PROMOTING his Edinburgh Fringe show, opening later this month, Sami Abu Wardeh worries that he might have been funnier.
“Writing jokes can be difficult,” the Irish-Palestinian comedian sighs. “But there’s an extra challenge writing jokes when your identity is, at best, misunderstood. And at worst, completely and violently misrepresented.”
The clown comic won acclaim for his 2022 Fringe debut, Bedu, in which he explored the immigrant experience through a range of daft characters, including a refugee based on his father. And he conceived his follow-up as focusing on Merguez, a 30-something “idiot loverman” on the dating scene, named after the North African spicy sausage.
But then the Hamas October 7 attacks happened. And “I had to start finding new ways to talk about what’s happening in the world. New ways for me, maybe even new ways for comedy”.
Born to an Irish mother and Palestinian resistance father, who helped to coordinate medical care for Fedayeen fighters but was then exiled from the West Bank with other dissident voices when he took issue with the emerging leadership, Wardeh was displaced from Kuwait as a child by the Gulf War and ultimately arrived in the UK in 2004 to initially become a qualified doctor, then an “unqualified comedian”, who felt it prudent to “push down my Palestinian identity, the injustice of my heritage”.
As a member of the diaspora, performing Bedu, “getting to the place where I could get on stage in front of strangers and say ‘I’m Palestinian’, while not contributing to the narrative that if you’re Palestinian you must talk about trauma, was huge for me. Emotionally, it was very difficult”.
Yet after Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Wardeh “felt like I had the freedom to say what I really want, to talk about what being Palestinian really means”.
Arguing that the UK Government is playing an “active role in genocide” through military support for Israel, with the “complicity” of the mainstream media and artistic institutions in this country, his late entry to the Fringe programme, Palestine: Peace De Resistance, announced last week, asks what it means to resist? And can resistance be funny?
Merguez now journeys from polit-
ical ambivalence to engagement, realising that the Western establishment view of the Middle East is “not working” and “disintegrating”. However, Wardeh’s speciality, of portraying “slightly pompous and idiotic” characters, such as this buffoonish romancer and his amoral, Channel 4 series creation, Sheikh Ahmed Al Kabir, “867th richest person in the world”, have proved inadequate to fully convey his outrage.
Wardeh began performing stand-up in comedy clubs for the first time, “speaking in my own voice”. And for Peace De Resistance, he’s channelled that into “hosting” the show as another, more familiar character, “greatly influenced” by the legendary Irish comedian Dave Allen, “essentially a tribute act to him, talking about myself with jokes”. Combining a sort of stand-up, theatrical storytelling and pure clowning, the show remains a potentially spicy proposition.
Mindful of last year’s Fringe, when Reginald D Hunter clashed with antisemitism campaigners that heckled an anti-Israel joke made by the American stand-up, in Wardeh’s Pleasance venue, as well as an incident last year at London’s Soho Theatre (which backed Bedu), in which Northern Irish clown Paul Currie is alleged to have verbally abused an audience member objecting to him displaying the Palestinian flag, prompting the theatre to ban Currie and the comedian to sue the venue for libelling him as antisemitic, Wardeh now films all his shows as a precaution.
He maintains that he will “never get angry” if efforts are made to protest or disrupt Peace De Resistance and will “stay calm, with no raising of my voice”.
The best known of only four Palestinian comedians he’s aware of living in the UK, he sympathises with the limited number of comedians generally who “care about Palestine and oppose the behaviour of the Israeli government on stage but do not come from an activist background or an inherited identity that helps them discuss it publicly. There are ways to engage that are beneficial to the movement. And some of these comics are struggling with phrasing that is potentially quite simply fixed … it’s about making your targets very clear.”
PREVIEWING some routines earlier this year, which haven’t necessarily survived in the show, “jokes about Benjamin Netanyahu, Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, specific targets that are difficult to generalise and misrepresent”, Wardeh has been met by “hissing” from individuals in some “mainstream” audiences. Yet he has learned to control his emotion, taking them as “defining moments” for “understanding how to leverage and fold these responses into my act”.
He finds it difficult to talk about clowning with his extended family in the West Bank. “It’s very easy to feel ‘what am I doing?’” he admits. “They’re living under occupation and I’m doing a comedy show, it’s just insane. What keeps driving me is the knowledge that the system I live in and oppose is an intrinsic part of the violence. And any way we can go to dismantling that system is going to ultimately help. I just have to
have faith.”
He has felt isolated speaking about Gaza on the comedy scene, “for a period, honestly, it was only me and a handful of others”. Yet even within pro-Palestinian circles, he wants to see more Palestinians platformed by UK arts organisations.
“No-one has ever asked me what I want,” he reflects. “I lost my home due to war, like half a million other Palestinians in the diaspora in Kuwait. And I would like to return to my land, for which I have the deeds, which is currently occupied in 1948 Palestine. And I would like to live as an equal citizen.
“But I would also like to live in a world where we’re allowed to say what we want to say and make what we want to make.”
Alongside his solo show, Wardeh has joined the line-up of Palestine Stands Up, appearing at The Stand during the festival, as well as its comedy clubs in Glasgow and Newcastle. Alaa Shehada from Jenin, Diana Sweity from Hebron and Hanna Shammas from Haifa have been showcased in Alaa Aliabdallah’s documentary Palestinian Comedy Club, which last month won the Spirit Of Raindance Award at the independent film festival and is currently seeking distribution.
Wardeh recalls a work-in-progress gig for Peace De Resistance held in London.
“It was really heartening how many people came. Afterwards, a friend who’s Palestinian told me that it felt really good to come to a place as a community, to feel safe, to be given an hour that energised them to carry on.
“I want to put the show in front of as many people as possible. And be part of energising them to act.”
