879: A Christian and a Muslim Walk Into a Bar
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A quick warning; there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Shreve Holmesie is a stand-up comic in a place that's not really known for its comedy scene. Damascus, Syria. As maybe you've heard, the place was run by a dictator for a long time, Bashar al-Assad. Back then, there were a lot of jokes that Shreve was not able to tell on stage. Definitely nothing about Assad or Assad's family, nothing about politics at all. Those kind of jokes would get you killed or disappeared into one of Assad's infamous prisons. So during those years, Shreve kept jokes like that, and the folder on his computer labeled Lebanon, because he pretty much only felt safe telling them when he would take trips abroad. There is one joke, I want to bring it back, but there is one joke I used to say when I go to Lebanon, like listen, we have a lot of problems, but you don't have a president. And our problem is that we have one. So maybe if you take him and you can rent him for a bit, and if you like him, you can keep him, you know. You cannot say anything like this, ma'am. That joke, if I say it over here, we will get killed, there is no joke with them. Bashar al-Assad's family rode Syria for 53 years, the last 13 of which were a brutal civil war. Over 300,000 Syrian civilians died. Then, a year ago, to everybody's surprise, a bunch of rebel groups overthrew the regime in just 12 days. Assad, his wife Asma, and their family flew to Russia. The rebels were led by an Islamist group called Ha'Yat Terir al-Sham, HTS for short. And then, the new people in power surprised everybody again by not immediately becoming another repressive regime. HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharah says he's acting as interim president, and has promised to hold elections in the next few years. And Syrians have been experiencing a freedom that they have not experienced before. A dinner a couple weeks ago with somebody who was just there, and they were talking about how kind of inspiring it is to be there right now. She met lots of people who were moving back, ready, and excited to rebuild their country. But at the same time, parts of Syria are still violent. They were fighting this month in and around Aleppo, over 150,000 people were displaced. In July, Sharif had to cancel a show in a city called Suweda, because of a massacre there. 800 people were killed. And then in October, in the middle of this chaos and hope, Sharif and the other comedians in his comedy group, the group is called Styria, decided to go on tour. They planned 16 cities in 21 days, all over Syria, in conservative regions, in liberal areas like Damascus, areas under Kurdish control, and areas that were once under ISIS control. And they really weren't sure how this was going to go. Nobody had ever done this. And this is the tricky part. And to the dictator, it was clear what they could not say on stage. But now, there seems to be no rule book at all. If anything, the new government was saying, "Go ahead, you can make jokes about us. We're different from the old regime." But the comedians didn't know if they could trust that. And then beyond that, there are lots of just very conservative, very religious people
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