In the summer of 2009, journalist Maziar Bahari stumbled back to his solitary prison cell. He’d been slapped, punched and kicked until his legs were black with bruises. His captors told him he’d be dead within a week.
And yet he laughed, he roared.
The questions his interrogator had asked.
“What is your connection to Anton Chekhov?”
And, more bizarrely, “Who is Pauly Shore?
His imprisonment in Tehran’s feared Evin Prison had become a black, absurdist comedy, as he recounts in his newly published memoir, Then They Came for Me...
Bahari knew his hulking, perfumed interrogator, whom he nicknamed Rosewater, trolled Facebook, looking for evidence against him. Rosewater and his cohorts mined his interests and his contacts, but they lacked the experience and sophistication to know what their findings meant.
Rosewater tried to understand him but was bewildered by the richness of his life, his interest in Western film and music and literature. “These things were foreign to my interrogator — he didn’t know how to put pressure on me, how to use that knowledge,” Bahari said. “My secrets from him were my little universe that kept me intact — he couldn’t touch it.
“They used advanced interrogation techniques to force people to admit to things that were ridiculous, outlandish and exaggerated. And it’s why I had this Kafkaesque, dark-humour experience.”
To his oppressors, everything about Bahari signalled Western corruption or sinister plots to undermine the Islamic republic. They interpreted references on his Facebook page to Anton Chekhov, the Russian writer dead more than a century, as Bahari’s connection to a Zionist conspiracy. There was also mention of Pauly Shore, the U.S. comedian and star of B-list movies such as Encino Man, on the prisoner’s Facebook page. “We’ll investigate this Pauly Shore,” Rosewater vowed.Yeah, that Pauly--he's one scary dude. Cabalist-in-Chief for the ZOG, I hear.
Meanwhile, over in funny Sunni Saudi Arabia, the NYT's Neil MacFarquar reports on the Guy Earles of Riyadh:
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — You know you are attending a Saudi Arabian comedy night when the sprawling performance tent is pitched 50 miles out into the desert to avoid the morals police and, astonishingly, the ushers are women, even if they remain shrouded by the standard-issue black garments.
Then the swirling disco lights and giant speakers thumping out “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas go still for evening prayer. And sex determines the seating — bachelors on the right, families including women on the left.
“I love Riyadh!” the master of ceremonies starts in Arabic, eliciting a tepid response from the audience of about 1,000 people with his next line: “When you walk on the streets, you don’t see any women!”
Stand-up comedy in Saudi Arabia remains a somewhat clandestine affair, emerging from the raw local performers hired as warm-up acts for the mostly Arab-Americans who began touring the Middle East a few years ago. But Saudi comics are now coming into their own.
Two have established wildly popular shows on YouTube — not least because the Web has emerged as the one public space in the kingdom where it is O.K. to endorse the Arab uprisings. Comedy nights have just switched to Arabic from English, broadening their appeal, and comedians have even been asked to entertain at Koran conferences.
“It is really convenient for Saudi society because it is one person on stage; there is no acting, no women on stage, no men dressed as women,” said Ahmad Fathaldin, a 25-year-old medical student and one of six twentysomethings who write and perform the hit series “On the Fly” on YouTube. “Socially it is accepted.”...A few samples of Wahhabi humour: "Thanks for coming and try the sharia"; "I'll be here all week--unless the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice has something to say about it; "Take my wives, please..."
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| The sinister cabalist wearing his Dubyabusters shirt, to discombobulate the mullahs |
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