Comedy for Organizers

Toni Cade Bambara wrote that our work is to "make revolution irresistible.”

Have you ever been to an activist meeting, protest, or workshop that felt…less than irresistible? Have you ever wondered how to make your organizing work less…miserable?

In this experimental workshop led by activist and artist Morgan Bassichis, we will practice letting the absurdities, contradictions, failures, and difficulties of organizing unlock our innate and contagious powers of humor. Following the workshop, Morgan will be in conversation with poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir, author of Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation.

“The choice to be irreverent at the podium liberates both the speaker and their audience, albeit briefly. In the pause between the laughter that follows a sardonic observation, something sacred takes place in the unconscious. The grand stage becomes an intimate living room, and the tragedy at hand, whatever it may be, becomes a family affair. The speaker exiles the prestige of the podium from his mind, discarding the role he was coerced into rehearsing, proclaiming what he had been taught to whisper. The spectators are, for a moment, implicated in the spectacle, polluted by its imperfections, in on the joke. Something sacred occurs in the unconscious: a world without pretenses where we look each other in the eye.” -Mohammed el-Kurd, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal (Haymarket Press, 2025)

Nuar Alsadir is a poet, nonfiction writer, and psychoanalyst. She is the author of the books Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (Graywolf, 2022), which was a TIME Magazine must-read of 2022 and a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of 2022. She is also the author of two poetry collections: Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and More Shadow Than Bird. She is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and a member of the curatorial board of The Racial Imaginary Institute. She works as a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.

Morgan Bassichis is a comedic performer, writer, and musician who has been called "a tall child, or, well, a big bird" by The Nation and "fiercely hilarious" by The New Yorker. Most recently they co-edited with Jay Saper and Rachel Valinsky the young adult anti-zionist guidebook, Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah. They published a book of to-do lists, The Odd Years, in 2020 and also edited and wrote the introduction to the 2019 reprint of the cult classic The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions. Their performances have been presented by Creative Time, the Kitchen, the New Museum, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, MoMA PS1, the Whitney Museum. Their current show, Can I Be Frank?, explores the life and work of Frank Maya, a queer comedian and performance artist who died of AIDS-related complications in 1995. They have taught widely on humor writing and the creative process, and work as a somatic coach for community organizers and artists. They have participated in social justice movements for the past twenty years, and have been a member of Jewish Voice for Peace-NYC since 2014.