I'm Fine...And Other Lies

by Whitney Cummings

  Then I thought maybe I’d wear jeans and a T-shirt—classic Americana—but that felt slightly passive-aggressive, and I much prefer being actively aggressive. I considered a dress with heels, thus looking as traditionally feminine as possible as an F-you to their suppression of femininity. The problem with that is I have literally never worn a dress, much less heels, onstage, and I figured rolling my ankle while performing would not be conducive to showing the Middle East how strong women could be.

  I also considered dressing very sexy, the opposite of how traditional women dress there. Maybe that would make the point that women can be smart, strong, and sexual all at the same time, but I also wanted the women to see me as their ally. I didn’t want them to think I was trying to outshine them or steal their man or something, which, frankly, maybe I would have done, given how into mean guys I was at that time in my life. Pre-therapy, a sexist Middle Eastern dude actually would have been the ultimate aphrodisiac.

  I settled on bell-bottom jeans that have never been in style, New Balance sneakers, and a black slightly bedazzled blazer. I figured it was androgynous, neutral, and respectable. “Be beige.” Blazers mean power, pants mean business, sneakers mean freedom and comfort. The perfect message to send, I thought. What I didn’t realize is that the message I was actually sending was: In order to be respected as a woman, dress like a man. I wanted my outfit to hide my femininity, for my gender to be invisible. I’m not sure if I accomplished that, but I did accomplish looking like a sexually confused teenage boy from the seventies. Maybe this was the closest thing to a burka we had in America: dressing like a man with a full face of makeup on.

  Two comics went onstage ahead of me and both did very well. Both were also men. They may have been dressed less like men than I was, but they were men nonetheless. Now, I’ve never been one to get nervous before I go onstage, even the first time I ever did stand-up, mostly because adrenaline and fear are sort of my comfort zone. But on this night, not only did I feel fear, I also felt pressure. Pressure to be funny of course, but also to be an example. I felt I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. I felt like maybe I had to represent America, to represent women, to represent freedom. I felt like maybe if I just nailed this, all the women in the audience might reject their circumstances, wake up, and leave their oppressors. They’d see that life could be different and that they were capable of doing whatever they set their minds to! They, too, could tell dick jokes at night to strangers if they wanted to!

  The other obstacle that I was facing, besides an ancient patriarchy, was that the show was in an outdoor venue. I’m sure that the idea of doing comedy outside sounds super fun to noncomedians, but the truth is that outdoor venues are a mess because the laughs tend to dissipate into the sky instead of bouncing off walls and ceilings. So for this show all I had to rely on were my emotional walls and the glass ceiling.

  I couldn’t believe it was my turn to go up. I guess time flies when you’re having fear. I remember being brought up with a glowing, super complimentary intro that was probably intended to get the audience on my side, but it ended up just making me feel more pressure.

  Everyone asks if being a female in comedy (in America) is hard, and I never have a good answer because I feel like everyone has a hard job. It’s hard to be a male and a female in any career because working sucks sometimes. I shudder when I think about what accountants must have to do all day. I can barely remember my cell phone passcode, much less be able to sit at a desk and add all day. Every job blows. I’m just grateful that mine doesn’t involve blow jobs.

  That said, the one thing that does nettle me is when being a female is the focus of my intro—that is to say, “You’re going to love this next comedian, she’s a lady!” or “Are you guys ready for a girl comic?” as if to warn the audience that a female is coming on, so if they need to go make a call or take a bathroom break, now’s the time. I know this isn’t malicious, but pointing out that I’m a girl before I get onstage always seems a little odd, since nobody ever makes intros like that for any other career. No customer service rep warns you, “I’m sending an insurance adjuster over to survey the property. Just a heads-up, it’s a lady!” No hostess at a restaurant says, “Your server will be right with you. It’s a guy! Enjoy!” And even within the comedy world, we also don’t specify anything else about the comedian besides gender. No show host ever says, “This next comedian is black!” or “Next up is a homosexual comedian. Keep it going for the gay guy!”

  “Keep it going for Whitney Cummings!”

  Oof.

  I had always been made fun of for my last name, but this was the first time I ever worried it could actually be illegal to say it out loud.

  Once I got onstage, I scanned the crowd for what I was up against. I saw a mixture of men and women, some dressed in traditional garb, some not—again shattering my idea of the homogeneous backward population of the Middle East. I had envisioned that all the women would be in burkas and after my set they’d all rise up, rip off their oppressive garb, and storm into the sunset with me, prancing toward liberty. Nope. It was way messier and more complicated than that. First of all, the sun had already set, and second, every woman was in a different incarnation of the garb, if in the garb at all. Panicked by this curveball, I locked onto one girl who seemed particularly supportive and decided to just do my whole show for her.

  I started by addressing my unfortunate last name and made a joke that referenced the base of it, which is, sadly for me as a teenager, cum.

  I held my breath, ready for the onslaught of boos, gasps, tomatoes. There was a slight beat of silence, then something very weird happened. The audience laughed. Hard. I’ll never know what lay within that beat of silence. Maybe it was a language barrier or a collective moment of wondering if they were allowed to think it was funny, but that was all the encouragement I needed to go another twenty minutes yelling about boobs and vaginas to an area of the world known for covering those very things up.

  These laughs didn’t sound like the laughs in America. They felt like they were coming from a deeper place. They were a special kind of laugh that felt like repression desperately aching to be released. The laughs were like the Middle East itself—half very new, half very old.

  When I finally got comfortable, I was able to look at other people in the crowd besides the girl I locked onto, and I saw something I didn’t expect to see. The men were also laughing. They weren’t mad, threatened, offended, or scared. Turns out I was the only one guilty of all of those things.

