Laughing After Survival, Stand Up Fest and the Sound of a City Healing

Stand Up Fest in Gjilan offered warmth against December cold, laughter as civic ritual, and comedy rooted in family, masculinity, bureaucracy, while quietly asking what risks remain untaken.

Gjilan is not a city that forgot the war, it is a city that learned how to carry it quietly. Twenty five years after NATO’s humanitarian intervention halted Serbia’s genocidal campaign against Kosovo Albanians, Gjilan lives with memory embedded in pavements, family stories, and unspoken habits. What was once a town shadowed by fear has become a place where ordinary life insists on itself, cafés full, theatres open, jokes told aloud. For an international reader, this matters. Laughter here is not escapism, it is proof of survival, a refusal to be defined only by atrocity, and a reminder that culture often rebuilds what politics cannot.

And for me, Gjilan is not an abstract idea or a convenient setting, it is home. It is the town where I spent part of my high school years learning how to speak, how to listen, and occasionally how to survive. The theatre where Stand Up Fest now fills the room with laughter is the very stage on which I first learned to talk to the public with heart, mind, and a slightly trembling confidence, discovering that words could carry both joy and courage if you trusted them enough. Right next to it there was once a library, a proper one, quiet and serious, where I went digging through books as if they were contraband. Kadare sat beside Fishta, Kafka lurked nearby, and Don Quixote tilted eternally at his windmills, which, to a teenager in Gjilan, felt less like fiction and more like a practical manual.

It was also a place where education did not stop at literature. Gjilan taught me other disciplines, the sociology of the street, the ethics of timing, and the fine art of running when discretion was the better argument. I was beaten by groups and, in the strange logic of youth, beat them back one by one when opportunity allowed, a small and absurd war of livelihood conducted with more bravado than wisdom. Looking back now, it all feels faintly ridiculous, as if even then the city was preparing me for journalism, learn the story, take the hit, get back up, and try to explain it later with a straight face and a dry joke. In that sense, standing in that theatre again, laughing with the room, felt less like attending a festival and more like completing a very long, very Kosovar punchline.

This was my second time attending Stand Up Fest in Gjilan¹, and I arrived with the sort of cautious optimism you bring to any returning appointment, the dentist, a family wedding, a London gig where the room is either on your side or sharpening knives. Gjilan in late December has its own weather system, cold air outside, warm noise inside, and the particular civic pride that gathers when a city theatre is asked to behave like a comedy club. The posters promised a festival, two nights, and two time slots that felt almost Londonish in their confidence, early show and late show, as if we were all going to spill out afterwards into a nearby bar and argue about which bit should be cut.

What struck me first was how clearly the festival understands its audience, and how clearly the audience understands what it has come for. Not moral instruction, not the stiff nationalism of a commemorative evening, but release, the clean pleasure of laughing at what the week has already forced you to endure with a straight face. In London you can sometimes feel a room doing arithmetic, calculating whether the comic deserves their attention. In Gjilan the room listens more like family listens, generously at first, then sharply, then tenderly again, and the laughter arrives fast when it recognises itself.

Avni Shkodra opened in the manner of a host who is also a participant, apologising for the divided attention that organising requires, then steering into football as autobiography and social glue. His best moments were not the big punchlines but the lived detail, the youthful seriousness of school tournaments, the coach insisting he play on the wing, the stubborn desire to be in the middle, the childish logic that becomes adult character. He mined the nostalgia of Kosovo football watching, the 1994 World Cup, Baggio, and then snapped back to the local and personal, the weekly terms with friends kept for years with a kind of ritual discipline. The laughs came from recognition, and from timing, especially when he let the story wander just long enough to feel true, then clipped it with a sharp turn. He also did something subtle that good hosts do, he set the emotional temperature, he made it safe to laugh at ambition, at superstition, at the small humiliations of being told where you belong.

Ernest Zymberi followed with a set that understood provocation as a visual fact before it becomes a verbal one, the banana and the microphone, two objects that become a test of the audience’s mind. His central trick was to blame the viewer, not the thing, and that is always a reliable engine, because it lets the room laugh at itself without admitting guilt. From there he widened out into the theology of male risk, marriage as surveillance, social media as a booby trapped hallway, and the male fantasy of consequence free chaos. The audience laughed hardest when he described the absurd logistics of keeping secrets, passwords, apps, names, and the sheer administrative labour of being a so called legend. It was stand up as a mirror held to a culture that performs masculinity like a job, then complains about the hours.

Euron Fetahi brought a different flavour, Kumanovo stories told with the pacing of someone who knows the room will follow him through a long family drive. His strongest section was the domestic travel that turns into a small war, the father reminiscing a little too confidently, the mother responding with silence that has the weight of a verdict, and then the ritual pilgrimage to a bargain shop where everything costs one euro until the total becomes a moral argument. His jokes landed because he used economy, not just of language but of choice, one clear scene after another, the father paying, the mother buying, the children watching the household constitution rewrite itself at the till. He also slipped in a current political note, diaspora, elections, slogans, which in another context might have been a cheap applause line, but here it worked as a snapshot of the season, the country living in campaign mode as if it were a permanent weather condition.

Flakrim Fejzullahi arrived from Stockholm with the outsider’s licence to say what locals may avoid, and he used it. He talked about weed culture as a consumer scam, about technology and how it has made life both faster and stupider, and then pivoted into the deliberately controversial idea of disciplining children, framed as satire but delivered with the bluntness of someone enjoying the discomfort it creates. In London that section would split a room, and here too you could feel people deciding whether they were allowed to laugh. The strongest laughs returned when he went back to shared memory, power cuts, childhood fear, and the way the body remembers threats long after the mind has learned new ethics. He is at his best when he describes physical sensation, the sound in the dark, the reflex, the old household theatre of authority.

