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| Ismail Heydari (1949–2017), Azerbaijani Turkish-Iranian stand-up comedian known for performing in Turkish. |
Ismail Heydari has passed away. While he had a particular talent for making his audience laugh, his programs largely reproduced stereotypical ideas about marginalized groups, the lower classes, rural people, women, and so on. Despite claims to the contrary, these programs lacked the essential elements of humor, satire, or critique. Instead, they expressed part of society’s condescending view of these groups in a more blatant, unvarnished way through joking. It seems that these clichés had penetrated his subconscious so deeply that he was never able, as an artist should, to distance himself from common assumptions, think differently, or create differently. To make part of the audience laugh, he would mock another part. Most of his programs presented the crudest and most harmful beliefs in society—not to satirize, critique, or reform them—but in a tone that implied approval. In his jokes, rural people were depicted as superstitious, the poor as foolish, and women as shallow. His fictional characters, when lacking authenticity, behaved foolishly. They were neither dignified nor sensible; they were naive and worthy of ridicule. Sometimes, these classifications were even extended to animals of higher or lower status.
But where did the popularity of Heydari’s programs and the size of his audience come from?
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His audience belonged to a sad and withered society, one that had endured the years of war and faced numerous challenges. On the one hand, economic pressures drained its vitality, and on the other, political repression limited its freedoms. Such a society was desperate for laughter, a temporary escape from its pains. Part of Heydari’s appeal stemmed from this context.
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Another factor was the language of his performances. For Turks who had been deprived for years of humor, satire, or comedy in their mother tongue, he and his narratives became a rare opportunity to experience laughter in Turkish. Before him, Mirza Ali Mojuz Shabestari and Karimi Maraghei had achieved similar popularity, though the former leaned more toward humor and satire in poetry, while the latter was considerably more superficial.
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Another reason was Heydari’s blunt and candid style. This rawness and directness, in a society where modesty is an inseparable norm and censorship pervasive, appeared even more appealing. And if such a tone aligned with the audience’s preexisting mindset and expressed their own views, it became doubly funny and captivated them.
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The final and perhaps most important factor relates to the audience’s taste: the audience often lacked a proper understanding of humor or satire and sought only to laugh, even if that laughter came at the expense of "the other." Unaware, they overlooked the fact that reproducing crude clichés is neither humor nor satire—it is simply vulgarity. This superficial taste has gripped a not insignificant portion of Iran’s population. From ethnic jokes to gendered taunts, from racial quips to mocking the weaker classes, when we do not know what we should laugh at, we will laugh at any vulgarity.