When Mario Moubarak landed at Beirut airport in December, he was greeted by government security agents who confiscated his phone, laptop and passport.
But Moubarak was not suspected of any elaborate conspiracy. A well-known stand-up comedian, his ongoing criminal investigation centres on a joke.
His is the latest criminal case against Lebanese comedians that has underscored the limits of expression in a country regarded as a regional haven for dissidents and artists.
Moubarak’s case is based on a video where he jokes, as part of an extended stand-up set about what makes a good funeral, that Jesus’s burial might not be considered a success because “in the end, he rose”.
After a brief clip, taken out of context, generated outrage online, the head of Lebanon’s Catholic Center for Media called on the public prosecutor to take legal measures against the comedian. Legal notices were filed based on a Lebanese penal code that criminalises blasphemy.
Moubarak has since been summoned for multiple interrogations by the public prosecutor and state security services. Lebanon’s strict religious defamation laws mean comedians such as Moubarak could serve three years in prison.
Many of the cases follow a similar pattern, sparked by complaints filed by religious authorities.
Comedians, lawyers and policy advocates say these are attempts by sectarian bodies to demonstrate their continued heft, rally their base and reassert their influence on the state.
“From time to time, [religious and sectarian bodies] want to test that they still have this power over society, and they still have the power to make the authorities take actions,” said Roula Mikhael, director of Maharat, a Lebanese freedom of expression advocacy non-profit.
The country’s many confessions coexist in an often tense power-sharing system, and some saw Moubarak’s case as an effort by Christian leaders to show they too could cause a backlash over perceived insults.
Shaden Fakih, a stand-up comedian, recalls the “national unity” she inspired after a secretly filmed joke about religious practices prompted both Sunni and Shia Muslim religious authorities and a parliamentarian to file criminal complaints against her in 2024.
She fled Lebanon hours after the video was leaked, fearing for her safety as online threats mounted.
“Their problem is that I’m ridiculising religious institutions,” said Fakih, who was granted political asylum in France. “It worries them.”
Lebanese security services have also filed cases of their own against comedians who satirised the state’s collapse or dysfunction.
In 2023, Lebanon’s military prosecution detained comedian Nour Hajjar for 11 hours, according to Amnesty International, after interrogating him over a joke about how Lebanese soldiers had taken second jobs as food delivery drivers when the economic crisis devalued their salaries.
When he returned to the military police station to finish his paperwork days later, Hajjar was detained yet again, this time for a case brought by Dar al Fatwa, Lebanon’s highest Muslim Sunni religious authority, over a sketch he’d performed in 2018.
The trials can themselves feel like comedy. Fakih was first prosecuted for a prank call she’d made to the police in 2020, satirising inefficient Covid lockdown measures by asking the officer if they could help buy her period pads after the 5pm curfew.
She was tried in military court in front of judges also tasked with ruling on bombing suspects and deserters. “Imagine: The judge asked: ‘So, do you usually get your period at 5 o’clock?’” Fakih said, recalling how even lawyers in the courtroom laughed. “Our state is ridiculous.”
Yet while authorities have gone after some of Lebanon’s most high-profile comedians like Hajjar and Fakih, the comedy club where they and Moubarak perform still hosts near-nightly shows.
Mohammad Baalbaki, another comedian who performs with Awk.word, the club, said the stand-up scene continued to find new audiences.
But he said the feeling of being watched was so strong it had become a running joke to try and guess which audience members were intelligence informants.
The club’s management was careful to clear the content it would post online with a lawyer, he added.
But state pressure isn’t the only source of alarm.
Baalbaki and other performers sneaked out a back door of a stand-up event in the northern city of Tripoli this summer after religious protesters surrounded the venue. An earlier performance in the southern city of Sidon was also called off because of similar protests.
Moubarak has faced waves of online attacks by right-wing Christians, including violent threats by people showing their faces and wielding knives. Fakih said she was the target of death threats that forced her family to wear disguises and change locations.
Ghida Frangieh, head of litigation at The Legal Agenda, a Beirut-based advocacy and research organisation, said the authorities were prosecuting comedians while leaving those who threatened them alone.
“The prosecution’s policy is to consider that a joke is a more serious crime to society than inciting violence against comedians,” said Frangieh, who was Fakih’s lawyer in her military court case.
Frangieh said the courts were more progressive than the prosecution policies, pointing to the 2023 decision overturning Fakih’s prank call conviction after a retrial at a higher military court found that her joke did not constitute a crime.
Hajjar was also acquitted in December in the military trial.
“Courts are clearly starting to consider that comedy is protected under free speech,” Frangieh said. “We think these court decisions are sending a message to the prosecution, but we’re not seeing that the prosecution is catching up.”
Lebanon’s legal code also needs to take a less draconian approach to speech, reformers said.
A draft media law under consideration by parliament would reclassify expression-related cases such as libel, blasphemy and defamation from criminal to civil offences, meaning they would no longer carry possible jail time, said Mikhael of Maharat, which helped draft the bill.
If passed, she said it would “help us limit the power of any authority to curb freedom of expression”.