Stand-up comedians from Palestine

Watan ala Watar, or Country on a String, made its debut on Palestine TV during Ramadan in 2009: a sketch show with a cast of three, among them the actress Manal Awad and Imad Farajin, who wrote, acted and sometimes directed. Its targets included Palestinian leaders, mocked on the channel those leaders control. It went out daily during Ramadan and weekly for the rest of the year. In August 2011 the Palestinian attorney general ordered it off the air after complaints from, among others, the head of the doctors' union and the director of the Palestinian police. Farajin said the team would keep posting clips to YouTube.

Amer Zahr, a Palestinian-American comedian who had launched the 1001 Laughs Dearborn Comedy Festival in Michigan in 2013, founded the 1001 Laughs Palestine Comedy Festival in 2015. That August it put seven Arab-American comics, Mo Amer among them, in front of audiences in Ramallah, East Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

Alaa Abu Diab, born in Jerusalem, started in 2018 with posts and videos on Facebook and gave his first performance that year in Sweden, during the Lund Comedy Festival. Shortly afterwards he played a full hour in Ramallah to an audience of 300. Of that show he told The National that stand-up was new to him and to the audience and not common in Palestine, so he was shaping their whole impression of the form.

The Palestine Comedy Club brought together six comics, among them its co-founder Alaa Shehada, who worked with the British tutor Sam Beale on a touring show that opened in Ramallah. A Chortle review of the documentary made about them describes the show as carrying more music, dancing and storytelling than straight gag-telling. The film, also called Palestine Comedy Club, was shot in 2022, with more filming when some of the comics travelled to London in 2023. Comedians of Palestinian descent who built their careers in the United States include Mo Amer and Maysoon Zayid.