Go on stage and tell jokes: two Jordanians in Amman have challenged themselves to teach their compatriots to laugh again, mired in daily economic difficulties.
Since establishing the Amman Comedy Club (ACC) in 2019, Moeen Masoud and Yazan Abou al-Rous have enabled 140 people to be “trained” in laughter during free workshops lasting three to four months.
Aged 18 to 40, lawyers, doctors but also students have learned to do improv, stand-up, comedy sketches or even to write satires.
“Comedy is a message and our message is to make people laugh,” says Masoud.
“If you come here and spend two hours laughing, forgetting all your troubles and worries, that means I’ve accomplished my mission.”
Jordan is going through deep economic difficulties, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to the latest official statistics, dating from 2021, nearly 25% of the population is unemployed, a figure that rises to 50% among young people.
The public debt is 43.1 billion euros, or 106% of the Gross Domestic Product, and the poverty rate is 24%, a record.
Comedy makes it possible to talk about these “worries” in another way, and under cover of joke the underlying criticisms can help “to grow and solve problems”, underlines Mr. Abou al-Rous.
The workshops take place with the support of the Jordanian government and aid from international foundations, such as the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, but also from foreign comedy clubs, like the famous The Second City, in Chicago.
“We have big ambitions (…) we want to tour the Arab world and beyond with Jordanian comedians,” says Masoud.
“According to prejudice, Jordanians are not laughing,” says Mr Abu al-Rous. “At ACC, we want to challenge that idea and prove it to the world that we love jokes and laughter.”
Among the “graduates” of the ACC, some now perform across the country to elicit giggles, even in the Syrian refugee camps, where the club organizes psychological support modules.
The best known of them is called Abdallah Sobeih. The 25-year-old unites hundreds of thousands on social media and has a weekly show in Amman.
The ACC workshops taught him “to pick topics that affect people’s lives, and how funny stories are constructed.”
On Instagram, his jokes “make his 340,000 subscribers forget their worries”, he hopes.
“We know that people are suffering (…) We try to bring them some relief,” said the comedian.
With two other former ACC workshops, Kamal Sailos and Youssef Bataineh, he continues to joke at the Al-Shams theater, in front of an audience of 350 people, mainly young women and men.
“Our country is the only one in the world for which, when you type its name on Google, the results show Michael Jordan”, legendary basketball player, launched Youssef Bataineh in front of a hilarious audience.
At the end of the show, the student Ahmed has a smile on his face. “People really forget the importance of laughter,” he says.
“What they do is give people the positive energy they desperately need.”
03/26/2023 09:07:20 – Amman (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
