August 18, 2026 Fest
Interview: Comedians in Conflict
On February 28th, Sepideh Kaav was in a Berlin taxi, on her way to a gig, when news broke of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death in a US-Israeli airstrike. The Iranian stand-up wrote a swift response before taking the stage. “And that was definitely an interesting experience,” she recalls. “Delivering the news and then immediately delivering a joke. Up until we’ve cracked the first joke, such shocking things feel unreal.”As discussed in her Fringe debut, 1979: Persianality Disorder, Kaav grew up in Tehran’s post-revolution Islamic theocracy, “where being a woman you don’t have certain freedoms” and she was arrested by the morality police for her student dress. Yet she’d already been turned on to stand-up by US counterculture icon George Carlin. “It really resonated with me,” she recalls. “I would pretend I was doing it in the shower but I never thought I could actually do it.”That changed when she moved to Germany in 2021. As an immigrant, she faced racism for the first time and was agitated by Western contentment. Unable to forget the “pain and suffering” she’d left behind, comedy became an outlet to “scream my anger”.However, when the American offensive began, “it changed the way audiences receive my jokes.”Continuing, she says: “I want to show that Iranian women are women. So I try to be relatable. But it feels like everything I say becomes geopolitical. For many people in Europe, Iran was an afterthought. But now it’s so real, everything has become a little more direct.”She’s anxious to not be seen as “leveraging” the conflict for personal gain. But when she couldn’t reach her mother after a round of bombing, “I was upset, I needed to address that on stage”. She won’t claim to represent Iran, “that’s very dangerous territory” because there are “so many different opinions, both in Iran and the diaspora”. But she believes she’s found sufficient balance, “the right path. Because I get hit from all sides”. Click Here For Article