 Okay, so we're not we're not live right when the. Yes. Okay. Great. I can't see I still can see the participants should I change my. I only see one person running hi Jenny. Okay. Okay, I guess we were going to begin. Okay. So I'm going to say some people again, joining us, please feel free to. Hi, Sammy. Hello, hello. I'm not worried about you, but you're here. I had another class on zoom. I was doing. No worries. No worries. Yeah. Yeah. I was just saying to all our attendees, please join the meeting on mute. Okay. So I'm going to begin officially. I'm going to be welcoming everyone here. And just some housekeeping items and some acknowledgment. If you would allow me. So welcome to no summary. This is golden threads, online conversations with artists who don't fit in a box. My name is Sahara staff. I use she her pronouns. And I'm the executive artistic director of golden thread productions. And by way of visual description, I'm an Arab woman with a light complexion and brown hair. And I'm wearing a navy blue blazer with a black top underneath. And behind me is a plain white wall. For those of you who don't know, golden thread is the first American theater company devoted to theater from or about the Middle East. And we were founded by playwright and director to run. Yeah. In 1996. I would like to take a moment here to acknowledge the people of the land on which we live and work today. The multiple oloni tribes. Despite the atrocities of colonization and genocide, native communities persist today. And are active in efforts to preserve and revive their culture. At golden thread, we are driven by a desire to expand this land acknowledgement statement to recognize our community's experience of occupation in the Middle East. The refugee crisis and the displaced population. This today is our first no summary for 2023, which is our fourth season. Of this program. And in this new season, no summary embarks on a virtual tour to universities across the nation. Bringing golden threads conversations with artists who don't fit in a box to theater and art classes. It's like a. Class visit made public, basically. So I'm so thrilled to be launching this year's series. With our artists in residence. Join by the classes and some students from the classes of associate professor and cultural historian. Simon Anderson. At the school of the art Institute of Chicago. And students from the classes of interdisciplinary artists. As much at Columbia College, Chicago. And also at the school of the art Institute in Chicago. So. Welcome all of you and thank you for being here. And our guest speaker today. Allow me to make it a little also official of an introduction and read a little bit of. Wafa's bio for those of you who might not be so familiar with his brilliant work. Wafa is Iraqi born artist and arts professor at NYU. And he's a professor at NYU. He's known internationally for his online performative and interactive works, provoking dialogue about international and interpersonal politics. His work explores tensions as he would like to put it between the cultural spaces he occupies. His home in the comfort zone of the U.S. and his consciousness in the conflict zone. He's known internationally for his online performative and interactive work. And his consciousness in the conflict zone in Iraq. For his 2007 installation, domestic tension. Bilal spent a month in flat file galleries where people could shoot him via a remote access paintball gun. The Chicago Tribune called it one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time. Naming him 2008 artists of the year. That year city lights published shoot an Iraqi art life and resistance under the gun about Bilal's life and about domestic tension. Using his own body as a medium Bilal continued to challenge the public comfort zone with projects like third eye and and counting. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Museum of contemporary photography in Chicago. He is a professor at the University of New Mexico and MFA from the school of the Art Institute of Chicago. And is currently, as I said, an arts professor at NYU school. What was also our artist in residence. We're so honored. And he will collaborate with us on multiple projects throughout the year, including the curation of and wreak at a comedy show. And also he will be contributing to the reorient forum this fall. And just allow me also like to just say one thing about this artist in residence program because it's a brand new initiative at Golden Fred. And aim is to engage guest artists on an annual basis within the company staff. So the program intends to bring fresh perspectives into each season and also expand the culture of innovation and creativity while allowing the guest artist the opportunity to grow their work and engage with our communities. Again, I'm so honored to be launching this new program with you Wafa. Welcome. Thank you so much, Sahar. And I wanted to say I'm really thrilled to be working with you and working with the Golden Fred with a great opportunity. It is very unusual with me to cross path to the theater. But I'm sure there is a great connection here. There is. And we're going to be talking about it for sure. So this conversation today is the title of the conversation is comedy as a form of resistance. So we're going to be diving into why Wafa Bilal is doing something like a stand-up comedy, curating a stand-up comedy. Before we do that, I want to welcome those in the room again. And also those of you who are tuning into the live stream on HowlRound. So those who are with us in the room, please feel free to contact us. So those who are with us in the room, please feel free at any point to utilize the chat function and post