Source: The London Prat | Region: Arabian Peninsula, Levant, Iraq, Iran, and surrounding areas | Period: c.800 BCE to present
Middle Eastern humour is one of the oldest, most formally sophisticated, and most comprehensively misunderstood comic traditions in the world — misunderstood partly through linguistic inaccessibility, partly through the Western tendency to represent the region primarily through its political conflicts rather than its cultural richness, and partly through a persistent and thoroughly incorrect assumption that Islamic religious culture is fundamentally incompatible with comedy. In reality, the Arabic, Persian, and related comic traditions are ancient, diverse, and possessed of a wit so refined that the West has been borrowing from it — via the transmission routes of medieval Spain, Sicily, and the Crusades — for a thousand years without always being fully aware of the source.
The Middle East's comic traditions are unified by several shared characteristics: the narrative tradition of the extended comic tale, refined in the courts of Baghdad, Cairo, and Isfahan; the figure of the wise fool, who appears across Arabic, Persian, and Turkish traditions under different names but with the same structural function; a verbal wit that prizes the precisely crafted phrase with an intensity comparable to the French esprit; and a political comedy that has operated, across centuries and under varying degrees of constraint, through the same strategies of indirection, allegory, and apparent innocence that constrained comedy everywhere tends to develop.
One Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa-Layla) — the collection of Arabic, Persian, Indian, and Egyptian tales whose compilation spans roughly the 8th to the 14th century CE and whose influence on world literature is, in the technical sense, incalculable — contains within its frame structure one of the most elegant comic premises in literary history: a king who kills his wives after the first night, and a woman who survives by telling him a story so good that he cannot bear to end it before the next instalment. Scheherazade's comedy is the comedy of narrative as survival: the story that postpones death, the joke that buys another day, the entertainer whose performance is simultaneously her art and her life insurance.
The tales themselves range from the tragic to the bawdy, from the magical to the satirical, but the comic tales — the stories of Juha and his donkey, of the barber who cannot stop talking, of the man so credulous he can be persuaded of anything, of the clever woman who outsmarts everyone around her — establish a repertoire of comic types and situations that have influenced every subsequent comic tradition that encountered them. The tale of Ali Baba (not historically present in the original Arabic manuscripts but added to European translations by Antoine Galland in 1704, which is itself a very good joke about cultural transmission) and the tale of the Barber — whose tendency to talk while performing surgery has not improved the patient's situation — are among the most durable comic set-pieces in world literature.
The Persian comic tradition is inseparable from the tradition of Sufi mystical poetry, which appears at first glance to be an unlikely source of comedy and turns out, on closer examination, to be one of the richest. The great Persian poets — Hafez (Shiraz, c.1315-1390), Rumi (Balkh, 1207-73), Omar Khayyam (Nishapur, 1048-1131) — write about wine, love, God, and the absurdity of human pretension with a wit that operates simultaneously as mystical commentary and comic observation. The Sufi tradition of divine comedy — the laughter of the mystic who sees that the gap between human self-importance and divine scale is funny rather than merely humbling — produces a specifically Persian comic register: the joke that is also a prayer, the laughter that is also an act of worship.
Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat — the cycle of four-line poems about wine, mortality, and the unknowability of the divine, translated into English by Edward FitzGerald in 1859 and thereby becoming one of the most widely read poems in Victorian England — is among other things an extended exercise in the comic philosophy of the sceptic: the systematic deflation of human certainty, the consistent observation that nobody knows as much as they think they do, and the proposal that given this fact, a glass of wine and good company are a reasonable response to existence. This is a comic position of considerable dignity, and one that has aged rather well.
The contemporary Iranian comedy tradition — operating under the political constraints of the Islamic Republic — has produced, by the familiar mechanism of constraint generating creativity, some of the most formally inventive comedy in the region. Iranian stand-up has developed primarily in the diaspora communities of Los Angeles, Toronto, London, and Berlin, where Iranian comedians including Maz Jobrani (Tehran-born, American-raised; a founding member of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, the groundbreaking 2007 touring show of Arab and Iranian comedians whose title was both a joke and a political statement) have brought Persian comic sensibility to global audiences.
Arabic comedy is as diverse as the Arabic-speaking world — which spans from Morocco to Oman, from Syria to Sudan, and includes communities from Andalusia (historically) to Indonesia (currently) — and any summary does it considerable injustice. Several distinct comic traditions deserve attention:
The Levantine tradition — particularly the Lebanese comedy scene, which produced a vibrant satirical culture in the relatively liberal Beirut of the 1960s and 1970s and has maintained it, with difficulty and considerable courage, through the years of civil war, political assassination, and economic collapse that followed — is among the most politically engaged in the Arab world. Lebanese satirical television, including the long-running programme Bas Mat Watan (Enough, the Country Is Dead; LBCI, 1998-present), has maintained a tradition of political satire under conditions that would have ended most comedy programmes elsewhere, partly through the specific Lebanese talent for finding the Lebanese situation simultaneously unbearable and hilarious, which requires both sensitivity and a very high pain threshold.
The Gulf comedy tradition — Kuwaiti, Emirati, Saudi — has developed rapidly in the digital era, with Gulf comedians including Fahad Al Butairi (Saudi Arabia), whose YouTube comedy channel La Yekthar accumulated millions of views before his arrest in 2018 for participation in activism unrelated to his comedy, representing both the possibilities and the risks of comedy in contexts where the boundaries of permitted speech are both real and unpredictable. Egyptian comedy remains the most widely consumed in the Arab world by virtue of Egypt's cultural dominance in Arabic-language television, with comedians including Adel Imam (the most commercially successful actor in Egyptian film history, whose career spans 60 years of comedy in formats from film to television to theatre) representing the mainstream tradition of Egyptian popular comedy.
One of the most distinctive features of contemporary Middle Eastern comedy — particularly in its diaspora expressions — is the comedy of being misrepresented: the joke that arises from the gap between how the Middle East is represented in Western media and how the people who actually live there, or come from there, experience their own lives. This gap is, in the judgment of comedians who work with it, extremely wide and extremely funny — though the comedy tends to work rather better when the comedian has lived it than when they have merely observed it from the outside.
The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour (2007; Maz Jobrani, Ahmed Ahmed, Aron Kader, Dean Obeidallah) was the most high-profile expression of this comic mode: a touring show whose title took the George W. Bush administration's geopolitical terminology and redeployed it as a comedy framework, with four comedians of Middle Eastern and North African heritage performing their experience of being Arab or Iranian in post-9/11 America. The show's Comedy Central special demonstrated both the commercial viability and the political significance of comedy that speaks from the inside of a community about its experience of being represented from the outside — a comic position that the Middle Eastern diaspora shares with virtually every other diaspora community that has ever performed comedy in a language that is not its own.
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Source: The London Prat | Cross-references: Turkey; Africa (Pan-Regional); Southeast Asia; Latin America.