Ten months of English-language late-night comedy under death threats. Told by Mohanad Elshieky (EP 28).
In 2011, shortly after the Libyan uprising began, Mohanad Elshieky launched an English-language late-night comedy show on a Benghazi radio station. The format borrowed from the American stand-up and late-night tradition he had grown up studying on slow internet — Chappelle, Martin Lawrence, Bernie Mac and the Def Comedy Jam archive.
Death threats started arriving by SMS to the station's number. They were specific enough that Mohanad understood they were not pranks. The threats then migrated to his personal phone. He kept broadcasting for ten months.
One of the more counter-intuitive observations he made in the episode: the English-language segments were more dangerous than the Arabic ones. His theory was that any English speaker who happened to tune in could pick out trigger words — "religion," "Libya," "Islam" — without following the context or the joke, and react violently. Arabic comedy, by contrast, had inherited decades of coded language. English did not have that protection in Benghazi.
The station eventually shut the show down. The reason given was "broadcasting issues." Mohanad read this as institutional face-saving: the station did not want to admit it was closing a show because of threats against the host.
The Benghazi radio show is the beginning of Mohanad's stand-up career, and also the first point at which the risks of the profession became explicit. The career that followed — MEPI fellowship, New York clubs, Conan — began in a studio where the host was receiving threats between segments.
See: Mohanad Elshieky