your comments and questions throughout the conversations. Feel free also to introduce yourselves in the chat as well. We're going to be sharing the biographies of our speakers also in the chat for you to have a deeper look at them. So those who know Wafa's work, like I do, might have been surprised to know that you're the curator of the comedy show. Like I was. I mean, when we started this conversation, Wafa, about what to do during this residency with us, I was literally expecting anything except comedy. But it was such a happy surprise for me because at Golden Thread, we were really looking for opportunities to allow us to spread laughter amongst our communities. You're an artist who have used your body, used technology, virtual reality, like many platforms, many mediums, I mean, to, as you put it, to trigger a platform. Like to name a few examples, you've surgically installed a camera into your skull for a year. You put your body in front of a web-activated paintball gun for like six weeks in domestic tension. You then have a sticky memorial permanently tattooed on your back and counting. So as a theater maker and firm believer in the power of storytelling, I find it extremely interesting that you say America, the stand-up comedy battle. It does the same thing basically. Triggers a platform. I would like to invite you to begin, start us on this conversation by talking about you know, how does your work, you know, the kind of work that you do and comedy come together by triggering it. Oh, Sarah, thank you so much. When I looked at comedy, it really it bring me back so many years to the childhood. And I wasn't aware of its power, the power of laughter, the power of the very basic of it as a, is it the joke? But then when we to begin with, we try to analyze it, right? What's the basic of it? In order to laugh at something specifically a joke, you do need basic things. You need to be informed of a situation. You have to have a network of things. You have to have a reference to things, whether it's politics, whether social, whether it's a mundane thing. So things we practice every day, but you don't really know the mechanism about it. So let's say I'm saying a joke, but what I'm really doing, that joke it would never resonate unless there is a connection between me and the people I'm telling that joke. So we could see immediately that form is build them a community. And that's what interests me to begin with. How a laughter build a community. But let's break it more down, go to the child. I lived in Iraq when I was a child under Saddam regime and I lived through multiple wars. Let's not talk about the oppression of the regime, just talk about the wars, for example, Iran, Iraq war, Iran Kuwait, Iraq Kuwait war, within the war tend to dehumanize people because it's insignificant. The destruction doesn't discriminate whether it's a human or an object. Then it become a form of oppression. How do you fight that back? How do you say I'm a human? I exist, but I have not existed alone. So it become empowered. And I remember the childhood memories all punctuated with laughter whether it's during bombing or whether during the embargo or during a harsh day. Why that is important? I think it's important because it holds us together. As a group of people, it empower us, then it enable us to fight back. Then we go back, well, how is it laughter making us fighting back, for example? As I mentioned, I live under Saddam's regime. And as a group of teenagers, this is the 70s, the 80s. Forget about your phone, forget about the internet, forget about even TV, phone. What it was, it was us teenagers. It's trying to prevail over an oppressive regime. How do you do that? By breaking its power through minimizing its psychological effects. What did we do? We establish an underground, call it a comedy club, but really it's a joke that is built by people and disseminated by people underground. So we would tell jokes about the regime to undermine its power and its effect on our mentality. This way, not only we feel we are living but we are in power too. And how did we do it? Our parents always told us, be careful when you live under an oppressive regime because the walls have ears. As kids, we took it literally, the walls have ears. They're listening, right? So we would tell each other, meet me at that intersection. I have a new job for you. And we would walk to the intersection. Why the intersection? Because we were afraid of any walls. We were afraid of any enclosure, anybody who could hear us. We were even afraid of people from a distance. So we will distance ourselves. We will come to tell the joke. Of course, it was directly about the regime, about the leader of the regime. And then we will walk away. That continued for so many people under oppression in Iraq. And that practice to this day, I remember one day, then it was really when around, when the civil war about to break in Iraq, around 2007, eight, I think that's when I did domestic tension when the joke dried up in Iraq. And that's the first time I realize the culture is in danger because for the first time, politics and the situation is way more than a human could bear to the point that Iraq cannot laugh. And that's when you know the culture is in danger when they cannot laugh at politics. I'll stop for now. Thank you so much, Wafa, for the story. And yeah, I remember reading this bit. It was very striking for me in to shoot an Iraqi when you speak about it. And I actually highlighted this part where you're talking about how the fact that Iraqis are not able to laugh is deeply disturbing because it kind of gives you, it means that they've entered, you say a mode of complete hopelessness. So I do have a follow-up