Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

If you’d have seen Sami Abu Wardeh’s forbidding work in progress at the Leicester Comedy Festival in February, you might be forgiven for approaching the finished product with a little trepidation. In that form, it was a justifiably furious pillar of anti-fascist invective, heavy on challenging audience participation and deeply enmeshed with Wardeh’s personal experience of Israeli apartheid in Palestine.

Interestingly, those feelings have been largely sublimated for the finished product, which seems to draw on that rage without directly invoking it, allowing Palestine to be the skeleton under the flesh of this brutally funny and brilliantly-performed show.

Although it’s not Wardeh's Fringe debut, it’s still an introduction of sorts, as his previous shows have all been clowning and character-based. Here, for the first time, he’s doing ‘straight stand-up’ talking primarily about his fascinating childhood. 

The son of a Palestinian resistance fighter and an Irish schoolteacher, Wardeh was born in Kuwait before his family had to flee to England as refugees from Saddam Hussein. There they stayed for a while before his mother accepted a job in Dubai.

Between these experiences, Wardeh’s context shifted dramatically. Christian, atheist, Muslim, always poor but often surrounded by great wealth, subject to bullying for being too white, too brown, too whatever. He remembers being racially discriminated against for the first time, and many of those childhood bullies recur unexpectedly throughout the show.

His is a fascinating viewpoint, but it’s the way he expresses it that makes it so divine. Don’t get me wrong, Wardeh was a powerful clown when that was his bag. Now, though, with his incredible gift for body language, voice work and sound effects fully integrated into a killer storytelling set, he might be unstoppable. If any other stand-up could beatbox AND do Tuvan throat singing, well, their whole show would probably be about that.

His act-outs especially are on another level. His impression of a fart travelling around a mosque is gorgeous, Chaplinesque stuff. Later, reflecting on his burgeoning adolescent sexuality, he conjures the big booty Latina who he dreamed of a boy, sitting on the back of a motorbike and getting turned on by the very concept of Islam. I think that’s the hardest I’ve laughed all Fringe, and Wardeh's show is full of such moments.

It’s sometimes a little surprising that the show isn’t more overtly political, especially given its title. He promises at the top to lure us in before hitting us with the anti-fascist stuff, but it never arrives in quite the way you expect, although he does take 30 seconds to swear his undying hatred for every complicit politician who waved through the Palestinian genocide over the last three decades.

Instead of giving vent to this cathartic rage, his story ends on a complex note, as Wardeh asks if his skills as a clown are fundamentally ill-suited to provoking change. Chris Morris talked about satire that ‘placates the court’, and Wardeh wonders if that’s the inescapable role of all entertainment.

This might not be the show I expected from Wardeh, but it’s richer and far funnier than I could have hoped for.

Review date: 24 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard