I went to the Dubai Comedy Convention last night. It was set on a lawn at Dubai Media City and it turned out to be a very nice evening. The Comedy Convention is really just a renamed and reworked comedy tour that didn't really go over well with the local authorities last year (I'm getting this from a friend who works at the paper, so you know it's true). Apparently, the Axis of Evil Tour was shut down last year due to some sensitive content.
It's now a 3 night stay in Dubai with a different lineup each night. It's a very diverse crowd and lineup, so it made for a fun, interesting night. Ahmed Ahmed was the host; Rob Magnotti, Kirk Fox, and headliner Omid Djilil. Lots of humor thrown at nationalities all over the world, but mostly the middle east. I'm also surprised how tuned in the rest of the world is to American culture. At first I thought Magnotti's Jersey schtick might flop, but everyone seemed tuned in. Same for the other American, Kirk Fox, though he was pretty much just whacked out funny.
Omid Djilil was very funny...an Iranian raised in England, and he was a big crowd favorite. The family next to me was Iranian and were loving it.
The evening was filled with alot of terrorist jokes (my favorite, was Fox's observation about why the shoe bomber couldn't have been a bra bomber--think about that next time you are going thru security at the airport). There was not alot of foul language or crude sexual references--which is not my appetite when it comes to comedy anyway. I prefer clever.
Overall, it was a very enjoyable evening. Whatever, they did wrong last year, they must have got right this year.
(Just a footnote...a friend who was at Wed nights show, also went to Friday nights show and said it was toned down considerably. Guess it hasn't quite passed the censors).
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2 comments:
hi there, glad you came to our show and thank you for the positive feedback. i did, however, want to know where you got your information from regarding the 'rebranded' event? I'm not sure you know this but we own and produce the dubai jazz fest and we created that from scratch. the same goes for the comedy convention.
we created this brand to bring comedy to the middle east. and that's the plan.
thank you for your support and we hope to see you there in the next edition.
regards
sam from Chillout Productions
Samer, thank you for reading. I got the rebranding info from a newspaper source who was refering to last years 'axis-of-evil' tour which was met with some local 'resistance'. I appreciate that your event was independent of that, but I have to feel lessons were learned. Good luck and look forward to next year's show.
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