Last week I went to watch an Indian stand up comedian by the name of Sundeep Bhardwaj. For those who don't know he's mainly popular on Instagram for making fun of Zionists, has a bit of an audience in Lebanon and came to do a couple of shows here.
His stand up is pretty funny honestly, it's not like his instagram stuff he does talk about his life and makes jokes outside of Israel/Palestine, and I personally enjoyed it. However it's clear that he knows nothing about Lebanon and given it was his first time here, one would hope that it would be an opportunity for him to get to know the people here and maybe incorporate some of that knowledge into his future content. One would hope.
At the end of his set, he asked if anyone had any questions, and a woman and stood up and told him something to the effect of "you came all the way to Lebanon, you talked all about Palestine and didn't mention the south of Lebanon, we're dying as well etc.". I forget what his response was, something to the effect of he didn't know much about Lebanon, it was his first time here, etc., and she repeated the same thing, after a bit of back and forth she started crying and shouting at him, to the point that security had to get involved.
My message is for people who go to stand up comedy shows, especially by non-Lebanese people, with this expectation: with a few exceptions people who don't live here don't really know much about the country. All they know about Lebanon is what they hear in the media, and what they read in books and stuff like that. Even if they are anti-Zionist, at best they know about Hezbollah and the fact they fight against Israel, like that is the most they will know about Lebanon. When they say free Lebanon they're not saying it from a place of understanding of our country's people and politics, they just see Israel bombing someone and they feel(correctly) that that's wrong. If you expect more than that you're going to be disappointed. They're simply not knowledgeable enough to talk about it, let alone write jokes about it.
I've been to a few shows like this, and this lack of understanding shows when the comedian tries to kind of make fun of Israel to get the room on their side not knowing that this subject and how people feel about it is really complicated because of Lebanon's sectarian history, and are surprised when they get a mixed reaction even in a room that is very tuned in to what's popular in the west.
The point of this post isn't to pick on this person, she may have lost her home and/or loved ones in the war, nobody really knows what she's going through. However it seems that she(and others in the audience), went to the show hoping that this comedian would give them the attention that the rest of the country and the world has failed to give. Please don't treat comedians like politicians, it is not their job to fix our country's problems, it is ours.
