I had always been made fun of for my last name, but this was the first time I ever worried it could actually be illegal to say it out loud.
Once I got onstage, I scanned the crowd for what I was up against. I saw a mixture of men and women, some dressed in traditional garb, some not—again shattering my idea of the homogeneous backward population of the Middle East. I had envisioned that all the women would be in burkas and after my set they’d all rise up, rip off their oppressive garb, and storm into the sunset with me, prancing toward liberty. Nope. It was way messier and more complicated than that. First of all, the sun had already set, and second, every woman was in a different incarnation of the garb, if in the garb at all. Panicked by this curveball, I locked onto one girl who seemed particularly supportive and decided to just do my whole show for her.
I started by addressing my unfortunate last name and made a joke that referenced the base of it, which is, sadly for me as a teenager, cum.
I held my breath, ready for the onslaught of boos, gasps, tomatoes. There was a slight beat of silence, then something very weird happened. The audience laughed. Hard. I’ll never know what lay within that beat of silence. Maybe it was a language barrier or a collective moment of wondering if they were allowed to think it was funny, but that was all the encouragement I needed to go another twenty minutes yelling about boobs and vaginas to an area of the world known for covering those very things up.
These laughs didn’t sound like the laughs in America. They felt like they were coming from a deeper place. They were a special kind of laugh that felt like repression desperately aching to be released. The laughs were like the Middle East itself—half very new, half very old.
When I finally got comfortable, I was able to look at other people in the crowd besides the girl I locked onto, and I saw something I didn’t expect to see. The men were also laughing. They weren’t mad, threatened, offended, or scared. Turns out I was the only one guilty of all of those things.
And yes, for the haters reading this (hi! and thanks! and sorry!), I do realize the people at this show in no way represented the entirety of the Middle Eastern culture. I was performing for a very specific and small sample of people. The kind of person who would come to a comedy show is already going to be way more modern and tolerant. I realize that the hostile misogynistic weirdos, the conservative fundamentalists, and the very oppressed women who weren’t allowed to leave the house wouldn’t even know about the show, much less buy a ticket. That said, it still felt like a win that in the Middle East a woman could go onstage and yell into a microphone about squirting.
That night, people showed me photos of myself onstage, and although I probably should have been beaming with pride, when I looked at the photos all I could see were the bags under my eyes. “I’ll use the money I made from the tour to buy some de-puffing eye cream,” I thought. Ugh, the girls at the mall were right.
The next day we were off to Lebanon, a place I knew even less about than Dubai. No amount of Googling prepared me for how beautiful it was. It looked more like the Middle East that was in my head before I saw Dubai. It was rustic and majestic, like the preloaded screensaver that comes with your computer. Beirut was of course very developed, but the cosmopolitan mass of glass buildings was surrounded by rugged mountains and ancient mosques. The water that lined the city was an opaque emerald green, whereas Dubai’s water was an impossibly clear blue. Beirut had more grit, more edge, and more women in headscarves.
After the Dubai show, I was feeling safer and more confident about the whole being-a-woman thing. I also felt safe because I got to wander around the city with Tom Papa, one of the funniest people I know. Male comedians aren’t known for being the toughest people in the world, but at least I had someone with the charm and wit to talk us out of any trouble we could get into. He and I saw everything from abject poverty to annoying tourists to the biggest Fendi store I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t really pin this place down either, which was very annoying. My black-and-white brain saw only gray, my least favorite color.
Tom and I stumbled upon a gorgeous old mosque called the Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque. The spoils of modernity aggressively compete for your attention in Beirut: the billboards, the ads, the stores, the sales, the music, the fountains. Despite all the gorgeous things in your purview, this mosque effortlessly draws your eye with an eerily quiet ability to hypnotize you. I can’t quite figure out why it’s so arresting. Buildings are of course immobile, but this mosque feels especially still. Maybe it’s the odd combination of gold and turquoise; maybe it’s the stones it’s comprised of, which are of course beige.
Tom and I decided to go in. I had no idea if you needed some kind of ID or wristband or club card or something, but to my surprise, it seemed to be open to everyone, even obnoxious Americans like us. Having just done stand-up in front of a bunch of Middle Easterners who accepted me, I felt pretty invincible, so I sauntered into that mosque like it was my bitch.
When we entered, Tom and I marveled at the shocking beauty of the inside. It’s actually sort of unfathomable how gorgeous this place is. The domed ceilings are decorated with an infinitesimal number of colorful, painfully symmetrical tiles. I wondered, how can a country with such perfect tiles have such imperfect beliefs? A dangerously large chandelier hung from the ceiling. I thought about how gorgeous it would be if the thing just crashed to the ground in slow motion, but it didn’t seem like chaos was something that could happen in a place this serene. It was so impossibly quiet. I’ve spent my fair share of time in churches, and even when they’re supposed to be quiet, you hear feet rustling and people breathing. Not here. This place was dead silent. It was so quiet that I could hear the voices in my head, which is never good news given how grumpy my inner monologue was back then. I responded to the whole experience as any predictable twenty-six-year-old tourist would: I pulled my camera out to take a billion selfies.
Suddenly I heard a woman yelling. Screaming, in fact.