Interview: Sami Abu Wardeh on ‘Hates You’ and Channeling Anger into Action

‘I’m a character comedian and clown,’ Sami Abu Wardeh tells me, as we sit in the shadow of the City Cafe’s fittingly enigmatic Elvis statue. We’re catching up in the diner a few hours ahead of a work-in-progress performance that Abu Wardeh will be doing across the road at Monkey Barrel of his brand new show, irreverently titled Sami Abu Wardeh Hates You.

‘I do physical stuff, I do silly things,’ he continues, speaking about his practice. ‘Then the genocide started in Palestine – I found it very hard to be silly.’

A year ago, Abu Wardeh arrived at the Edinburgh Fringe with a piece of comedy that was as politically urgent as it was disarmingly funny. With Palestine: Peace de Resistance, he sought to survey the horrors of genocide using his trademark physical clowning and theatrical storytelling, with an added helping of absurdism and defiance. As well as earning widespread acclaim, the show established the Palestinian performer as one of the festival’s, and indeed the wider comedy scene’s, most distinctive voices.

His return to the Fringe this year with Sami Abu Wardeh Hates You takes him to a slightly different comedic space. While Palestine: Peace de Resistance was an immediate response to the genocide, Wardeh’s new show digs even deeper into the personal cost of making political comedy, exploring grief, anger, identity, and what it means to perform as a Palestinian artist while the destruction of Gaza continues.

For Abu Wardeh, getting to this stage and to the point of now being a full-time comedian has been a journey, and one that’s been anything but conventional. After qualifying as a doctor and spending years working in acute medicine and A&E, he eventually left the medical field to pursue performance.

‘I wanted to go to drama school when I was 21 but I was in med school at the time,’ he says. ‘It was the 2008 financial crisis, and I had no way of funding myself through drama school, so I just had no option other than to stay in med school. I considered myself lucky to be able to do that though.’

Comedy and performance first captured his imagination during a visit to Edinburgh as a university student, which transformed his thinking around what may be possible.

‘I didn’t grow up in this country for the most part, and I wasn’t really exposed to the volume of performance and performance art,’ he explains. ‘During that time in Edinburgh, it was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. It was more or less at that moment, I wanted to drop out of med school.’

Due to the timing around the financial crisis though, he chose to stay and save money while working as a doctor, before going on to train at Philippe Gaulier’s celebrated clown school in France. ‘And I’ve been sort of hacking at it for the last ten years, really!’

Although he’s been working away on his craft and building his artistic trajectory all this time, everything changed dramatically after October 2023. The events of 7th October and the subsequent violence towards and displacement of nearly the entire Gazan population weighed heavily, and Abu Wardeh found he could no longer perform in the same way, with the same level of carefree silliness.

‘I stopped performing for about eight months,’ he says, reflecting on that period. Instead, he turned to stand-up, carefully crafting material that addressed Palestine while anticipating potential attempts to misrepresent his work.

The conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-semitism has unfortunately become all too common, but for most who oppose the actions of the modern state of Israel, Zionism is a settler-colonial movement and one that attempts to establish an apartheid state, whereby the rights of Palestinians are diminished and erased. Anti-Zionism is a rejection of these ideals and a recognition of the harm caused by creating a racist hierarchy.

‘I’m very, very careful about the wording of my material,’ he explains, ‘because you don’t want the general public to misinterpret what you’re saying, and secondly, because there’s a constant threat of bad faith, aggressive, racist, bigoted Zionist actors who are going to try and pin something on you.

All Palestinians know how to navigate that, so I think the stuff I wrote was very carefully written, and I would stand by it to this day. But it just took it out of me, it was very hard to be happy.’

The resulting show, Palestine: Peace de Resistance, proved to be both a critical and commercial success. The show was originally devised for PalArt Festival – a London event dedicated to showcasing Palestinian arts and culture – before being picked up as a last-minute addition to the Pleasance’s Fringe programme for 2025.

‘I was expecting bad faith actors to come,’ he recalls, when asked how he felt about the engagement with that show during the Fringe. ‘The only bad thing that happened was my posters were ripped down and defaced a little bit.’

More significantly, he found audiences that were willing to engage with explicitly political material. ‘Increasingly, mainstream audiences are very comfortable with well-written anti-Zionist, anti-Israel material, because it’s so clear what we’re dealing with and who these people are. That’s the biggest change.’

His new show takes its title from an essay by the late anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber, whose writing challenged liberal discomfort around the idea of hatred.

‘The gist of the essay is that hate has become this bad word that we on the tolerant liberal left have shunned,’ Abu Wardeh explains. ‘But his argument was that hate has been a very natural, normal part of human existence up until very recently. The core idea of the show is, guys, can we just say that we hate Nazis? Can we start with: “I hate Nazis, and Nazis need to be stopped at any cost?” And we can use that hate to take action.’

From there, the show expands into something more autobiographical, with added reflection on his position as an artist performing in the UK today. ‘The show, as it stands, is an exploration of me doing stories about what it’s been like performing comedy over the last two years in this country, as a Palestinian in a country that is committing genocide against Palestinian people, and stories from my childhood.’

While Sami Abu Wardeh Hates You marks a move towards more conventional stand-up, he rejects the notion that he’s abandoned clowning.

‘I will always fundamentally be, I think, a physical comedian and clown,’ he says. ‘The more I’ve gone into making the choice of going into stand-up, the more I’ve realised it’s all comedy… You write the jokes, you make people laugh, that’s all it is.’

Throughout our conversation, Abu Wardeh returns repeatedly to the relationship between comedy and truth, which he speaks of with consistently insightful analysis.

‘I’m not using my stage time as therapy,’ he says. ‘However, there’s something very, very unique about making a piece of work that deals with something that is painful, and then putting it on again and again and again. In my experience, it has changed me in a way that I don’t think anything else could.’

He believes audiences instinctively respond to authenticity, adding: ‘I’m a big believer that we cannot help but be what we are on stage, and the sooner a performer accepts the truth of who they are and relaxes and opens that truth up, the sooner we love them.’

That authenticity also informs how he thinks about the role of artists responding to world events. While he rejects simplistic notions of responsibility, he has found purpose in occupying a space few others can.

‘I’m one of the only Palestinian comedians in the country,’ he says. ‘It did feel like I had a responsibility to take up space and be in people’s faces.

‘I did a work-in-progress which was sold out,’ he continues, ‘and afterwards a friend came up to me and said, “Thank you, you gave us a place to be together and actually laugh,” because there were not many spaces, and there still are not many spaces to be together, in solidarity, and just have a bit of respite from the onslaught of videos and testimonies.’

Ultimately, however, his motivation for his art and performance has become much more personal.

‘I had this moment last year where I thought, every single murdered child in Gaza will never grow up to do what they want, whether it’s an actor, comedian, an engineer, you name it. That was stolen from them by the Zionists. I have the privilege. I am doing this for them. Right now for me, it’s as simple as that.’

As for what audiences should take away from his new show, Abu Wardeh resists prescribing any particular response. ‘I don’t really ask anything of my audience,’ he says. ‘I just want them to come, and they can take whatever.’

Then, in typically playful fashion, he reaches for an image that only a true clown could conjure up.

‘When you make a piece of art, it’s like doing a big poo,’ he smiles, ‘and then publishing it is like flushing it down the toilet… you say bye bye poopy, and the poo goes, and you have no control of where it goes.’

Sami Abu Wardeh Hates You is at Beside at Pleasance Courtyard, 5th till 30th August (except 17th)

Photo credit: Dylan Woodley