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Gallows Humor Provides Respite From Mideast Wars
Arab digital creators on social media are turning out edgy material to cope with the conflicts and bring levity to a pain that often feels too raw.
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Samer Moumneh, wearing a red headband, recording a new sketch in a cafe in Beirut, Lebanon, last week.
Credit...
Diego Ibarra Sánchez for The New York Times
By
Abdi Latif Dahir
Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon
April 29, 2026,
12:01 a.m. ET
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In a humorous video circulating online in the Middle East, explosions wake a young man at night, making him bolt upright and dash to his parents’ bedroom, looking disheveled in pajamas.
“There’s WW3 and you go to your Arab parents,” reads the text that sets the premise.
The father barely stirs, murmuring a Quranic verse about fate before drifting back to sleep, snoring loudly. When the son tells his mother that he is afraid, she reprimands him for his appearance.
“Are you serious?” she asks. “You are wearing a T-shirt and not even wearing socks?”
The tone may be light, but the substance could not be heavier.
For more than two years now, the Middle East has been convulsed by conflicts that have taken a devastating toll and reshaped the region. The violence has expanded to multiple fronts from the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and the U.S.-Israel war on Iran to Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Persian Gulf states and the Hezbollah-Israel conflict in Lebanon.
In response, Arab content creators and influencers on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube have turned to a
macabre brand of humor
to bring levity to a pain that often feels too raw.
“I do feel sad for my country and people, but I like to turn to this dark comedy to make sense of it,” said Samer Moumneh, 22, a content creator from Lebanon who starred in the video poking fun at Arab parents. “We always like to cope through humor.”
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