Laughter World: Phillipines, Abu Dhabi

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on October 22nd, 2007

It’s Monday, time for Laughter World! It’s always entertaining when we see how folks halfway around the world regard comedy. Today, we take a look at a comedy tour that entertains expats in the Persian Gulf and a controversy in the Pacific sparked by one of our American humor shows.

From the Khaleej Times, “the #1 English language daily newspaper published from Dubai,” comes “Let’s Heckle A Bit,” an article by Layla Haroon whch attempts to describe a Laughter Factory show that touched down recently in Abu Dhabi.

It is known for its lunatic hecklers, who try to distract the most strong-willed comedians, keeping the audience in hysterics for an hour and a half.

The evening is usually divided into three segments with a short refreshment break between each comics set. Performances are in English, attracting a large crowd of regular comedy fans of about 400 people per show of different nationalities.

The comedians who will perform this time are Dave Fulton, Paul Tonkinson and Michael Smiley.

Lunatic hecklers? Haroon says that some of the audience members have gotten into fistfights over who was funniest. Standup comedy is enjoyed differently by the international crowds who find themselves marooned in the deserts of the middle east.

And the Phillippines are all atwitter about a recent segment on The Daily Show that parodied Perez Hilton and made light of attitudes toward female world leaders. What particularly got them riled about the Daily Show piece was when a photo of Corazon Aquino appeared on the screen with the word “slut” scrawled across it. (This is a convention of Hilton’s site. Apparently, the Filipinos are not familiar with Hitlon’s site and the subtleties of the bit were lost on them.)

Bryan Mari Argos, writing in The News Today (an English language news service from Iloilo City!), tries to explain to his countrymen that they just didn’t get the joke:

Humor can be used to gauge the intellect of a person– those who laugh at jokes that are too physical, i.e. the wart on a witches’ nose or the eczema on someone’s vulva is too dumb to understand the underlying meaning of humor. Intelligent humor is the kind of humor that involves wit, finesse, discretion, subtlety, and relevance to the status quo, i.e. GMA should not be worrying about the ZTE deal that much. If she can’t hear Garci through the cell phone easily as shown by the number of times she said ‘Hello Garci’, she probably wouldn’t like VOIP that much.

Cryptic! GMA? ZTE? Eczema on someone’s vulva? (Who can’t laugh at that, we say?!)

For background on the story, click here.) Some of the references in Argos’ story become a bit clearer if you read this one first!

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