Deniz Göktaş on stage at Harbiye Open-Air Theater
Istanbul has never been a quiet city.
For centuries, it laughed at power.
Long before stand-up comedy, the city possessed its own traditions of irreverence. The shadow theatre of Karagöz and Hacivat mocked bureaucrats, clerics, merchants, and the contradictions of everyday life. The meddah performed biting social observations before coffeehouse audiences. And later came tuluat theatre—improvised popular performance in which actors responded spontaneously to current events, political moods, and the absurdities of urban existence.
The Ottoman Empire, despite its many limitations, produced a remarkably rich culture of satire. Poets composed lampoons. Newspapers published caricatures. Theatre troupes turned governors, ministers, and social fashions into objects of laughter. Humor functioned not as rebellion alone, but as a safety valve, a shared acknowledgment that authority itself was part of the human comedy.
No city embodied this spirit more fully than Istanbul.
From Direklerarası to Beyoğlu, from Ramadan entertainments to republican cabarets, political satire remained one of the city’s enduring languages. One could criticize power indirectly, allegorically, or with a joke whose meaning everyone understood without being explicitly stated.
The forms changed; the impulse remained.
Today, stand-up comedians have inherited this centuries-old tradition.
Deniz Göktaş’s performance at Harbiye Open Air Theatre on 1 June was, in many respects, part of that inheritance. The show reached millions after its online release and transformed a single evening into a national conversation. He is now under police custody following an investigation related to material from the performance.
One need not agree with every joke to recognize something larger at stake.
The measure of a confident society is not whether it avoids offense, but whether it can endure laughter.
A civilization secure in itself permits exaggeration, irony, and mockery. It understands that jokes are imperfect instruments—sometimes elegant, sometimes clumsy, occasionally offensive—but rarely existential threats. The inability to distinguish ridicule from danger reveals not strength but fragility.
Perhaps this is why so many people feel that contemporary society has lost something essential.
Not prosperity.
Not technology.
But joy.
The great sadness of our age may be that we increasingly inhabit a culture of perpetual vigilance, where every word is scrutinized, every joke litigated, and every laugh carries consequences. We have become skilled at outrage and strangely uncomfortable with playfulness.
Yet Istanbul remembers.
It remembers Karagöz mocking authority beneath oil lamps. It remembers the improvisations of tuluat actors who transformed daily politics into communal laughter. It remembers cabarets, satirical journals, and storytellers who knew that humor was not the enemy of society but one of its oldest forms of wisdom.
A society that ceases to laugh does not merely lose its sense of humor.
It loses a part of its memory.
And perhaps the true question raised by the events surrounding Harbiye is not what was said on stage, but whether Turkey—the country of meddahs, shadow puppets, and improvisers—still recognizes itself in the sound of its own laughter.