question or this, but before I do that, I wanna turn to our guest speakers also here who are bringing their students to join us. So I'm gonna turn to you, Simon. Hello and welcome. We're so happy to have you. Please, you know, feel free to comment. I wanna ask you like whatever resonated from what Wafa shared with us and also tell us a little about your work and the students that might be joining us here today, some of your students, I believe are here. Yes, indeed. Thank you, Sahar. Thank you for this opportunity to engage with this fascinating concept. And thank you, Wafa, for remembering the old school. And so I come at the idea of humor from my own area of interest, wherein the work of art was deliberately made to be sometimes a gag, a visual gag or a kind of conceptual one-liner. So I learned very early that the idea of a work of art can be simply to flip your ideas around and maybe humor is a very good way of doing that. And hopefully for those people who are in the room as well, the Friday afternoon crew will acknowledge that I'm not making that up. So I find humor to be a very powerful thing. And first of all, Wafa, I wanna thank you for that story. Man, that was harsh. But I'm grateful to have heard it. And I want to say that, although it can never scar the psyche as much, that humor works in a similar way in the individual psyche. In other words, that it sets up these situations where for instance, is it safe to tell this joke? Is that joke going to offend someone else? And maybe even the joke itself is about a clash of oppositions. So that's what I'm interested in thinking about. And because I'm a historian, I'm thinking about it as a historical thing. And so I know it goes back a long way. Thank you so much, Sam. And I just wanna mention something about what you just said. And I wanted to refer everybody to what the futurists did around the four-world war or the first war and in their opposition toward the use comedy as a form of resistance. So I highly recommend people read about that and what the futurists and other people have done of performance are taking it to the public to undermine and to resist war. Yeah, thank you both. I mean, historically speaking in the theater also, like it goes back to the ancient Greeks, right? With Aristophanes' comedies telling us a lot about what was happening politically and socially and even in like how the theater, we learned a lot about how theater functioned through these comedies. And it was like kind of mandatory to add the satir plays within the, you know, tragic trilogies. It's interesting. Let's see, Sammy, how is it for you? Where does your work intersect? Do you do comedies in your work to begin with? I'm not sure. It could be up to interpretation. And I think part of the tactics that I started to use by being here is to play in this realm of like fiction and nonfiction and the real and not real. And that could end up being comic depending on who you are performing in front of and what type of audience. I mean, it's funny. I was reading the other day that the global South, they know a lot about themselves and their political situation. And they also know about people in Europe and in America. But people in America and Europe barely know about themselves and their political situation. Which is, you know, I think this is the kind of realm I play at and where I'm coming from over here. And sometimes that could be comic. I don't think I go with the intention of it being comic, but it does sometimes end up being comic for sure. And if I may, I mean, I'd like to call on my students in the chat just to comment if you all can on what does it mean for you in relation to the work we have been doing with me or with other professors. What does it mean for you to trigger a platform and then what's important about humor in relation to your work? And if you want to introduce yourself, as Sahar said, please do, right? So in the chat, and then maybe Sahar, if we have time, a couple of them can be invited to speak if that's... Oh, absolutely. That's an idea. I'd love for them to speak. I see lots of nods and I see Sophia, Jenny, forgive me if I'm mispronouncing the names, but feel free to unmute, use the raise hand function at any point or add your question in the chat. But we really would love to hear your voices. So just, yeah. And Wendy, keep an eye with me on if I don't see, like I'm not able to see everyone. I don't know for some reason, but if people raise their hands, just give me a sign. Anyone? Any question from the room before we move on? Something very, very relevant. I know the graduate students are working on an adaptation of the Bacchai and each of them are individually really triggering a platform in relation to the Bacchai and there is comedy in it. So any of the graduate students, please, if you want to talk about that, I think that would be a great entry point for you into the discussion as well. While we're still loitering in the ancient past, I want to thank you Sahafa for the mention of Aristophanes, because I think, you know, Cloud Cuckoo Land is a place that is still around and thrown around as a kind of political fantasy. And it's interesting to think about the way that those humorous terms can be kind of thrown around and used as weapons or alternatively can be kind of mirrored and used as a form of defense. I don't know, I think Wafa probably is someone who's been a target more than most of us. You might want to, you might have something to say about that, but really it's just an idea about how that sort of, especially in standup, I think, when you're there alone and you are the focus, that must have a kind of psychic effect. This is a good time, I think, to talk about how