Comedy fans have seen Sami Abu Wardeh in several guises, from a capering clown catching cherry tomatoes in his mouth, to teller (on last year’s fringe) of the historical stories behind the Gaza crisis. But we’ve never seen him deliver straight autobiographical standup – until now. The new direction, the 40-year-old tells us, is thanks to his agent, who’s told him that audiences need to get to know him better. And who may be concerned, Wardeh implies, by recent dust-ups between this “anti-fascist”/pro-Palestine performer and one or two audience members to whom that worldview was unwelcome.
Sami Abu Wardeh Hates You (its title notwithstanding) presents us with a more palatable act, one effortlessly capable of delivering mainstream comedy. From the opening gag about walk-on music, to the tour of his peripatetic childhood (from Kuwait via southwest London to Dubai), to the risque gags about wanking and his resemblance to a “porn Super Mario”, the show might have been designed to demonstrate the Irish-Palestinian’s mastery of standup topics and techniques. But he gives them his own spin; whether that’s workshopping racist slurs with his bully, or orchestrating his Middle Eastern schoolmates in a rap-along to Will Smith’s Men in Black.
