Charbel Khalil in the NYTimes

Take a look:

EVERY weekday, Lebanon’s large and fractious cast of politicians appears on television in news conferences and speeches. And every night at 7:45 they appear all over again — only this time as rubber puppets who sing, dance and babble their way through the day’s news.

The wizard behind this nightly transformation is Charbel Khalil, a small, round-faced and very brave man of 41. His new show, “Democracy,” which first went on the air in September, is the latest in a career-long series of comedic broadsides aimed at the vanities of Lebanese politics and society.

It is not an easy profession. Mr. Khalil has been threatened more times than he can count, briefly driven into exile and forced to sit waiting for hours in the offices of offended Syrian commanders. Three years ago, after he dared to mock Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, angry young men burned tires and blocked the road to the Beirut airport, and Lebanon’s cabinet anxiously ordered the show off the air for two weeks.

Mr. Khalil shrugs it off. “We are completely free here compared with other Arab countries,” he said, sitting at a desk in his cozy, wood-paneled studio office just north of Beirut. “Nothing is forbidden for satire except the president of the republic.”

Then he adds, with faint embarrassment, “and the army. And the judges, and religious leaders. And the presidents and kings of ‘sister and neighborly countries.’ ” All these are specifically protected from public ridicule under Lebanon’s media law, he says.