Sharief al-Homsi shivered, clutched his arms and pretended to go through Syrian regime withdrawal.
Standing before an audience in Damascus, he was telling a joke that would have been unthinkable until just a few weeks before, when President Bashar al-Assad was suddenly ousted after more than five decades of his family’s oppressive rule.
“We need rehab centers. You can’t just take this guy away from our life like that — it has to be gradual,” the 33-year-old comedian and screenwriter said, describing the omnipresent posters and magazine spreads depicting the al-Assad dynasty, to laughter from the crowd. He continued to shake. “They’ll ask us what drug were you addicted to; we’ll say, ‘Bashar al-Assad.’”
It was a night of stand-up in late December at the Zawaya Art Gallery in the heart of the Syrian capital. Half of the comedians performing that night have been living abroad after fleeing the country during the 13-year civil war that ended with Mr. al-Assad’s ouster.
Their routines included standard comedy fare — religion, sex and the pressure to get married — but the biggest punchline of the night was Mr. al-Assad. One comedian referred to him throughout his routine as “that whore.”
The comedians were relishing the chance to say things that for decades Syrians would be too scared to utter even in private company. Fear of the notorious mukhabarat, the secret intelligence service, was ingrained so deeply that Syrians lived with the cautionary warning that “the walls have ears.”
But even as they embraced the liberty to make new jokes, the comedians, like many everyday Syrians, were worried that this new freedom of expression could be fleeting. Ahmed al-Shara, the country’s interim president who leads Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist rebel group that ousted Mr. Assad, has promised unity that reflects Syria’s diverse population, but there are deep concerns about how democratic and inclusive the government will be.
Under the Assad government, Roula Sulaiman, the owner of the Zawaya gallery, said she faced restrictions and accusations of organizing political opposition events when she tried to hold comedy and cultural events. Now, she is still concerned.
“We haven’t tested the new regime yet,” Ms. Sulaiman said. “Based on what we are seeing, I think we are moving toward more restrictions.”
Officials with the new government had come by her gallery and told her that nudity in art would no longer be allowed, she added. Asked for comment, the government’s information ministry said it was not familiar with the episode but did not have any rules to that effect.
So as the comedians wait to see what the new red lines may be, they are taking advantage of the opportunity for as long as it lasts.
“We’re in an interim phase where we can talk about the past and present freely, but we all face an unknown future,” said Mary Obaid, one of the founding members, along with Mr. al-Homsi, of Styria — a portmanteau of Syria and hysteria — that bills itself at the first stand-up comedy platform in the country.
Styria formed two years ago with the goal of spreading stand-up comedy in Syria and establishing the first comedy club in the country, a goal it has yet to achieve.
“We’re all afraid but we’re hopeful that the freedom of expression will remain,” said Ms. Obaid, a 23-year-old dentist.
Even under the Assad government’s repression and through a destructive civil war, Syrians relied on humor — usually dark — as a coping mechanism.
Early in the war, ordinary Syrians began forming rebel groups to fight the government, but often struggled to acquire arms. One small band of men recorded a satirical video echoing others announcing new groups, but rather than holding Kalashnikovs, each held a piece of fruit to poke fun at their group’s struggle to get weapons.
In Aleppo, as government forces began to encircle opposition-held areas of the city in 2014, rebels shared their dinner with stray cats. The rebels joked that they were trying to fatten the cats in case they needed to eat them.
Given their tradition of gallows humor, Syrians might be uniquely equipped to mine laughs from both the current moment and the decades living under the Assad dynasty.
That includes combining the personal and political. After Mr. al-Assad’s presidential palace was looted in the wake of his fall, a photograph of him circulated online, showing him dressed in ill-fitting white underwear and a tank top.
Ms. Obaid found an overlap with her own life. “I wasn’t shocked by anything from the fall of the president except for one thing,” she began during her routine, “My underwear before I had stomach reduction surgery. Why were they in the president’s palace?”
Thirty minutes before the show at Zawaya, Mr. al-Homsi sat in what was serving as a green room, trying out on his fellow comedians lines that could become new material. Paintings covered the walls around him as techno played loudly in the main hall.
He joked about a recent visit from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham security officers and how he tried to hide the tattoos covering his arms, given most conservative Muslims’ disapproval of body art.
Before the regime’s fall, Mr. al-Homsi would inevitably come up with jokes involving Mr. al-Assad, his wife or the government. He would write them down and file them away in a document that he labeled, “for Lebanon.”
At this point, he is work-shopping the Assad withdrawal symptoms joke, aiming to expand it into a proposed 12-step program to wean Syrians off an addiction to the regime.
“These were jokes that I couldn’t tell here,” he said. “Now I can.”
Zeina Shahla contributed reporting.
