Bridge of laughter

Lamya Tawfik, an Egyptian comedian working in Dubai, is one of a growing number of Arab women for whom comedy is the ideal medium.

Her audiences do not immediately know what to make of 33-year-old Lamya Tawfik. Comedy being a typically male-dominated industry - stand-up especially - the Egyptian woman, in headscarf and all, is quite a departure from your average funnyman. But, Tawfik explains, the first step in making people laugh is to get them to relate to you. And she doesn't find that difficult: because she's based in Dubai, a place to which she says everyone moves and proceeds to pack on pounds, she breaks the ice by poking fun at her own corpulence.

"Sometimes my skinny friends will try to help me, you know. They'll be like 'Hey don't eat that piece of chocolate'. They're like, 'Lamya, where's your willpower?'. And I explain, 'I ate it.'" And right there, she's got them. Simply being from Egypt also provides her with a ton of material, she says. "Seriously, bless the Bangles. It's amazing how much damage one song can do." She is referring, of course, to the threesome's Walk Like an Egyptian, and explains: "When I'm chatting online I tell people I'm from Egypt and they're like, 'Whoa. Do you walk like an Egyptian?' Yes, that's exactly how we walk; the pizza man shows up with the pizza in one hand and the other one out like this, just for balance."

But comedy is a surprisingly serious business. Her background in teaching helped with the performance aspect of it, she says, explaining that whenever she could see a class losing interest she would crack a joke or make fun of things. Their attention returned immediately. With her self-prescribed theme song Queen's Under Pressure, Tawfik describes being launched into stand-up comedy after the Middle East-based group Axis of Evil performed in Cairo and offered workshops, holding an open audition. Persuaded by her friends and sister to go, Tawfik explains she had about four hours to come up with truly funny material.

"I was like, 'Oh, I have to be funny tomorrow,'" she remembers. What relieved some of the pressure was the realisation that even the most mundane activities in Egypt can result in hilarious anecdotes. She chose a recent dining experience. It worked. Positive feedback from the Axis of Evil crew encouraged Tawfik to take comedy more seriously. She enrolled in classes and began working on new material, doing her first gig in the UAE at the Comedy Cafe, an event that ran alongside the Dubai Shopping Festival last January. There, she met Aron Kader, a Palestinian-American comedian and member of the Axis of Evil, who pushed her to join a workshop and do the show.

Of this experience, she admits that while she does not get stage fright herself, her audience seems to get it on her behalf. This she attributes to her headscarf, which makes audiences wary even though her face is not covered. "You know, stand-up is a cruel form of art. It's scary; the audience is not forgiving. If you're trying to be funny, you have to be funny," she says. "And I'm a veiled woman on stage, I can see what people are seeing when they look at me. They think, 'How can she be funny?' They think people like me are too pious to laugh, that we're not tolerant. Then I crack the first joke and I can actually see their faces relax."

And yet women are not a minority in Dubai's burgeoning comedy scene. Ali al Sayed, an organiser at Dubomedy, which runs Monday Night Funnies, at which Tawfik is a regular, says sometimes in getting a show together he and his colleagues have to make a point of getting more men on the stage. "You'd be surprised how many women there are," he explains. "Comedy around the world is male-dominated, yes, but Arab women here have something to say. And they're using comedy as the tool to get to us."

Al Sayed was born and raised in Dubai, where he has seen the comedy scene grow to the point where he is confident it's "going all the way to the top". His optimism lies in stark contrast to the perspective of Gail Clough, who has run the Laughter Factory in Dubai for the past 12 years. "Our club's tiny, and comedy is not a big thing here. People are too busy making money," she says. "Most of our audience here have seen our comedians back at home in London. Then they come here and they lose their local references; our comedians aren't from the Arab world."

Which could explain why the acts don't work. Al Sayed describes the audiences at Monday Night Funnies as a pretty good cross-section of the city, and its comics appeal to residents of Dubai, easing their ability to reach such a diverse audience. With someone like Tawfik, though her appearance might at first throw the audience off, al Sayed describes what she does as "bringing people together". "It's a challenge, so we localise," he says. "We make it about Dubai. The media in the West portrays us a certain way because we haven't spoken our own truth yet. So it's up to us to present ourselves."

Tawfik understands this. In one opening sequence, she asks the audience if they do a lot of online chatting. "You do it at home? Yeah? You do it at work? Hey it's OK, you can tell me; you're all going to get laid off anyway." People want to laugh, al Sayed argues, and getting people from all over the world sitting in the same room to laugh at the same jokes amounts to creating community. Convinced the comedy scene will continue to improve and grow, he explains that the popularity of the comedy workshops means there are now hundreds of young people loose in Dubai who know exactly how to make you laugh.

And as the UAE's comedy world expands and the capital completes its plans to build more hotels, he predicts, we will see more venues opening up in Abu Dhabi, while the medium itself will broaden to include sketch comedy and improvisation. Tawfik, meanwhile, continues to build on her stand-up, works a day job in Dubai Media City and is completing her PhD at a university in Cairo. What is becoming more difficult for her to ignore is the fact this comedy thing, which began only half seriously, is really beginning to take off.

"It's all going so fast," she says. "Now I'm like, uh oh, I really have to be funny. This has taken on a life of its own." Philosophically, she says she just goes along with it. She describes her act as family-friendly: clean jokes, no politics, no swearing, no religion. But aside from expanding her routine and branching out into other forms of comedy such as sketch work, there's something that Tawfik really wants to figure out - and the sooner the better.

"I meet people and they know I'm a comedian and then they ask me to tell them a joke. Uhhh, I don't like that," she says, laughing. "I seriously need a comeback for that one. Do you have anything in mind?"