The Sharief al-Hihi shivered, tightened herself with her hands, and pretended to go through the withdrawal of the Syrian regime.
Standing in front of the audience in Damascus, he spoke a joke that would be unthinkable up to just a few weeks before when President Bashar Al-Assad was suddenly thrown out After more than five decades of the oppressive rule of his family.
“We need rehab centers. You can’t simply take this type from our life-it must be gradually,” said the 33-year-old comedian and screenwriter, describing the ubiquitous posters and magazines depicting the al-Assad dynasty, to laughter from the crowd. He continued to shake. “They will ask us what drug you were addicted to; we will say,” Bashar al-Assad. “
It was a night-up night at the end of December at the Zaway Art Gallery in the heart of the Syrian capital. Half of the comedians who performed that night lived abroad after fleeing the country during 13-year-old civil war That ended with Mr. Al-Assad.
Their routine included the standard price of comedy-relay, sex and pressure to get married but the biggest blow to the night was Mr. Al-Assad. One comedian called him the whole routine as “that whore.”
The comedians enjoyed the chance to say things that the Syrians would have been afraid of even in a private company for decades. The fear of the infamous Mukhabarata, the secret intelligence service, is built so deep that the Syrians lived with a warning warning that “the walls have ears.”
But even as they accepted freedom to make new jokes, comedians, like many everyday Syrians, were concerned that this new freedom of expression could be transient. Ahmed al-Shara, Temporary president of the country He who runs Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist rebel group that was granted by Mr. Assad, promised a unity that reflects a diverse population of Syria, but there are deep concerns as the government will be democratic and including being.
Under the Government of Assad, Roula Sulaiman, owner of the Zaway Gallery, she said that she faced the limitations and accusations of organizing political opposition events when she tried to maintain comedies and cultural events. She’s still worried now.
“We haven’t tested a new regime yet,” Mrs. Sulaiman said. “Based on what we see, I think we are moving toward multiple limits.”
Officials with the new government came to her gallery and told her that nudity in art would no longer be allowed, she added. Asked for comment, the Government Ministry of Information said it was not familiar with the episode, but had no rules in this regard.
As comedians wait to see what new red lines can be, they exploit opportunity as long as it lasts.
“We are in a temporary phase where we can talk freely about the past and present, but we all face an unknown future,” said Mary Obaid, one of the members of the founder, along with Mr. Al-Husia, Styria-Portmanteau of Syria and Hysteria-which is charged on the first stand-up comedy platform in the country.
Stirij Formed two years ago with the aim of spreading stand-up comedy in Syria and establishing the first comedy club in the country, which is a goal that has yet to be achieved.
“We are all afraid, but we hope that freedom of expression will remain,” said Mrs. Obaid, a 23-year-old dentistry.
Even under the repression of Assad Government and the destructive civil war, the Syrians relied on humor – usually dark – as a coping mechanism.
At the beginning of the war, ordinary Syrians began to form rebel groups to fight the Government, but they often fought for the acquisition of weapons. One small band of men was recorded by a satirical video that echoed to others announcing new groups, but instead of holding Kalatnik’s, each kept a piece of fruit to have fun in the fight of their group to get a weapon.
In Aleppo, since the government’s forces in 2014 began to surround the opponent’s areas of the city, the rebels shared their dinner with stray cats. The rebels joked that they were trying to remove cats in case they should eat them.
Considering their tradition of humor Hallows, the Syrians may be uniquely equipped for a mining laugh and from the current moment and from the decades that live under the Assad Dynasty.
This includes combining personal and political. After Mr. Al-Assad Presidential Palace He was robbed due to his fall, his photograph that spread online, pointing to him dressed in undeniably white underwear and the top of the tanks.
Mrs. Obaid found overlap with her own life. “I was not shocked by anything from the fall of the president, except for one thing,” she began during her routine, “my underwear before I had a gastric reduction surgery. Why were they in the presidential palace?”
Thirty minutes before the show in Zaway, Mr. Al-Hihsi sat in what served as a green room, trying on his colleagues to comedians who could become new material. The pictures covered the walls around him as Techno played loudly in the main hall.
He was joking about the recent visit of the Hayata security officers to Tahri al-Shama and as he tried to hide the tattoos that covered his hands, given the majority of more conservative Muslim disapproval of physical art.
Prior to the fall of the regime, Mr. Al-Hihi would inevitably refer to the jokes involved in Mr. Al-Assad, his wife or government. He would write them down and endure them in a document that marked “for Lebanon.”
At this point, he threw out the joke of the symptoms of the Assad withdrawal, with the aim of expanding it into a proposed 12 -step program to reject the cheese of the regime addiction.
“Those were jokes that I couldn’t say here,” he said. “Now I can.”
Zeina Shala contribute to reporting.
