Stand-up comedians from United Arab Emirates

Close to nine in ten people living in the United Arab Emirates are foreign nationals, and the comedy bills look like the population. Clubs in Dubai and Abu Dhabi work mainly in English, the shared second language of the audience, and the performers come from the places the audience came from, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines among them.

The scene was built rather than inherited. Mina Liccione and Ali Al Sayed started Dubomedy in 2008 as a school and a producer at once, teaching stand-up and improvisation and staging shows, running a regular night called Monday Night Funnies and a troupe of women performers alongside it. The Laughter Factory has been bringing professional headliners into hotel venues for about thirty years, and a city festival programmes shows in several languages across ten days.

Comedy in Arabic runs on a separate track with a different apprenticeship. Bin Swelah is Emirati, performs in Arabic and came up through theatre in Sharjah in 2013 before moving into stand-up and cinema shows, which is not the open mic route the English rooms are built on.

What the material shares is not a hometown but a situation: visas, rent, traffic and the business of landing somewhere and starting again. When local work travels, it tends to go as a show about the city, the way Big In Dubai! became one of the first productions from the country to play the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.