ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- At the recent "Dirty Mic" night at the Central Almaty Stand Up club, the change in atmosphere was hard not to notice.
As spectators filtered into the venue, club staff issued warnings about the use of profanity and harsh language on stage and informed them that "comics do not have the goal of offending anyone."
The host of the July 11 event, comic Duman Beisen, reminded the audience of these terms and conditions repeatedly before the comedians began their acts and in some cases during them.
He implored spectators not to film or record the comics and warned that anybody who found the jokes offensive was free to leave.
"If you so much as look at your telephones to check a text, I may get nervous," Beisen joked.
Spectators are traditionally encouraged not to film such events.
But since the second half of May, Kazakhstan's stand-up circuit has been understandably on edge.
That was when a comic well-known for his political jokes, Nuraskhan Basqozhaev, was arrested and sentenced to 15 days in administrative detention just weeks after his act in the same venue landed him in trouble.
In the period since then, both Basqozhaev and the Central Almaty Stand Up club have faced anonymous threats, raising questions about where the growing comedy scene can go from here.
'Might Negatively Affect The Youth'
Basqozhaev's problems began after a prominent Kazakh model, Madina Mamadalieva (Madlen), took offense at a sexist joke that seemed to imply that she was quite literally at the beck and call of corrupt government officials.
"You go on f***ing stealing cash and f***k off to Dubai, order [yourselves] bloggers like Madlen while you watch how the whole north of Kazakhstan is drowning," Basqozhaev vented, at a time when several Kazakh provinces were badly affected by flooding.
"There should be a punchline here but I haven't thought of it yet," the comic added.
Mamadalieva promptly made her displeasure at the joke known on Instagram, where she has some 2 million followers, and promised to take legal action against Basqozhaev.
Public apologies from Basqozhaev and Central Almaty Stand Up followed, and Mamadalieva declared the matter settled.
But on May 23, Basqozhaev was summoned by the police and asked to provide a written explanation of his words.
He was subsequently detained on charges of "minor hooliganism." An Almaty court then ruled against him, charging that the comedian's statements "resonated widely in the society and might negatively affect the youth."
The administration of Central Almaty Stand Up, whose director is Basqozhaev's wife, Aigerim Inayat, stated that it considered the arrest "persecution of speech."
Beisen, the host of the July 11 comedy night, went further.
He told RFE/RL's Kazakh Service that he considered the punishment less to do with Basqozhaev's standoff with Madlen and more to do with the politically sensitive jokes by the club's comics that target Kazakhstan's political leadership.
There have been plenty of those, said Beisen, who confirmed that men introducing themselves as representatives of the security services had made contact with Central Almaty Stand Up in the past.
'Today It's 15 Days, Tomorrow It's 15 Years'
Beisen did not specify what was in their requests.
But in one of his jokes, showcased on the Central Stand Up club's YouTube channel in April, it is notable that President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev's name is censored out. The moment comes as the comic compares political regimes to washing-machine cycles -- known as "regimes" in Russian.
"Then along came [censored]. He promised us a more delicate wash but he pulled out the automatic [guns]," Beisen told his audience, who responded with gasps and laughter.
That could be interpreted as a reference to Kazakhstan's January 2022 unrest, which left at least 238 people dead and is a highly sensitive topic for the administration of Toqaev, who issued a "shoot to kill" order to troops during the peak of the demonstrations.
One of Basqozhayev's jokes, in turn, touched on apparently leaked footage of the torture in jail of activist Timur Danebaev, who attempted to sue Toqaev in connection with the president's infamous assertion that "20,000 terrorists" had attacked Almaty during the unrest.
"Personally, I took this as a signal to people to shut the f**k up," Basqozhaev said at the time.
Was Basqozhaev's arrest a similar signal?
"Today it's Nurashkhan, tomorrow it's me or any other comedian. Today it is 15 days, tomorrow it is 15 years because of a joke," Zarina Baibolova, a comedian from Astana, wrote on Instagram after her colleague's arrest.
"Sitting [in jail] because of a joke, even a very bad one, is something very North Korean," she added.
Stand-up comedy is on the rise in both of Kazakhstan's two largest cities, albeit from a low starting point and after a pandemic-era hiatus that dealt a blow to its early development.
As the scene has become more popular, more and more comics have ventured into the sticky territory of politics.
The beginning of Toqaev's presidency in 2019 hinted at a more relaxed brand of authoritarianism than that espoused by his long-ruling predecessor, Nursultan Nazarbaev.
But recent years have provided a reality check.
Would-be opposition party heads and journalists have been sentenced or are facing sentences for serious crimes in contested cases.
Public demonstrations, meanwhile, are as difficult to stage as ever, despite Toqaev hailing changes to the legislation governing them.
Can the stand-up scene withstand any further pressure?
A number of comics contacted for interviews by RFE/RL's Kazakh Service this month refused. Others agreed at first before having second thoughts.
This is a sign that "fear has won" after the first arrest to hit the scene, according to Assem Zhapisheva, a journalist, screenwriter, and regular attendee of stand-up nights.
"But this didn't begin with [comics]," Zhapisheva told RFE/RL.
After Bloody January "forbidden topics and forbidden names have returned, just as was the case during the Nazarbaev era. If something happens in the country, then many major media outlets either do not write about it or write about it the way [the authorities] need them to."