Hasim Sopi Memishi offered the most classically structured social satire of the night, bureaucracy as a national sport. He built a world of administrators whose work is less work than pause, whose day is a sequence of breaks interrupted by brief moments of stamping paper. The laughs were loud because the target is universal and specific at once, anyone who has waited at a counter knows the feeling. His best images were the small absurdities, the man celebrated as hardworking because he stayed until five, the revelation that it was a battle with a yoghurt lid, the colleague who cannot find the red pin, the office rituals that turn simple tasks into pilgrimages between numbered doors. This is where the festival feels closest to a certain London tradition, not the edgy club circuit but the more enduring satire of systems, the slow realisation that the joke is the country’s operating manual.

Mentor Shuki took the room into riskier territory, sex, jealousy, hypocrisy, and the way moral language is sold like cheap perfume. His set was sprawling, energetic, at times almost like a monologue delivered mid argument, and the audience laughed most at the social observations that feel impolite to admit out loud. He has a knack for turning a familiar proverb into a weapon, for mocking the performative respect that is really just manners, and for noticing how class now announces itself in small purchases, cherries becoming a status symbol, not because they taste better but because they can be priced like a dare. His longer riffs sometimes threatened to outrun their own point, but his stage presence pulled them back, and the crowd rewarded the honesty of his cynicism, which is a strange phrase but an accurate one.

Now to Valina Muqolli, and I will write to that set, because it is the one I can actually read and judge line by line. Her material was among the most coherent of the night, built around “inati”, that Kosovo engine of motivation that can power a family, a neighbourhood, and occasionally a state. She took the audience through the maternal economy of comparison, the neighbour’s child as an eternal benchmark, the tests brought home like evidence, the slap as punctuation, and the peculiar poetry of curses that older women deploy with the precision of trained composers. The laughter here had a different texture, less roar and more rolling recognition, because she was describing an ecosystem many people in the room grew up inside. Her best strength is detail, the brand of slippers, the way a cough becomes a household alarm system, the women of the neighbourhood weaponising language, the men carrying the burden of the state while barely managing the burden of conversation. In London, a set like this would be praised as observational, here it is more than that, it is ethnographic without being sentimental, and it lets the audience laugh at the intimate machinery that shaped them.

Two performers who especially caught my attention were Kushtrim Qerimi and Esat Shabani. They are clearly among the festival’s most interesting voices, but I would rather do them justice in a separate piece, one that gives their work the space and focus it deserves, and which I plan to publish in the weeks to come.

Now, let’s talk about the themes of the festival.

The dominant themes orbit familiar territory, neighbourhood life, family hierarchies, masculinity and its self inflicted bruises, sex conducted in whispers, bureaucracy as farce, diaspora politics, and the daily humiliations that pass for normality. These subjects resonate precisely because they are shared experiences, and because stand up comedy in Kosovo still operates as a kind of public confessional, where the audience plays priest and absolution arrives in the form of laughter. Yet the overlap is unmistakable, and after a while the trajectory becomes predictable, a domestic anecdote expanding into a social complaint, a relationship joke widening into a diagnosis of society, the journey moving steadily from the bedroom to the municipal office, from a mother’s curse to the state’s incompetence.

It was at this point that I found myself wishing for at least one set to take a different kind of risk. Kosovo’s troubles do not end with slow counters, noisy dinner tables, or inefficient offices. There is also the quieter, more corrosive damage of psychological warfare against truth, the steady poisoning of public language, the presence of actors who present themselves as journalists while functioning as political operatives, and the peculiar theatre of moral certainty performed by those who treat facts as optional furniture. In London, for all their self obsession, comedians have become increasingly fluent in dismantling these ecosystems, skewering media cultures, professional outrage merchants, and the lucrative performance of neutrality. Gjilan, and Kosovo more broadly, offers even richer material, because the stakes are higher and the disguises far thinner. A festival like this could become a place where such phenomena are punctured not with lectures, but with jokes sharp enough to make a room laugh first and only then realise how close to home the laughter landed.

None of this is meant as a reproach to the festival for being entertaining. Entertainment is the point, and it is not a trivial one in a society that has been required to be earnest for far too long. The value of a stand up festival in a city theatre is both cultural and civic. It trains audiences to listen, to tolerate disagreement without hostility, to recognise themselves without embarrassment. It also gives performers a reason to evolve beyond recycled premises and momentary online attention. In London, evolution is enforced by sheer volume, the market is unforgiving and the rooms are many. In Kosovo, the rooms are fewer, which makes Stand Up Fest more significant, not less, as a laboratory, a deadline, a shared stage on which craft can be tested and refined.

My hope, after this second visit, is that the festival preserves its warmth while expanding its range. The recognisable stories should remain, people need to hear their own lives rendered ridiculous with affection. But there is also space, and perhaps a responsibility, to invite the next layer in, the manipulation of public opinion, the erosion of trust, the subtle coercions that teach citizens to doubt their own eyes. If that is done with humour rather than sermons, and with the same local precision that made the strongest moments of this year’s programme land so cleanly, the audience will follow. Gjilan can handle it. It already has. They came out in winter, filled a theatre, and laughed at themselves, which remains the most basic requirement for any society that hopes to stay sane.

1. National Theatre of Gjilan, Republic of Kosovo’s Facebook Post.