Palestine Comedy Club is a 2024 feature documentary directed by Alaa AliAbdallah (known as Regash), following the birth of the first stand-up comedy club in Palestine. Founded in August 2022 by Alaa Shehada, the club brought together six Palestinian comedians — from Jenin, Hebron, Haifa, and beyond — to write and tour a show exploring the unlikely, often dark humour that surrounds the complexity of Palestinian identity under occupation. Crossing military checkpoints, navigating walls and closures, the troupe performs to packed audiences across the West Bank, in Jerusalem, Haifa, and eventually on stages in London. What begins as an experiment in shared laughter becomes an existential act: resistance through comedy.

The film’s most powerful and wrenching sequence comes when the comedians arrive in London to perform on the night of October 7, 2023, as war breaks out at home. Their mission is thrown into crisis — and yet they perform. Palestine Comedy Club premiered at SXSW London 2025, where it won the Raindance Spirit Award, and has since screened at film festivals internationally. It was also profiled at Cannes Docs and the Toronto International Film Festival. Intimate, political, and urgently human, the film is a reminder that laughter itself can be a profound form of steadfastness.