Brick Wall Comedy

Deniz Göktaş Takes His Act to the Dock

Published September 30, 2026

Deniz Göktaş Takes His Act to the Dock

A Turkish comic closes his defence with a tag, Sam Morril asks you to admire the structure, and Catherine Bohart leads with her pelvis.

Doing a Tight Closer for a Judge

After 88 days in Karatepe high-security prison, Turkish comedian Deniz Göktaş was convicted in an Istanbul courthouse on September 28 over jokes from his YouTube special Ölü Deniz (Dead Sea), and then released pending appeal. The judge gave him more than 19 months across two charges and acquitted him of a third. He had faced up to a decade in prison for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and religious values. The trial report has the details.

Göktaş, 32, started out at Istanbul’s TuzBiber comedy club in 2019 and is known for a deadpan, dry delivery. A comedian on trial for his jokes usually has one sensible option in the dock, which is to stop telling them.

Göktaş kept going.

The prosecution leaned on one line, in which he called Erdoğan “a shy dictator”. Göktaş insisted there was “no criminal element” there, and argued the word dictator was “a political characterisation”. His second point was practical. The same party has run the country for 25 years, so a political set that left out the leader’s name would have no connection to reality. That is a legal defence and also a fair description of how topical comedy gets written.

He ended on the three months he had spent in pre-trial detention, in a well-type isolation cell. “Three months have been taken away from my life. I quit smoking, so I’ll add three months to the end of my life anyway,” he said, in court on Monday. The setup is a grievance against the state. The punchline turns the prison into a quitting programme. It drew laughter and applause as he left the stand, which is an unusual result for a man whose jokes were the evidence. He goes home with a conviction, an appeal and a closer that worked in the hardest room he will ever play.

Asking a Recoiling Crowd to Admire Carpentry

Netflix has released Sam Morril: Incorrect, a self-directed hour taped in a comedy lounge in Tampa, Florida, that runs 47 minutes. Morril is a New York club comic and co-host of the podcast We Might Be Drunk, known for a raspy deadpan and a great many one-liners.

Streaming hours tend to stretch. There is often a long sentimental story, or a section of culture-war grievance. Morril skips both and keeps the jokes coming, with road stories that make no attempt to be romantic.

One of his best tags is about joke structure itself. The bit is about extreme turbulence, the kind where everyone on the plane thinks they are about to die. Morril sets up the action-hero fantasy: “You think you’re going to be Bruce Willis in Die Hard, but you’re just Bruce Willis, basically…” The fantasy is the man who saves the plane. The reality is the actual Willis, who stepped away from acting after an aphasia diagnosis and whose family later announced he has frontotemporal dementia (his health history is public and grim). So the joke says that in a crisis you will be confused and helpless, and it uses a real man’s illness to say it. The audience recoiled. Morril turned the scaffolding into the next laugh: “even if the content upsets you, the structure is there, guys.” Then: “Think of the structure.” It is a comic asking to be judged as a builder after the crowd has objected to the building.

Another bit starts with film trivia. Lars von Trier hired a body double for Willem Dafoe’s nude scenes, and said he did it because Dafoe was too well-endowed for the scene. Morril imagines the call from the double’s agent telling him he got the part: “You did it, buddy… Everybody’s very impressed by how not big it is.” Every casting call congratulates an actor on what he has. This one congratulates him on what he lacks.

That is the whole pitch of Incorrect. Forty-seven minutes of joke mechanics, with no sentimental story and no grievance section, in a format that usually makes room for both. Morril is betting his Netflix hour on the structure, and he has already told you to think of it.

Opening a Mental Health Hour With Your Pelvis

Catherine Bohart has opened her fifth solo show, Borrowing Trouble, at Soho Theatre in London, and it is about buying a home with her partner while living with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. Bohart is an Irish standup and BBC Radio 4 regular whose material covers family, queer identity and mental health.

A mental health hour now arrives with a problem attached, which is that audiences have seen a lot of them. Bohart addresses that fatigue straight away. Then, after the briefest of introductions, she tells the crowd she has an “uptight pelvis”, a real medical diagnosis, and goes through it in excruciating detail. Leading with something that humiliating removes any expectation of polite conversation, and it breaks the ice.

The best line is about her father and his manic tendencies. Her generation talks about mental illness. His generation files it under something else. Dads, she says, don’t have mental health crises, they have “their own way of doing things”. The joke is the euphemism. It is the phrase a family uses so nobody has to use the other one, and Bohart just says it out loud.

That is her answer to a subject people are tired of. She stays clinical and candid, keeps the jokes short and never lets the room drift into a support group. A fifth show about a house purchase and a disorder could easily have been a hard sell. Opening with her pelvis and landing on her dad gives the Soho run a show that sounds like a comedy hour first.

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