Sami Abu Wardeh

Did You Know?

• Abu Wardeh was displaced from Kuwait by the Gulf War as a child and lived in nearly 20 places growing up.
• He began his medicine studies at a UK university in 2004.
• His mother is from Liverpool and of Irish Catholic parentage.

Career

Sami Abu Wardeh first teamed up with the comedy duo Marina and Maddy, who perform as Siblings, in 2021. They brought him on for a joint show called Sami & Siblings when they returned to the Brighton Fringe in 2022. That same year, he performed his first solo show, Bedu, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He calls his approach "character clowning," shifting through different personas during the set, beginning with a Palestinian refugee. Guardian critic Brian Logan picked Bedu as one of the ten best comedy shows of 2022. Abu Wardeh also co-created Clownts, a competitive clown show, alongside Julia Masli, John-Luke Roberts, and Viggo Venn, and he won that competition. Since 2022, he has been a regular performer at the comedy night Arabs Are Not Funny!.

In 2023, Abu Wardeh wrote and starred in The Sheikh, a five-part digital sitcom for Channel 4 that satirises a wealthy Sheikh living as an expatriate in Britain. As a playwright, he contributed to Cutting the Tightrope: The Divorce of Politics from Art, a 2024 anthology of short plays created in response to censorship around Palestine in the arts. He came back to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2025 with his second solo show, Palestine: Peace de Resistance. He describes it as an hour of jokes, storytelling, and clowning rooted in the history of anticolonial resistance. This absurdist piece centres on a 1960s Palestinian character named Merguez who encounters an Algerian woman. The show won the Heart Award at the Besties Awards and was shortlisted for Neurodiverse Review's ADHD Comedy Award. During the Fringe, as well as in Newcastle and Glasgow, Abu Wardeh performed as part of Palestine Stands Up alongside Alaa Shehada, Diana Sweity, and Hanna Shammas.