At a comedy club in Vilnius, Lithuania, Evil Sasha gets belly laughs with a joke comparing US politics and the repression in her home country, Belarus.
“They're checking phones at the [US] border, and people are getting arrested for protesting… And I'm like, ‘Ha ha ha, first time?’”
Evil Sasha -- real name Sasha Hushcha -- bases her humor firmly in the adversity that has shaped her life.
As a child, she suffered extensive burns to her hands and face in a house fire. Then, she was injured during a police crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Belarus in 2020, and subsequently fled the country.
“I mostly use black humor,” she told RFE/RL’s Current Time.
“When I start my performance, I go up to the microphone on stage and say, ‘Hello, my name is Evil Sasha, I'm from Belarus, I'm the former Belarusian champion in rock-paper-scissors.’”
The joke is a reference to her physical appearance: the audience can see that her fingers have not been reconstructed after the damage they sustained. She has been through 39 operations and is not afraid to make jokes about her looks.
“I'm not dating men because I have this condition,” she tells the audience. After a pause, the punchline: “It's called having standards.”
“I really like this duality, where I try to make jokes that are funny, so that people enjoy them and have fun, but there's also this spice of discomfort,” she says.
Hushcha says she was teased and bullied as a child. She says people would approach her and demand to know what had happened to her.
At one stage, at a reception at the Belarusian Health Ministry, somebody suggested sending her to an orphanage.
But eventually she received extensive medical care thanks to a benefactor from the Belarusian community in the United States.
“She completely sponsored us for several years. She sent us money for air tickets, accommodation, food,” Hushcha says.
In 2020, she became involved in the political turmoil engulfing Belarus. Mass protests swept the country after the country’s ruler, Aleksandr Lukashenko, declared victory in presidential elections that were widely seen as falsified.
He responded with a brutal crackdown by security forces, involving mass arrests, beatings, and several deaths.
In 2022, Hushcha became one of the many who fled the country, and now lives in neighboring Lithuania.
Comedy, she says, has kept her going.
