Funny You Should Mention: Mohanad Elshieky
The Gist
Mike Pesca
4.4 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2025
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mohanad Elshieky joins Funny You Should Mention with stories that make Benghazi feel less like a political Rorschach test and more like the small town where he learned comedy by roasting his siblings and dodging unlicensed militias. He walks us through the dictatorship-era silence around politics, the sudden rise of ISIS-adjacent checkpoints, and the knife-wielding "helper" who hijacked his car only to request a future hangout. We also dig into the Greyhound incident that vaulted him into national headlines, why clapter makes his skin crawl, and how Portland's well-meaning curiosity can feel like its own border crossing.
Produced by Corey Wara
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Friday, December 5th, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions. |
| 0:08.0 | It's the gist. I'm Mike Peska. |
| 0:10.1 | We finally got that Benghazi report we've been working on since the show started. |
| 0:15.8 | Literally, when Andy Bowers, who was the first executive producer, I guess, who commissioned the show and hired me to first do it, one of my ideas was, maybe we should do something about Benghazi. |
| 0:26.3 | I think that there might have been something, not the conspiracy, but maybe something to it. |
| 0:32.0 | Well, 12 years later, if you include when the planning stages hit, we finally have our Benghazi episode. |
| 0:40.4 | And I have to tell you, it's not what I expected. |
| 0:43.0 | It is, in fact, an episode of funny you should mention with the Libyan-born comic Mahanad |
| 0:48.4 | El-Shakey. |
| 0:49.7 | He is a very funny guy and usually unfunny you should mention. |
| 0:53.7 | We talk about, hey, why did you say that joke? |
| 0:55.9 | Sometimes why you say it this way? But why do you think that? What's the point you're trying to get to? When we do get to that. But if I got a guy from Benghazi in front of me, and he was actually, oh, you'll hear, abducted, lightly abducted in Benghazi. I mean, definitely abducted for, say, Cincinnati, but in |
| 1:12.1 | Benghazi, perhaps a light, a toe touch of an abduction. Got to ask about that. And so I do. |
| 1:18.4 | And we don't really uncover the rest of the Benghazi situation. But I think that that has been |
| 1:23.8 | so thoroughly chewed over that everyone has their strong opinions. |
| 1:27.7 | Actually, no, I am more of the belief that everyone's opinion on Benghazi by now is, |
| 1:32.8 | wait, what was supposed to have happened there? |
| 1:35.6 | Or is that when the Patriots deflated the balls? |
| 1:38.5 | No, that was Balgazi. |
| 1:40.1 | And this is Mahanid Elshakey, funny you should mention. |
| 1:51.1 | When you give to a nonprofit, how do you measure success? |
| 1:54.3 | You hear a lot of things like, oh, low overhead costs, or the efficiency of fundraising as defined by how much money actually doesn't go |
... |
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