It looks like a funeral, it sounds like a funeral – but it isn’t, not really.

The men pick up an angharaib, its wooden frame partially covered by a white shroud. A crowd look on, some sheltering from the sun in a makeshift condolences tent.

The video, filmed on a mobile phone, picks up lamentations and prayers. But there is a light, almost mocking edge to the voices, and the occasional whoop, ululation or laugh makes the gathering sound more like a celebration than a wake.

On the funeral bier, the corpse is not that of a human being, or even an animal. Instead, a tree with abundant green leaves is about to be buried. The tree, of course, is the symbol of Omar al Bashir’s National Congress Party.

I don’t know where or when the video was filmed. Some have suggested Abu Hamad, in River Nile state, where an independent candidate (formally of the NCP) beat the NCP nominee, one of a handful of independent candidates who won seats at these elections.

When I showed the short film to a NCP supporter, he went quiet, and then insisted that “everyone in Sudan loves Omar al Bashir” and his party.

Whatever its provenance, the fake burial is part of a long Sudanese tradition of mocking the country’s rulers.

Sudanese politicians are fair game for barbed jokes: in one, which is a few years old now, Nafie Ali Nafie, Ali Osman Taha and Bashir are boasting about the large crowds they can draw to rallies. ‘That’s nothing’, their fictional driver replies. ‘If I drive over the edge of a cliff, 30 million Sudanese will cheer!’

This election may have been short on suspense, but it has had its fair share of humour.

The satirist Khalid al Baih drew one of his Khartoon series, also focusing on the image of the NCP’s tree, standing lonely in a field of stumps (see above). The punchline? ‘The only tree they left in Sudan.’

The lack of competition was a source of much comic inspiration. One election monitor (from a party not expected to outshine the NCP), talking to me in a nearly empty polling station, compared the election to a football championship. Liverpool was taking part, he said, but all the other premier league teams were boycotting. Who would want to go to a football match between professionals and part-timers?

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