Exporting the funny: Dubai comics go international

Dubai is exporting the funny. After a years of open mic nights and free performances attended by obliging friends, the city’s fledgling comedy community is now taking the show on the road.

Come August, two comedy groups will fly the UAE flag at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival. Komic Sutra, a company founded and fronted by Nitin Mirani, and Dubomedy Arts, founded by husband-and-wife entertainers Ali Al Sayed and Mina Liccione, will perform for a week in the Scottish capital during the month-long event, which has helped establish the careers of many internationally famous writers and performers. While Mirani will be performing solo, Al Sayed and Liccione will join amateur comedians Ray Addison and Jamie Johnson for their show called Big In Dubai.

For Al Sayed and Liccione, who founded their company in the hopes of one day exporting comic talent, the trip will be a milestone.

“When we started out we wanted to create communities that would grow in the region and be taken abroad rather than just import great comedians from abroad,” says Al Sayed, an Emirati, whose Dubomedy Arts recently turned four. “The comedy scene took off in Dubai with a few Arab-Americans coming here to perform, but the concept was new and unexplored here in the region. Main headliners were flown in and nothing was home-grown. So we decided to educate people here about comedy as a whole and not just look at stand-up comedy alone.”

Before heading to Scotland, Al Sayed and Liccione, an Italian-American, will travel to Athens, Greece, where they will teach and perform at the Theatre For Change International Festival next week and then to Kuwait, Canada and New York to perform.

Mirani, who launched Komic Sutra in 2009, is also going international. Having performed a shows in India, Canada and New York this year, his schedule next month includes gigs in London, Hong Kong, Maldives, the Philippines, South Africa and more shows in Canada, New York and India.

“When I quit my job to take up comedy full time back in 2006, there wasn’t anybody doing it. It was not until a comedy night called One Night Stand in a bar called Jimmy Dix, by a guy called Basit Quereshi, who introduced the open mic concept, that I got my first break. It was a big leap of faith for me,” says the Indian comic.

Monday Night Funnies, a weekly variety show, was started by Al Sayed and Liccione to give aspiring comics the platform to find their funny side through sketch, standup and improve comedy.

“Four years ago people were scared to give us a gig thinking that our humour won’t be clean and it might be a mock satire so it took us 13 months to fix the venue for our first show,” says Liccione. “But we came a long way since then. For the first performing arts festival in 2010, we got around 200 performers and it has been growing since then.”

Dubomedy Arts, which also conducts classes in writing, tap dance, has seen many students graduate from its courses and start their own comedy groups and nights.

“We started off with one class of 12 students and now we have 120 students spanning eight classes,” says Al Sayed. “Our students, after graduating from Dubomedy, are all on their own now doing their own amateur nights. We aim at establishing a comedy circle more than just growing as an institution.”

Omar Ismail, a Dubomedy graduate and now a resident artist there, says the UAE’s mix of communities is a goldmine for comics. “Coming from so many different communities and varied cultural backgrounds we bring more spice to the table. Our shows bring variety and help everybody in the audience to relate to someone or the other in our gags,” he says.

But despite the rise of the UAE’s comics, comedy here does not have a business model yet.

“As a community you can help each other perform but that’s it, you are capped,” says Hisham Wyne, a writer, columnist and a Dubomedy graduate who organises a free-to-attend event called One Night Standup. “There are a lot of people who would pay to watch comedy and even though organising community nights is fairly easy there is no corporate awareness for that here.”

Mirani got creative. The comedian last month launched a rent-a-comic concept called Laugh Your Assets Off targeted specially at corporations.

“What we will do is basically walk into your office, maybe at lunch time, and for about 30 to 40 minutes get you to laugh away your worries and then walk off,” says the 33-year-old. “We will bring our own set-up, so you could be sitting at your desk and enjoying the show. It’s therapeutical, can help you switch off and calm you down, even for a little while.”

Mirani also has an army of comics he can bring with him, depending on budgets and requirements, of course. A 20 to 30 minute session will start at Dh5,000.

“Each session is tailor-made to the organisation,” Mirani explains. “For instance, we recently did a session at Reckitt Benckiser, the company which makes Durex, and we had a lot of jokes about protection, which went down very well. This is the only show where I couldn’t say, ‘Thank you for coming’.

“Gone are the days when there was the same belly dancer at all the office events,” Mirani adds. “Bosses are clever these days, they put their employees in a good mood and then tell them about the numbers they’ve screwed up.”

But it’s not all about the money. Newbies Andre Reynolds and Sheida Ibrahim agree that they do comedy only for the love of it.

“I have a full time job which has nothing to do with comedy. I am yet to establish myself and gain a hold before I expect to take up comedy full time. At the moment there are about eight to ten gigs that I get per month but not all of them are paid,” says Reynolds.

Not everybody who graduates ends up on the stage says Sheida. “For me it’s different. I just love getting a chance to perform. Yes, people do find it hard to express themselves because comedy as such is quite a male dominated sphere. But this generation is different as they are more educated and open-minded.”

Robert Hillier, a TV producer, adds: “You can choose whether to make a living by comedy or take it as a part-time. Here it is still developing so you can’t do much with it yet. We all try to reach out and stand up for each other by encouraging new comers and backing them up. With the latest in technology we can use the social network and put up a video on YouTube to spread the word around.”

Sheida and Hillier, who met at Dubomedy, have also started another group called Comedy Dubai along with past fellow graduates, which organises monthly events called Get Up Stand Up.

Edinburgh-bound Addison, a television producer, and Johnson, an air traffic controller, who were instrumental in securing Dubomedy a slot at the renowned festival, created a new group especially for the event called Dubai Laughing. The pair, also recent graduates, met at Dubomedy.

But while the mushrooming of comedy events in Dubai can only be a good thing, Ismail is worried about the community splitting up. “Groups can’t survive when they split. In our case since the community here is expatriate dominated and transient so someone or the other is leaving every year. It becomes a problem to keep everyone together.”

What the community needs now is support from the general public, adds Addison.

“People still come with low expectations but go back quite surprised,” he says.