Episode: 28 — "Dream to Achieve" · Full Episode #28
Date: 30 June 2020
Language: Mixed Arabic and English
Mohanad Elshieky (مهند الشيخي) is a Libyan stand-up comedian based in New York. He was a writer on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. He performed a set on Conan in September 2019. He was born in Benghazi and came to the United States in June 2014 on a six-week MEPI fellowship that became permanent when Benghazi collapsed into militia conflict.
Mohanad scored 94% in his Libyan secondary exams. Society pressured top students into medicine or engineering. He hated maths, so medicine was the default. He spent three years failing, isolated, and discovering the cliché that medicine is "just memorisation" was a lie.
In grades 7 and 8, a friend gave him an mp3 player loaded with Def Comedy Jam — Dave Chappelle, Martin Lawrence, Bernie Mac. Later he rationed YouTube clips on slow internet, rewatching each one ten or more times. Stand-up became an escape route that he did not yet know had a destination.
In 2011 Mohanad launched an English-language late-night comedy show on Benghazi radio. Death threats arrived first via SMS to the station number, then to his personal number. He kept broadcasting for ten months. The station eventually shut it down citing "broadcasting issues." He noted that the English-language segments were more dangerous than the Arabic ones — any English speaker who happened to catch words like "religion" or "Libya" could react violently.
In 2018 a producer named JP at Conan cold-emailed him. Mohanad assumed it was a prank and sent a seven-minute tape back within ten minutes. Two months of silence followed. Then a reply: "We selected ten from hundreds. Come to New York." He did a Comedy Cellar-style showcase. More silence. Then a taping date: 24 September 2019.
He landed in Los Angeles, was picked up in a limo for the first time in his life, and realised he had nothing to wear for a television taping. He walked through Downtown LA from shop to shop until one staff member agreed to style him. The taping itself: Conan told him to forget the cameras and treat it like a regular club set. The set landed. After it Conan came over and said: "I liked how you wrote this." Mohanad left feeling, for the first time, "I'm a professional now."
Mohanad's central argument in the episode: "The difference between us isn't cultural, it's generational." The distance between a Libyan grandfather and a Libyan twenty-year-old is, in his framing, larger than the distance between a New York twenty-year-old and a Benghazi twenty-year-old.
"The difference between us isn't cultural, it's generational." (EP 28)