Mr. Albasheer is now shooting the show in New Haven, Conn., where he has been on a fellowship at Yale. His crew of about 25 people work from a country he asked me not to name. Half of them work uncredited because of the danger.

Iraqis watch the show on satellite TV on Germany’s Deutsche Welle Arabic channel. It repeats about once a day at different times to try to escape government jamming. The show also has 3.8 million followers on YouTube. It is, of course, in Arabic, but Mr. Albasheer also taped two short programs in English (one pretty funny, one sober) to tell the world about the protests. (He said that his income comes from the program and from a company he owns that does other TV production.)

Mr. Albasheer’s model was Jon Stewart (he calls George Carlin his idol), and the two have been compared. The comparison goes only so far. Mr. Stewart’s programs were not jammed. Unlike Mr. Albasheer, Mr. Stewart did not get daily death threats; has not had to flee his country; has not seen his father, brother, best friend and countless other family members and friends murdered; and has not been the victim of a suicide bomber.

Mr. Albasheer was once an ordinary correspondent, anchor and talk-show host at several of Iraq’s highly controlled TV news stations. Then, at a poetry celebration for the Prophet Muhammad in 2011, a man burst in wearing a suicide vest. “I looked him in the eye trying to explode himself,” he said. “Those two seconds were very long seconds. I had time to think: If I am dead now, who am I?”

He ran and found shelter behind a wall. But his best friend and several other friends were killed.

He didn’t leave his house for the next six months. “I’m just sitting at home getting fatter,” he said. “I was afraid of everything. I was waiting for I don’t know what. Just to die, maybe.”

But he remembered his long two seconds thinking: Who am I? He made a decision: He was someone who would say whatever he wanted.

He moved his family to Jordan, and while working as a journalist, he tried comedy news. In 2014 he began the “Albasheer Show.”