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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

What are Arab-American comics saying about the Iran-Israel-US war

More and more of us want to hear what the Middle Eastern comics are saying. They are translating the war for the world.

When wars erupt, comedians go to work. Because when the world begins speaking only in the language of missiles, retaliation and escalation, humour becomes one of the few ways left to translate what is happening. More and more of us want to hear what the Middle Eastern comics are saying: on stand-up stages, in viral Instagram Reels, and in short sketches shared across millions of phones.

But many of these Middle Eastern voices—Saad Alessa, Rudy Ayoub, and Sammy Obeid—doing this translating are not in the war zones themselves. They belong to a generation of hyphenated comedians — Arab-American, Lebanese-American, Palestinian-American — who often live and perform in the United States while watching their homelands unravel from afar. 

Their comedy, which ranges from impersonation of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to dark humour about life in war-ravaged areas, travels across the same global digital networks that carry footage of the devastation itself.

Stripping war vocabulary 

Kuwaiti-American comedian Saad Alessa has been among those turning geopolitics into satire as tensions in the region rise. His jokes often begin with the strange vocabulary of war itself. Words like “escalation”, he says, sound oddly bureaucratic, as if they belong in a boardroom rather than a battlefield.   

The humour works because audiences recognise the absurdity behind the language. Wars are rarely described in human terms anymore. They arrive wrapped in euphemisms. Comedy strips those away.

Alessa also jokes about family chat groups: concerned uncles, conspiracy-theorist cousins, and the one relative who meticulously forwards updates from “credible sources”. In one reel, he admonishes them: “Habibi, look outside the window. What source?”

It could easily resemble our own Indian family WhatsApp groups on........

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