A dispatch by Noah LaBelle
There’s a portrait of the Sacred Heart, only it’s Snoop Dogg bearing the halo. He’s cherubically lit by a ceiling fixture and framed by clouds—puffy cumulus above, puffed cannabis below. A blunt smolders delicately between his two-fingered benediction. On the mantle beneath, a sign reads #MAYTHEBOOZEBEWITHYOU, nestled next to pothos vines that have far outgrown their pots.
Welcome to Ziggy Cocktail Bar, Pangrati, Athens, just across from Saint Spyridon’s yellow façade. Population: thirty-odd Anglophones of varying nationality, fluency, and sobriety. All here for what’s billed as “Hear No Evil Comedy Show,” a Thursday night staple.
“Personal philosophy, go!” Pam Benjamin, an Athens-based, California-raised D.J., calls out, pointing the mic, identical to the one tattooed down her right arm, toward the open-air bar tables.
“Never fly Turkish Airlines,” one woman offers. Benjamin repeats it, fortissimo, to claps.
“Turkish Airlines is incredibly racist,” Benjamin adds. “When you choose your language, Greek is not represented! Every other language, but no Greek.” Someone, presumably not Greek, suggests learning Turkish.
“Greek airlines don’t have screens, it’s crazy,” she continues. Much heartier laughter. “We’re lucky the planes can fly, bro!”
Amateurs wait for their slot, glancing at pre-planned bits scrawled in journals. They’re the only ones with pen and paper in sight. Them, and your correspondent.
“Are you stealing jokes, mate?” asks a bar-goer with a pink fanny pack and a cigarette.
“No, I’m a journalist,” I say, too quickly.
He pauses, then snickers. “That’s even worse.”
I can’t parse out from his accent if he’s a local—the fanny pack, I figure, suggests not—but he’d already shuffled to a back table and grabbed a beer before I could ask.
Next up: George Moulos, a trim Australian in a burgundy polo, seven years in Athens behind him. (A search reveals he’s cracked the Guinness World Record for fastest traverse on foot of mainland Greece, from north to south. Comedy’s next.) He thumbs an A7 notebook, whose inane daintiness in his hands almost makes up for his first three jokes, all duds.
“Ah, ok,” he says, scanning the page. “Greek or gay. You tell me if this is Greek, or this is gay.” Beat. “Greek dudes who have manicured eyebrows, like, fully waxed eyebrows.”
“Greeeekkkk,” a few slur. “European!” insists one woman, loudly, twice. Consensus reached.
“Greek dudes who are on the back of their friend’s scooter, and they’re holding them like this”—Moulos puckers his lips, knees bent, hips forward, arms laced around a phantom torso. More cackling than clarity, but it’s not leaning Greek.
Fanny packs, or, as the Aussie self-corrects, bum bags? Decidedly Greek. (I glance back at the anti-journalist.) Carrying little bottles of olive oil everywhere? Also Greek. “So, apparently I’m not gay,” Moulos deduces.
Benjamin tells everyone to grab more drinks. The music turns back up. Ten minute intermission.
Mo, from Manchester, recognizes me. Earlier, Benjamin had clocked me on the outskirts—thanks, notebook—while trying to fill the front barstool. I declined. With prodding, she gleaned I was a Seattleite who didn’t drink coffee. (“Stereotypes aren’t real, you guys!”)
“This might be, like, an insider view,” Mo starts. “I don’t know if Americans know this. So: the Schengen Area.”
He can’t give specifics—his parents told him not to—but outlines a general path: a land crossing from Iraq into Greece, a flight to France, a hop across the Channel. He was born two years after they arrived.
“I love geography, all things countries and cultures,” he says, a month into two years of pilot training in Athens. “When I heard that my parents lived in Greece and all these countries, I was like, ‘Damn, I missed out on that trip.’”
We’d have kept talking, but Benjamin’s back at the mic, now sizzling, riffing on an A.I.-generated song that’s been stuck in her head all week. “Have you heard about Pam,” she unleashes, “in love with a twenty-six-year-old Greek man?” The crowd howls, briefly. ♦