perhaps the performance is linked to standup comedy. And again, breaking down the mechanism of it. Standup comedy is, I've been observing it for so many years and I think that is why I decide to produce it in a form of this show. If we think about the performance and the power of it, the performance is one medium that is not mediated, very similar to theater, very similar to standup comedy, if it's life, of course. And what do I mean by mediated? And mediated is not carried by another medium, right? So our thoughts, as an artist, we take a thought and then we assign it as a value to an object, to an act, and that become a form of art. So a medium carry out that, whether it's a scepter, whether it's a digital art, whether it's a painting, it really doesn't matter. We have a form of art that doesn't need a medium. The medium could be every one of us, it could be the body. So if it's mediated, where the power of that form come from, it's from its immediate. And that is some powerful thing. Why? Because as a living being, we have, we are affected not only by our thoughts and our cognitive power, but also our bodies have its own languages. We thinking about it that way. Then performance theater and standup has its immediacy, its effect on the viewer. On the participant that is engaged in that place, in that time. And I think we perhaps agree why these three forms of art, it's hard to replicate them on the record. It's hard to, you could archive them, but their effect, it would never be the same because they intended to be immediate and had effects on the viewer with a performance standup. And you could see why artists and theater standup choose that form in the time of upheaval whether it's political or social because they needed the immediacy. They needed to establish a platform. They needed to trigger. What do they need to trigger? They needed to trigger a respond. Regardless of the objective, here we're not passing any moral judgment on the artist. We're just breaking down the mechanism of things. So what is all, again, more in common they have? They have somebody who triggered the platform or a group of people who triggered the platform. They have a platform, then they have the audience. And I think that is now where we question how effective the work is. When it comes to art, we should never pass a judgment if this is good or bad art, right? Or no, this is good art or not. This is not up to us. The question is, is it effective or it is not? And I think its effectiveness come from how informed the performer is in form of what? In form of the subject matter, in form of two important elements. Objective, all the piece, but one of the most important element, the audience, right? How do you and your audience to engage in and what's the objective of the entire performance? When we break all of these down, I think it is easy for us to see the link between these three forms of art, right? Now, come back to Simon facing the crowd alone. It's never easy. If you ever stood on that platform, regardless of the platform, you see and you feel the energy, right? Coming towards you. Then it is really up to you as a performer. How do you start energy to serve your objective? This is not an easy task, but trust me, it is, it gets easier and easier and easier with the practice because we stand as a performer, we develop the tools to understand the situation we built to understand the objective and to deliver it by using the energy of the audience themselves. And I think the more we see stand up comedian are some of the best edits because people throw in things of them most of the time. Stand up comedian are able to get under people's skin. The objective there is to agitate, to inhale agitation is a form of engagement. It's antagonism. When you antagonize somebody, you don't want them to go away. You want them to engage and stand up comedian, use it, visual artists use it, theater use it too. So then what happened when you're standing alone antagonize people and things throw in it? Then you have to be quick. Either you anticipated that already or you are really quick at engaging people in the artist's objective and its outcome. Which I think Wafa is where humor comes in, right? Because it's a very rapid way to make a group of people cohere and also to a certain extent to disempower them, right? I mean, sometimes someone tells you a joke and you don't want to laugh but you can't help it, right? Because it's so stupid. Absolutely, absolutely. This is a great point. I just bring you an example from a real life. I did a project called the virtual jihadi, right? In Troy, where the government in the United States shut it down twice, within a few days. And it really was about aggression in video games against Middle East, right? And I described myself. I did nothing except holding a mirror reflecting a social condition, right? But that reflection didn't go very well. Why? Because people saw their own reflection and the picture was not very good. So I took that and then I exaggerated. I built my avatar as a medieval warrior with a suicide belt. It made no sense, right? But you see where the comedy start coming in. That already brought the tension. What is this thing? It doesn't make sense. And that's where comedy break any tension in the service and allowed us the entry for a conversation. Not many other things could do that, right? And that is the power of stand-up comedy and the power of the single element of comedy, which is a joke. Fantastic. I love that. In your description of Amrika Wafa, you say almost like the same thing. And I'm gonna be reading from our synopsis, which is on the website. This cathartic and witty venting holds a mirror up to reality showing it has