NEW YORK, Nov 16 \u2014 Lucie Pohl opened a night of comedy with a stab at President Donald Trump\u2019s migration crackdown.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre there any immigrants here? Or did we get rid of all of them?\u201d German-born Pohl said, scanning the Friday night crowd at a New York comedy club\u2019s show called \u201cImmigrant Jam.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump has overseen a sweeping crackdown on undocumented migration and alleges a link between migrants and crime\u2014something not backed up by any data.<\/p>\n
New York\u2019s Democratic mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani calls Trump\u2019s aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency \u201ca reckless entity that cares little for the law and even less for the people that they\u2019re supposed to serve.\u201d<\/p>\n
But at the New York show, a band of foreign-born comics tried to see the bright side.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe got a new mayor…. Who\u2019s happy?\u201d Pohl said to cheers.<\/p>\n
Pohl, who moved from Germany aged eight, told AFP she got into comedy during Trump\u2019s first term as president.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt sad and sort of scared. I hadn\u2019t become a US citizen at that point,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen this idea just came to me to have space to celebrate immigrants and do something where it\u2019s about joyful coming together, not a fearful coming together around immigrants.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Darker\u2019 material\u00a0<\/p>\n
A Colombian, a Bulgarian, and an Israeli were among the enthusiastic Friday evening crowd at Caveat, a small venue in Manhattan\u2019s Lower East Side.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow of course we are in a time where the rhetoric has been dialed up. Not only the rhetoric, but the government has taken such extreme actions against immigrants that I do feel there\u2019s more of a sense of urgency,\u201d Pohl said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe the material has gotten darker.\u201d<\/p>\n
Comic Jenny Tian from Australia said in her set that \u201cto get here to perform for you guys… I had to spend two years doing paperwork proving myself as an artist. Proving my comedic abilities to your government. And I managed to get in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Comic Lakshmi Kopparam, of Indian origin, was contacted by Pohl on social media and quickly became a hit fixture of the \u201cImmigrant Jam\u201d rotation, which is renewed from one night to the next, although some performers return regularly.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo much of my material already has that (migrant) content in it, so it wasn\u2019t even like I had to manufacture it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
In the heart of cosmopolitan New York, which recently elected a Muslim mayor, comedians get supportive audiences, and Pohl couldn\u2019t recall any heckling or hostility.<\/p>\n
Martin Calles, an Argentinian in the US for 35 years, said American comedians \u201ctend to talk about how they live in their parents\u2019 basements, and they do a lot of drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is really more about, like, \u2018I took my citizenship test.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cVery relatable,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
When a German audience member told Pohl that he had just moved to the United States, the comedian responded, quick as a flash: \u201cWhy? Did you have to see how poor people without health care live?\u201d<\/p>\n
The jabs at Americans were never mean-spirited. But it was unclear whether the humor would translate elsewhere in the heavily polarized United States. \u2014 AFP<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK, Nov 16 \u2014 Lucie Pohl opened a night of comedy with a stab at President Donald…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42077,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[24191,24190,9,24,55,54,24193,56,24192,24194,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-42076","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-immigrant-jam","9":"tag-lucie-pohl","10":"tag-new-york","11":"tag-new-york-city","12":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","13":"tag-new-york-city-news","14":"tag-new-york-comedy-club","15":"tag-ny","16":"tag-trump-migration-crackdown","17":"tag-undocumented-migration","18":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}