'Trees die standing.' That is the title of a play that has been staged in our theaters for many years. Müjdat Gezen is 83 years old and has been a performer for more than 60 years. Not just on stage — also a film actor and television personality. He has spent most of his life, in a sense, broadcasting live. His life is, in fact, a summary of Turkey's most turbulent era.
INCIDENT AT THE GIRGIRIYE MUSICAL
This time, Müjdat Gezen has made headlines with the Gırgıriye Musical — a show he wrote, directed, and starred in. During one of the performances, an audience member rushed on stage complaining that they could not see the show from where they were seated. The incident caused the performance to be cancelled, and Gezen fell ill and was taken to hospital.
Gırgıriye is actually a story that Müjdat Gezen also made into a feature film back in the 1980s. It depicts the Gypsy/Roma culture of Sulukule, in Istanbul's Fatih district — the neighborhood where Gezen was born and raised. The word 'Gırgıriye' derives from 'gırgır,' which means fun, mockery, and ribbing.
Gırgır was also the name of Turkey's best-selling humor magazine of the 1970s and '80s. First Gırgır disappeared, and then humor followed. For some time now, a country once rich in comedy has been left without it. What remains is, at best, gravity and dark wit — because the climate is harsh, politics is harsh, and daily life is harsh. There is no room left for humor.
Sulukule — the neighborhood of urban-poor Roma depicted in Gırgıriye — was pure street humor incarnate. Until the 1960s and '70s, it was one of Istanbul's most important centers of entertainment. Sulukule, too, is now gone.
MÜJDAT GEZEN'S ANGUISH AT A HUMORLESS TURKEY
For a long time now, Müjdat Gezen has been carrying the pain of humor's disappearance from public life. This is why he spoke out on TV against those in power. It is also why, well into his eighties, he was put on trial alongside another comedian of his generation, Metin Akpınar. He is generally known as an opposition figure of the left and social-democratic persuasion. Yet his Kemalist and secularist stance has always been front and center.
HE CONQUERED HIS HYPOCHONDRIA
Returning to this piece's headline: Müjdat Gezen is known in artistic circles as a hypochondriac. If someone were to tell him 'your face has gone very pale,' he would end up in A&E. He acknowledges this himself, attributing it to an overprotective mother — though he says he overcame it after the age of fifty. Still, a theater veteran who spent decades on stage and carried the grief of a humorless nation is not someone worth upsetting over the price of a seat. He already wants to die on stage.