become so absurd and surreal one must laugh if not cry. So in essence, it's doing the same thing, right? Like we're just reflecting. We're not necessarily trying to change things as much as we're just like inviting audiences to come and look at reality and the status quo. Yeah, it's true, Sarah. I mean, how did, I'm sure we need to look at just like how Amrika come to become a reality. Why a stand-up comedy show as a form of art, especially for me. When I left Chicago in 2008, I really loved that city in Chicago. It allowed me the spiritual and the physical space to think and do things. Come to New York is completely the opposite. It's rush, rush, rush. There is no physical or mental space. So while I'm in my small office or living space, I take a breather and I live in the village. And the breather is, I would go to these underground stand-up comedy clubs, right? And it remind me of what happened in my childhood and how so many comedians come to ear their grievances a life to other people as a form of living, right? They're not asking for money at all. These are one profession in the United States who doesn't want money for performance is stand-up comedian. And I think I used that in the Guggenheim Museum performance. But going back to Amrika, then come a moment. And I don't want it to be specific because I said I don't want it to politicize laughter but laugh at politics. A shift in United States politics made it a lot harder for us as a community. What I mean by us, not only Middle Eastern community who are not served from any minority community in the United States. It come very clear to me, it become very clear we needed to establish a platform to complain. And that complaint, it's a form of comedy and the complaint itself, it would be the glue to bring not to the reason to bring us together and to united us, to give us the power and to make us visible. It's not just about power, we all talk about power but I think the most powerful thing for us to do sometimes when we don't have the power is the visibility and I really thought this is a very simple idea but it has a tremendous power. So myself and couple of friends in New York City we decided why don't we do our own stand up comedy show, invited all the disfranchised friends or the people we like when we just go to other comedy clubs and see what happened and it did and we were really surprised. We brought very small group of stand up comedian and we asked a place like, can you let us do this? It was Duda cafe, I think upper west side, the first one and it was an amazing hit. Politics and the environmental, political environmental us needed that form to come over a drink and a bite and talk to each other, catch up, it helped and I think it gives also an amazing platform to the comedian themselves to laugh at politics. It's a very powerful platform that I remember in one of our chats, Wafa as producers, you're like, tell the comedians if they don't send you the whatever you need, you're paying them in minutes, you're gonna subtract some of the minutes they have on stage. Yeah, so guys, just if you don't know that just like much about stand up comedian here in the village, there are a lot of comedy clubs. Some of the form called bringers, which is if you ever walk around and people handing you flour and saying, hey comedy show come in. These are the comedian themselves bringing in people to the show for every person they bring, they get a minute off time, right? So when Sahar told me, the comedian are not turning their W9 forms or not signing contract, they say, Sahar, please tell them for every day they are not signing, they are losing a minute of their time. Let's get scared also. I wanna uplift some of the comments we're having from students in the chat and please feel free again to speak directly with Wafa or your professors here. Sophia, Zooming from Chicago and Sammy's class and I'm gonna be skipping some parts here just because we're short on time, it's never enough. I'm an actor that focuses on comedy so this subject that is close to my heart, I think comedy can give power back to the artist and audience allowing them to laugh and find relief in community. I also think it's easier to get people behind visiting a comedy show than the more serious platforms. Laughter is cathartic and isn't intimidating. Thank you, Sophia, would you like to say to kind of speak directly to us? Do you wanna unmute and add anything? I can a little bit, but I think what you said was really like the crux of that where I just think that comedy is a thing that everyone enjoys and everyone can relate on and although I hate thinking about the business side of theater, it's the part that I dread, but it's like, you have to get people to come see your things if you want to portray a message and there needs to be that kind of relief and catharsis for people and I've just found in my own daily thing where I'm talking to my friends being like, hey, you wanna come see my show and they're like, what's it about? And I'm like, oh, it's a very dramatic serious thing and they're like, oh, sorry, I have plans tonight. Or if I'm like, oh, it's like a comedic thing, like it's about a serious topic but we kind of like make light of it, they're like, oh yeah, I'll definitely come. So I think there has to be kind of the thought of that. Absolutely. Thank you, Sophia. And we also- Can I speak to that a little? Yeah, yeah. I think you raise a great point there. And it refers also to what I think Wafa was saying earlier. In other words that, you know, when you are, when you are being funny, you are kind of creating some sort of psychic tension in the mind of your audience. And that can, that has a lot of power, yeah? And so you can