<![CDATA[Political humor in digital media functions not only as entertainment but also as a communicative resource for expressing social and political critique. Previous studies have examined political humor in relation to persuasion, identity resistance, and mediated protest, yet less attention has been given to how linguistic, narrative, and contextual resources work together to construct policy critique in Indonesian short-form political videos. This study examines how political humor is constructed and how it communicatively frames criticism of government efficiency policies and associated power practices. Using a qualitative approach, the study analyzes three purposively selected political humor videos published on the Instagram account politikin.aja: Gagalkan Efisiensi, Anti Efisiensi, and Efisiensi Culun. The analysis draws on Attardo’s General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), which comprises six interrelated knowledge resources: Language, Narrative Strategy, Target, Situation, Logical Mechanism, and Script Opposition. The findings show that humor is mainly constructed through recurring script oppositions between efficiency as rational governance and efficiency as a manipulative, absurd, or self-serving practice. Informal language, irony, hyperbole, dialogic escalation, hierarchical workplace situations, and logical reversal work together to activate these oppositions, directing criticism toward political elites, bureaucratic practices, media actors, and mechanisms of public influence. Rather than demonstrating audience effects, the findings point to the communicative role of humor in framing contradictions between official policy rationality and representations of political practice. The study extends the application of GTVH by showing that, in short-form digital political humor, its six knowledge resources work interdependently rather than as isolated analytical categories. Audiovisual features, meanwhile, remain an important dimension for further multimodal investigation.]]>
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