Comme les Mongols à Baghdad

Following Québécois Tabarnak and Des putes et des voleurs—both winners of Comedy Show of the Year at the ADISQ Gala, a first in consecutive years in its 45-year history—Adib Alkhalidey returns with Comme les Mongols à Baghdad. This new show explores what we pass on: meaning, knowledge, wounds, fears, contradictions and impulses, in an era that sometimes seems to have lost faith in its own ability to pass anything on. Reflecting his branching train of thought, the show ranges across subjects as varied as tax fraud, political corruption, the ordeal of getting children to sleep, Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, Jesus and the realities of mixed families. By tackling some of today’s most sensitive, intimate or taboo subjects, Adib Alkhalidey seeks less to provide answers than to reveal what emerges when we dare to face certain truths. With a rare freedom of expression—probably amplified by sleep deprivation and the questionable honesty of exhausted young parents—the show transforms this chaos into something strangely clear, as though all these scattered branches secretly belonged to the same tree. Comme les Mongols à Baghdad is a deeply funny show, sometimes brutal, sometimes anxious, but always driven by a sincere desire to bring together what our times insist on keeping apart.