use that in many different ways. So I'm sure, although I don't know anything about it, but I'm sure there are people out there making horrible jokes and making rooms full of other horrible people laugh out loud. And yet there are other places where people are making lots of people who might otherwise be disempowered laugh out loud. See what I'm saying? That what you're dealing with in comedy, I think, is a kind of manipulation of the psyche of the audience and your use of the term catharsis of course directly feeds right into those psychological theories. Yeah, I wanna add one, just small thing. Even the most serious production, there is always comic relief in it and it's built for a reason. In any production, whether it be theater, short, feature, there is comic relief punctuated that script. And it's for a reason because it comes a point when we cannot take it any longer. It's too much, then we need a break and the break comes in a comic relief. That opens up lots of thoughts for me and I wanna take a moment just to go back to this idea that you, not idea like the thought, the feeling that you've had in 2007, you said when Iraqi stopped laughing. Because as a Lebanese who's lived in Lebanon most of my life and kind of Lebanese are famous for cracking jokes about every little and small and big and think as way of dealing with the circumstances. Recently, and I wanna say like probably after the explosion in 2020, I'm fed up. I feel I'm fed up with laughing about the situation. And here's like the pushback I wanna, or like just an idea I wanna throw and get your thoughts on it. Wafa and also Sami and Simon. Discapaces in my mind sometimes can be dangerous because we're, you know, we feel like it releases some of the anger that we need really to do something that would lead to a change that we need in our situation. So I'm just an individual in this time in my life. I'm not able to laugh at things that I used to laugh about in Lebanon in particular. It's not, I can't find it funny anymore. I'm done, like I don't want to be resilient. I don't want to be cracking jokes about it. I don't want to heal that way. I want the anger to be really big enough for us to like to say that's it. So I understand when you say like it's a sign that we have no hope when we stop laughing. At the same time, I want to say like maybe actually there is hope that we stop laughing because now we're gonna be trying something else to deal with the situation, you know what I mean? Yeah, so great points there. Let's first think about, it is not that I would come to laugh, right? But it's rather tool to engage. And I think there's a big difference between the two, right? If you laugh too much, I think at some point you cannot take it anymore because anything persistent for a long time as a living creature, we can't take that. We need a variation, right? So if we think of a laughter is a form of engagement. This changed a lot, right? Because it meant to engage us and it meant to temporarily getting us out of a sticking situation and hopefully motivated us to take up on a bigger thing moving forward. But then it becomes stagnant if it all become about laughing and I think it could fire back when we start laughing about the laughter itself and then we start about laughing about our situation, how can not get out of it? That is a dangerous thing because it starts to strip the very power we try to build. And at some point we snap and we say, I'm done. Just like what you mentioned, I wanted to go back and fix it. But Sahar, that is a point of privilege. We would never demand that unless we have the power to do it. As long as we don't have the power to change things, I think laughter would become the mean to engage but also it could backfire. So we have to look at it as just like how artists the trigger platform for engagement and that platform doesn't last forever. It is temporary for an engagement then there is the outcome that you wish. Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot to unpack here. And I think some of the comments we have from students, some of them also resonate with what you're saying. That's my opinion. It's not just the answer to everything. Absolutely, Sami, I see you unmuting and I see a lot of participation from your students and I wanna uplift all these great notes and comments and questions. So help me do that, Sami, do you wanna? Yeah, just quickly, I wanted to say something. Yeah, I mean, I think I understand where Wafa is also coming from and are you being from Syria and also witnessing some of these issues culturally, socially, immigration. You know, I feel that you have, yeah, it's a balance. Like suffering is almost part of our daily existence and we have to like be able to laugh about our suffering to be able to stay engaged. I think something I now understood more after you said what you last said, Wafa is, I think the moments when we stopped laughing at our suffering, we should be scared because it means we have become disengaged with the suffering, it's become normalized. We've accepted it and we cannot accept it, right? And so like I think now when you say the phrase like when Iraqi stopped laughing, I think that's something very real because it means they stop being engaged and the suffering has become normalized. Sammy, that is great. And it goes right into Sahar point because if a lot of laughter, it brings us to action. And that's when you say, no, I don't want more laughter. I want things to be done. But then if we stop laughing, it normalize. That's a beautiful step, Sammy. Absolutely. I agree, Sammy, a beautiful articulation of this thought. We have very little time left and I wanna give a chance to the students' voices in