Imad Kehdy

On stage, Imad Kehdy sounds less like a performer chasing laughs and more like an acquaintance telling you something absurd across a table. He keeps his volume low and his shoulders relaxed, stepping up to the microphone to lay out a grim scenario without changing his inflection. When an audience stiffens at a line about Lebanon’s economic collapse or a parent’s death, he does not scramble to bail them out. He simply holds the pause, blinks behind his glasses, and lets the tension hang in the room.

Kehdy came up through Beirut’s underground standup movement, playing the awk.word club circuit and touring diaspora rooms across the Middle East and Europe. He built an online following with deadpan sketches, parodying hollow politicians and neighborhood racketeers. Live, however, he abandons character work entirely in favor of an unhurried, confessional rhythm.

His solo hour, Hamburger, shows the range of that voice, pairing the petty nonsense of dating apps and food prices with blunt reflections on personal grief. He works best when tracking the surreal logistics of daily survival, talking about blackouts and neighborhood generator bosses with the dry patience of someone filing an expense report. When he wanders into standard riffs on modern relationships, the jokes can feel ordinary, but the delivery never speeds up to sell them.

That steady demeanor reflects years spent balancing comedy with a day job in corporate reinsurance. He speaks like someone who reads risk assessments for a living, which only makes his casual treatment of disaster hit harder.