Isa Cruz

Last Saturday, the Muslim Student Alliance (MSA) and Middle Eastern and North African Student Association (MENASA) hosted a comedy show featuring recent graduate Ahmad Abdulwadood ’24 and comedian Ismael Loutfi to fundraise for a charity week raising funds for Palestine and Lebanon. Students packed into Kresge Auditorium to enjoy humor that touched on Arab-American identity, the upcoming elections and Loutfi’s bad luck with marriage. Before the show began, members of MSA and MENASA handed out fliers to audience members with a QR code leading to the donation page.

Loutfi has performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live and wrote for “The Patriot Act” with Hasan Minhaj. MSA co-president Aniqa Chowdhury ’26 first contacted Loutfi over Instagram and served as a liaison between him and Director of Student Activities Nate Hintze. She also reached out to Abdulwadood, who is a personal friend of hers and an aspiring comedian.

Abdulwadood found that humor provides a unique way to examine political action. He not only used his experience as an organizer of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the difficulties he faced from the administration as material for his jokes, but also to share the work he did trying to bring about change at the College.

“I think [humor] breaks through things we take for common sense and hopefully prompts us to reexamine things that we otherwise accept,” Abdulwadood said. “Political comedy gives us the tools, language and imagination to scrutinize our world.”

In one joke, Loutfi highlighted white people’s willingness to pronounce different ethnic names.

“White people love giving a hard name a shot,” Loutfi said. “They’re the only people that do. And I appreciate that. It’s why you took over the world. You’re risk-takers. When white people see a hard name, they’re like, ‘Put me in coach, I can do it.’”

In an interview with the Orient, Loufti reflected on the event’s larger purpose to raise money for children, education and aid in war-torn Gaza and Lebanon.

“I think it’s good to have action things like this,” Loutfi said. “These tragedies and the evil that’s going on in Palestine and Lebanon are just so overwhelming that it’s good to be meeting with other people and see other people that agree with you. It does feel so out of your hands and out of your control, that the little you can do is really important.”

Loutfi explained that he appreciated the show’s cause to support the region where his family is from.

“Comedy is very solipsistic,” Loutfi said. “But if you can do it in a way where you can do it for something … good and could maybe raise some money,  it’s like, ‘Yeah, of course, I’ll do that.’ I’ll never say no to some kind of fundraiser for the Middle East, where my family’s from.”

Chowdhury appreciated Loutfi’s use of Arabic in his performance and bringing the Muslim experience to a larger audience.

“He’s referencing parts of Islamic culture that made me [feel] very seen and very heard,” Chowdhury said. “It’s hard being Muslim on campus and also being a hijabi on campus, where you’re always presenting your identity as being Muslim. But I loved that Ismael took really hard pieces that Muslims on the day-to-day face, and he just turned them into jokes that we could all laugh about.”

Audience member Jason Olaru-Hagen ’25 enjoyed being a key part of the show, hailed by Loufti in a number of jokes as canonically cool and notably strong. Olaru-Hagen believes that Bowdoin needs more comedy shows.

“I’m not afraid of the limelight,” Olaru-Hagen said. “I love running into the bit and just going with it. We should have these events more often. We’ve got people like Ahmad at the school who are really talented. I think it would bring more people together at the school. I see it as totally worth whatever resources they would have to put in to make that happen.”