here. Let's see. I think we can say anybody who wants to jump in, raise their hand, say something, please do, please jump in. Yeah, any dying question? Question or thoughts? Becky, I see a note from Becky. Or jokes. Yeah, or jokes. Or jokes, yeah. Yeah. So I know as this is making process, go ahead. Can we pause the link for people to tell everybody about the stand-up comedy show coming to San Francisco? And please, if you have a friend, family, if you are there, send them the link. Yes, I did post it in the chat. Yes, great. Yeah, and actually I wanna invite Wendy to share screen with us, show us the poster of this comedy show that Wafa is curating, which is so fun to look at. And do you wanna say briefly why America? Oh, yeah. So when we decide we can do a stand-up comedy show in New York, we start stuck. Okay, what do you call it? We throw a lot of things. And somehow I said, America, not even thinking about it, because that's how we said America in the Middle East. And a friend said, well, that is it. It's the Milton pot, right? Then you could bring any disfrontized person and which fit perfectly. It doesn't really matter who that person, as long as they want it to complain. But look at this line-up, right? Yeah, yeah. Can we get better than that? All colors, background. That's what the show is really about. It is laughing at politics and breaking us together. Yeah, and I also wanna highlight the fact that it's a very diverse lineup of comedians thanks to Wafa and his curation. And I'm reminded now of something you said, Wafa, in one of our, again, conversations about the show when you told me something to the effect that you need culture weaved around comedy because it relies on the common knowledge of that culture. And without that knowledge, it won't work. And that's why you cannot, most of the time, translate. Oh, absolutely. Right? Yeah. Tell our audience, how do you think it will work with a Native American, Palestinian American, a Bengal American, and African American on stage, like all these backgrounds and cultures? They all walk into the bar and that's the job that I want. I really think it is going to rely on the common knowledge we already know, whether it's political or social. These guys seen the problems we see in a very different lens. And that's the beauty of it. They break it down to allow us to observe it and not to offend us, right? And to allow us, as I said, they hold that mirror to see these topics, how ridiculous are, right? And I think that's the beauty of the standup comedy. It allowed us to enter topics and discuss them, otherwise we'll be so afraid of them because they held such a high power. And then what happened is standup, break it down to us and say, hey, it's not that complicated. Look at it from this point or this. So these become entry point to any subject matter. And I think that's what we expect. We accept an hour and a half of non-stop looking at social political issue, but from a lens of a standup comedian. I can't wait. We're almost at time, but I wanna give a chance to Simon and Sammy for any final thoughts or questions or anything you'd like to wrap up basically with. Well, I'd just like to challenge everyone in the room to think about it every time they laugh over the weekend. Yeah, love it. Yeah, okay. And I would say also, yeah, I think everybody, it was really good to be introduced and start thinking about this idea of what does it mean to trigger a platform and where is humor in that? But also consider your objective as the artist and am I using this humor and platform effectively? Because that's what it's about rather than like question if your art is good or not, right? It's more about how effective it is and how informed you are to do this objective, to achieve it. There's a huge responsibility in having access to triggering. Guys, go and support your stand-up comedians in wherever you are, trust me. There is no pleasure, well, besides theater, right, Sahar? Thank you. It's a great thing to hang out, go and have a drink with your friend and listen to stand-up comedians. It's really wonderful place to go together. But Sammy, Simon, really thank you so much for bringing such an important conversation to the platform today. I'm grateful. Thank you, Wafa. Thank you, Sahar. Thank you, everyone. I am. Thank you so much, all three of you, Wafa, Sammy and Simon. I'm so grateful and delighted to have had that. And Sahar, thank you so much for making all of this possible. Thank you, Wafa. I just want to take a moment also to acknowledge and say thank you to the students and I wanna Jenny, Asia, and again, forgive me. I don't intend to mispronounce if I'm mispronouncing your names. Becky, I've read all your comments here and they're brilliant notes. Kenzie, Jenny again and Rodra, Apologies. We didn't have time to uplift all those notes. Josh, thank you, everyone. I wanna also thank HowlRound for always giving us their platform to livestream our no-summary conversation. So up next on Golden Thread is America, that comedy show curated by Wafa Bilal here in San Francisco at the Brava Theater Center. You can find the information on our website. We're also getting ready for our signature program later in the fall. We orient a festival of short plays. I wanna thank the team at Golden Thread, really like small but mighty team and allow me to say their names, Michelle, Sheila, Wendy, Heather, Linda and Soluna. Without them, nothing can be done really and our board, thank you, our audiences, our attendees here in the room and also those of you who are joining the conversation on HowlRound. Thank you so much for tuning in. It's been such a great pleasure. Again, thank you, everyone and have a lovely and happy Friday.