What’s It Like Being a Stand-Up Comedian in Saudi Arabia?

Breaking into stand-up comedy is notoriously hard in Western countries where there’s an infrastructure of clubs and agents and laws that allow performers to say pretty much whatever they want. But in Saudi Arabia, where the notoriously oppressive government still uses beheading as a punishment and women aren’t allowed to drive, among other things, it’s nearly impossible to be a comedian. The country’s stand-up scene is “burgeoning,” to be kind, or “pretty much nonexistent,” if you want to be mean.

So when Ahmed Ahmed, the Egyptian-American comedian, was performing in Saudi Arabia in 2008 and the bookers wanted to find some locals to open for him, they had to hold auditions to find ordinary people who were funny enough to get onstage and tell jokes. An English teacher named Omar Ramzi got a Facebook message that said auditions were being held, tried out, and soon found himself in front of a thousand people doing stand-up for the very first time.

Omar stuck with comedy, and four years after his debut he had become famous enough to acquire a nickname (“the White Sudani”), made good money doing underground comedy gigs, and was featured on national TV and in the Saudi Gazette, an English-language daily newspaper. The catch was that despite being born and raised in Saudi Arabia, Omar had never received Saudi citizenship and was living illegally in the country thanks to a string of mishaps. After navigating the not-funny joke that is the Saudi bureaucracy, he eventually managed to flee to Cairo. I reached out to him through Skype to talk about the turns his life has taken.

VICE: So your nickname is “the White Sudani”? How did that happen?
Omar Ramzi: Yeah. See, my mother’s Irish and my dad is Sudanese, and obviously most Sudanese people are dark-skinned, with African origins, but there is a small minority of white Sudanese that came from North Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, and places like that. My dad is from that small minority. We’re like the bluefin tuna of the human race—almost extinct.

What was it like growing up as part of that tiny minority?
So, I was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, but I lived a very different life than most people—I lived in a compound, which is like a gated community. There’s several of them all over the country. The one that I lived in was called Saudia City, which is for the employees of Saudi Airlines. They had everything: They had their own schools—American schools, British schools—medical centers, pools… It was like a little city where the rules of the country did not apply. Women could drive and wear whatever they wanted to. There were parties and alcohol. And just outside the gate, you would see women all covered up with the black [burqa], like all ninja’d out, you know? They were like completely different worlds.

When you started doing stand-up, you were doing it in that wider world of Saudi Arabia. What was that like? It must be a lot different from what I think of as stand-up in America.
The thing is, in the West, heckling is part of the norm in stand-up comedy. In this part of the world they don’t know about heckling. There’s no such thing. People sit down and they will respect you, even if you suck ass.

Omar’s first show ever.

That must be nice.
Yeah, but it’s a bit of a challenge because they had a lot of rules. You can’t use profanity. You can’t talk about the government. You can’t talk about the royal family. You can’t talk about religion. So what is left to talk about? What is left to make fun of? I ended up making fun of the students I was teaching English to. I’ll tell you one of my jokes. I was teaching them the difference between “to” and “too.” After like three weeks of going through it, I thought, They must finally understand. So I asked who could give me an example of the difference between the words.

[heavy Saudi accent] “Teacher, teacher, I have the answer for you, teacher!”

[normal voice] “OK, go ahead.”

“For example, teacher, the one with the one ‘o’ teacher: ‘I want to go to the supermarket.’”

“Oh, very good, good job. What about the other one?”

“Yes teacher of course teacher. For example: ‘I want to go tooooooooooooooooo the beach.”

So you know, things like that, things that everyone could laugh at and that weren’t insulting.

If Saudi businesswomen think building a woman-only city will help with the 78 percent unemployment rate of their female graduates, then who are we to say it won’t work? If the goal is positive then why are we all so negative?

The laws of Saudi Arabia are based on strict Sharia principles, which require genders to be segregated and forbid women from driving, traveling alone, and achieving the same professional status as men. Of course, the effects on civil rights are a total bummer, but perhaps the most awkward Sharia by-product has to do with lingerie. Strangely, almost unbelievably, most of the Saudis selling women’s underwear are men. And in a country where a man and woman dancing together is the Western equivalent of having anal sex in the middle of a nursery, many ladies find it uncomfortable to speak with a dude about panties and bras.

Picture Perfect - Ziyah Gafić

Saudia Arabia Vs. Israel: It’s Cyber Warfare!

Guess what, everybody? Arabs and Israelis have found a new way to hate each other. Since the turn of the year, a hacking war has been taking place in the Middle East. The conflict was primarily ignited by two guys: one called “0xOmar,” who’s battling for Saudi Arabia and claims to be from the Saudi capital of Riyadh, and another called (confusingly) “OxOmer,” aka Omer Cohen, an IDF soldier and proud Israeli. Between them, these two men have been leading newly-formed legions of keyboard warriors in a rush and a push to spill the other side’s credit card details all over the web and generally make their lives as tedious and annoying as possible.

Faima Almotawa, dentistry student in her internship year: “The world should know that we don’t live in a desert and that we don’t ride camels. Our women are not slaves at home. We go to work, study, and decide our own pathway. Our challenges have never been about the Saudi government—it’s the culture. People can’t accept that women can be in line with men. Or at least they couldn’t accept it, until now.” 

— Unveiled: Inside the Homes and Lives of Saudi Women - See the rest 

Najat Bager, former school principal who now writes for various newspapers and internet publications: “Westerners must change the way they relate to us in the media. They must write the truth about Saudi women—and not just the bad women. We have women who are working as directors in television and editors at newspapers. It’s not like before.” 

— Unveiled: Inside the Homes and Lives of Saudi Women - See the rest 

Dr. Fawzia Akhdar, retired member of the ministry of education: “The Saudi woman is a chancellor, judge, leader, and mother. She can shake the world with her left hand and rock her child with her right, as Napoleon said. The rest of the world views the Saudi woman differently because she is covered and wearing a hijab, so she must be oppressed. But the opposite is true. The Saudi woman is like the rest of the women of the world, or even stronger because she has had to fight to reach where she is.” 

Forty-five percent of Saudi Arabia’s population is female. Ironically, these ladies control an estimated $11.9 billion of the nation’s wealth but are denied rights that most women take for granted: They are forbidden from voting (until 2015), can’t drive, and require written permission from their male “guardians” (usually a father or husband) if they wish to travel abroad or open a business. It’s no wonder they are often stereotyped as faceless, voiceless shadows without control over their own destinies.

 Offered a unique opportunity, I was invited into a world rarely visited by outsiders—one that is usually considered off-limits and impenetrable—to lift the abaya and niqab and meet the women underneath.

— Unveiled: Inside the Homes and Lives of Saudi Women - See the rest