Touring Bay Area comedian’s show canceled after pro-Palestinian jokes

Just days after comedian Dauood Naimyar received the contract for a two-night stint at Dallas Comedy Club, his manager received an unexpected email from the club’s bookers. The show was off. 

The club’s email offered no explanation, so Naimyar’s manager gave the venue a call. The bookers were vague on the phone, but they said that the cancellation had to do with Naimyar’s recent social media posts.

“And all of my most recent posts have to do with what’s going on over there,” Naimyar, who has over 160,000 TikTok followers, told SFGATE. 
 
By “over there,” the 33-year-old comedian refers to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. After the start of the Israel-Hamas war, the comedian began posting clips of his stand-up about the conflict on his Instagram and TikTok accounts, with an emphasis on Israeli aggression.

In one sketch, Naimyar dresses up in a suit and plays a real estate agent for the fictional Israeli Realty Group (formerly known as the Palestinian Realty Group), which advertises free, recently seized land to Israeli settlers. 

“This whole area used to be schools and hospitals,” Naimyar’s character says, smiling and gesturing to a dusty patch of land. “But we bombed it.”  

Naimyar said on Instagram that the sketch was meant to inform people about the situation in the West Bank and Gaza. He told SFGATE that he dislikes shock comedy, which relies on offensive jokes for cheap laughs. 

“I find that cheap and gross,” he said. “I like to make people genuinely laugh at terrible situations.” He sat on the sketch for two weeks after shooting it, worrying that it could be insensitive. But after enough positive feedback from his Jewish and Palestinian friends, he decided to release it into the world. 

The comedian, who was born in Oakland, grew up bouncing around the Bay Area. His first gig was at Tommy T’s Comedy Club in Pleasanton; now his homebase is the Punch Line San Francisco. Even though he’s since moved to Los Angeles, he remains active in the Bay Area scene, coming up once a month to perform. He’s done stand-up on Comedy Central, performed with pop-up comedy show organizers Don’t Tell Comedy and was included in the lineup for the Montreal festival Just For Laughs New Faces.

Naimyar dislikes controversy. When Dallas Comedy Club canceled his shows, he initially planned to take the loss and move on, booking a weekend of shows in Austin instead. But after talking the ordeal over with his comedian friends, he felt that he had to say something. He posted an announcement on social media explaining the cancellation, and tracing it back to his jokes.

“If they’re stopping me for my political beliefs or my jokes, they might be doing it to other Muslim comedians or other people who are in a similar stance,” he told SFGATE. 

“I have no ill will towards the comedy club,” he added. “I don’t want anybody attacking them. I just want to make it known that that’s what’s happening to people who take a stance for Palestine.”