On February 28th, Sepideh Kaav was in a Berlin taxi, on her way to a gig, when news broke of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death in a US-Israeli airstrike. The Iranian stand-up wrote a swift response before taking the stage. “And that was definitely an interesting experience,” she recalls. “Delivering the news and then immediately delivering a joke. Up until we’ve cracked the first joke, such shocking things feel unreal.”
As discussed in her Fringe debut, 1979: Persianality Disorder, Kaav grew up in Tehran’s post-revolution Islamic theocracy, “where being a woman you don’t have certain freedoms” and she was arrested by the morality police for her student dress. Yet she’d already been turned on to stand-up by US counterculture icon George Carlin. “It really resonated with me,” she recalls. “I would pretend I was doing it in the shower but I never thought I could actually do it.”
That changed when she moved to Germany in 2021. As an immigrant, she faced racism for the first time and was agitated by Western contentment. Unable to forget the “pain and suffering” she’d left behind, comedy became an outlet to “scream my anger”.
However, when the American offensive began, “it changed the way audiences receive my jokes.”Continuing, she says: “I want to show that Iranian women are women. So I try to be relatable. But it feels like everything I say becomes geopolitical. For many people in Europe, Iran was an afterthought. But now it’s so real, everything has become a little more direct.”
She’s anxious to not be seen as “leveraging” the conflict for personal gain. But when she couldn’t reach her mother after a round of bombing, “I was upset, I needed to address that on stage”. She won’t claim to represent Iran, “that’s very dangerous territory” because there are “so many different opinions, both in Iran and the diaspora”. But she believes she’s found sufficient balance, “the right path. Because I get hit from all sides”.
Sasha Nezlobin’s debut is also the realisation of a “dream” born from a nightmare. In Russia, the émigré comic “was always trying to be the first. I made the first stand-up concert broadcast on television, the first stand-up TV show, the first sitcom based on my own life”. Yet when Russia invaded Ukraine, he protested on Instagram and was among a group of comics that signed an open letter to President Putin. Then, when freedom of speech laws were tightened, he fled to the US with his family. Airport security asked: “Are you leaving forever?” He replied: “I don’t know.”
Only gradually has he recovered the freedom to more-or-less fully speak his mind. “I remember thinking, ‘can I say this about President Trump?’ I still had the fear from Russia. And it took me three years to say something in public about Trump because I was scared.”
His show, I’m Fine, reflects his belief that audiences have war fatigue. Like Kaav, he’s become more politicised than his comedy instincts might otherwise have gone. He yearns for returning to the more observational comic he was in Moscow, “when your struggles are just with your wife, your family and money.”
Sami Abu Wardeh can relate, at least about the financial struggle. The Irish-Palestinian comic was critically lauded for last year’s historical storytelling show Peace de Resistance, addressing colonialism with clowning and hand puppetry. But he needs his purer stand-up follow up, Sami Abu Wardeh Hates You, to be more commercial. The stumbling block is that he can’t ignore the Gaza genocide while performing in a country that plays an active role in that genocide through military support for Israel.
Twice in the last two years he’s found himself committing the “cardinal sin” of turning on his audience. “Because our consensus reality has disintegrated, there’s no foundation to build jokes because there’s nothing we all agree we can laugh at,” he laments.
“I had a few jokes, specifically at the expense of Benjamin Netanyahu, an internationally wanted war criminal. So it’s like making a joke at Hitler’s expense. But there were people shifting in their seats saying ‘oh, I didn’t like that’.”
He was aggrieved early in the conflict when a friend told him he didn’t need to talk about Palestine. And he had bitterness towards the comedy industry, fuming that “I wouldn’t have to if enough non-Palestinians spoke up onstage and off. I wouldn’t necessarily feel the need to keep reminding people”.
However, Abu Wardeh has become more pragmatic, more understanding “if an early to mid-career comedian doesn’t want to risk their only source of income”.
Besides, he feels momentum shifting. “People seem more accepting of jokes about Netanyahu now”. And he’s strategic. “I tell stories of me telling the joke so there’s a layer of abstraction, presenting it a certain way so it’s easier for audiences to absorb, relax and laugh at.”
“Last year, I had all this bottled up frustration. Emotionally, I’m approaching this one differently. I am who I am, a member of the Palestinian diaspora, born abroad, mixed heritage with a bit of a knack for comedy. I just want to be doing comedy.”
1979: Persianality Disorder, Laughing Horse @ Coco Boho, 18-30 Aug (not 24), 5.15pm
Sasha Nezlobin: I’m Fine, Pleasance Dome, until 30 Aug (not 17, 18), 9.30pm
Sami Abu Wardeh Hates You, Pleasance Courtyard, until 30 Aug (not 17), 10pm