This paper explores how political dissent is linguistically construed and alleviated in memes that are circulated nationally on WhatsApp in Oman, using insights from relational approaches to face, the theorization of communicative strategies as polysemous and equivocal, and research with respect to the Islamic practice of lamenting. The data consist of a representative set of memes gathered in the summer and fall of 2015 as part of an ethnographic project on social media and Arab identity. The paper theorizes memes as cultural tools that take the form of ‘reasonably hostile’ lament-narratives, which permit citizens in Oman to engage in democracy while saving face. To produce lament-memes that utter dissent while alleviating face-attacks, Omanis use diverse communicative strategies like repetition, code choice, hashtags, and various genres; they juxtapose emojis with text; and they manipulate the production and participation frameworks of texts. Collectively, these strategies, which operate via intertextuality, permit the concerns to be expressed, but indirectly and playfully. The paper shows how political dissent is negotiated and alleviated via memes, the agency of social media users, and the validity of conceptualizing memes as cultural tools.