines. From street theater in the Marcos years to satirical placards during EDSA Dos, protest here has always mixed defiance with creativity. What has changed is the medium: in the age of memes, the joke becomes both a weapon and a vehicle, circulating faster than tear gas and crossing borders with a click. As the late documentarian Morgan Spurlock once put it, “If I can make them laugh, I can make them listen.” Filipinos, knowingly or not, are proving him right.
The real question, then, is not whether our protests are “serious enough.” It is whether those in power can withstand a public that refuses to be cowed, whether by intimidation or by ridicule. Last Sunday showed that anger in the Philippines does not always wear a clenched fist. Sometimes, it carries a punchline.
You may reach Chong Ardivilla at kartunistatonto@gmail.com or chonggo.bsky.social