  And yes, for the haters reading this (hi! and thanks! and sorry!), I do realize the people at this show in no way represented the entirety of the Middle Eastern culture. I was performing for a very specific and small sample of people. The kind of person who would come to a comedy show is already going to be way more modern and tolerant. I realize that the hostile misogynistic weirdos, the conservative fundamentalists, and the very oppressed women who weren’t allowed to leave the house wouldn’t even know about the show, much less buy a ticket. That said, it still felt like a win that in the Middle East a woman could go onstage and yell into a microphone about squirting.

  That night, people showed me photos of myself onstage, and although I probably should have been beaming with pride, when I looked at the photos all I could see were the bags under my eyes. “I’ll use the money I made from the tour to buy some de-puffing eye cream,” I thought. Ugh, the girls at the mall were right.

  The next day we were off to Lebanon, a place I knew even less about than Dubai. No amount of Googling prepared me for how beautiful it was. It looked more like the Middle East that was in my head before I saw Dubai. It was rustic and majestic, like the preloaded screensaver that comes with your computer. Beirut was of course very developed, but the cosmopolitan mass of glass buildings was surrounded by rugged mountains and ancient mosques. The water that lined the city was an opaque emerald green, whereas Dubai’s water was an impossibly
clear blue. Beirut had more grit, more edge, and more women in headscarves.

  After the Dubai show, I was feeling safer and more confident about the whole being-a-woman thing. I also felt safe because I got to wander around the city with Tom Papa, one of the funniest people I know. Male comedians aren’t known for being the toughest people in the world, but at least I had someone with the charm and wit to talk us out of any trouble we could get into. He and I saw everything from abject poverty to annoying tourists to the biggest Fendi store I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t really pin this place down either, which was very annoying. My black-and-white brain saw only gray, my least favorite color.

  Tom and I stumbled upon a gorgeous old mosque called the Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque. The spoils of modernity aggressively compete for your attention in Beirut: the billboards, the ads, the stores, the sales, the music, the fountains. Despite all the gorgeous things in your purview, this mosque effortlessly draws your eye with an eerily quiet ability to hypnotize you. I can’t quite figure out why it’s so arresting. Buildings are of course immobile, but this mosque feels especially still. Maybe it’s the odd combination of gold and turquoise; maybe it’s the stones it’s comprised of, which are of course beige.

  Tom and I decided to go in. I had no idea if you needed some kind of ID or wristband or club card or something, but to my surprise, it seemed to be open to everyone, even obnoxious Americans like us. Having just done stand-up in front of a bunch of Middle Easterners who accepted me, I felt pretty invincible, so I sauntered into that mosque like it was my bitch.

  When we entered, Tom and I marveled at the shocking beauty of the inside. It’s actually sort of unfathomable how gorgeous this place is. The domed ceilings are decorated with an infinitesimal number of colorful, painfully symmetrical tiles. I wondered, how can a country with such perfect tiles have such imperfect beliefs? A dangerously large chandelier hung from the ceiling. I thought about how gorgeous it would be if the thing just crashed to the ground in slow motion, but it didn’t seem like chaos was something that could happen in a place this serene. It was so impossibly quiet. I’ve spent my fair share of time in churches, and even when they’re supposed to be quiet, you hear feet rustling and people breathing. Not here. This place was dead silent. It was so quiet that I could hear the voices in my head, which is never good news given how grumpy my inner monologue was back then. I responded to the whole experience as any predictable twenty-six-year-old tourist would: I pulled my camera out to take a billion selfies.

  Suddenly I heard a woman yelling. Screaming, in fact.

  I instinctively crouched over, covering my head with my hands. I guess because I had been in Lebanon for a day and had seen so many buildings with bullet holes in them, my monkey brain assumed it was a bomb or that the gargantuan chandelier finally gave up. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a woman in a hijab running toward me. She begged me in Arabic to do something, but I didn’t know what. Did she need me to rescue her? To protect her from an abusive man? Was she coming to me for help? Did she need me to bring her back to America so she could live her best life? Ooh! Did she want a photo with me?

  Tom and I finally realized that this woman was desperate for me to cover my head with a hijab. I looked around and realized I was the only woman in the mosque without a headscarf on. According to the alarmed expression on this woman’s face, this was a big mistake.

  Clearly there was a misunderstanding, I thought. I tried to clear it up by speaking clearly and loudly: “I’m American! I’m not Muslim!”

  The woman looked at me like I was insane. I mean, I was insane back then, but she didn’t know that. She dragged me to the entrance, and rather forcefully I may add. Another stereotype debunked: In addition to Muslim women not being mentally weak, they’re not physically weak either.

  Once we were in the lobby area, she ran into a room and came back holding up a black hijab. My heart sank. Not only because it was made of the cheap black fabric I found so depressing, but to put it on felt like a betrayal of women, progress, and everything I believed in.

  On top of that, this ritual just felt arbitrary to me. It was okay to take photos and videos in the mosque with the most modern technology, and post them on Facebook with dumb emojis? That wasn’t demeaning to the culture, but for a woman’s head to be exposed was? I couldn’t understand why my side part and ponytail was upsetting to this religion. I mean, I may have had the least insulting appearance there given some of the tourists were wearing cargo shorts paired with Teva sandals. One guy was wearing a Hard Rock Hotel T-shirt. As far as I’m concerned, the male tourists were the ones that should have had to cover themselves. It didn’t make sense to me that Crocs with socks are okay but my forehead is where they drew the line.

  I quickly realized this wasn’t about logic, reason, or justice. It was about tradition and my chromosomes. I was a girl and this was the deal.

  I thought about refusing to put it on. Maybe I would resist and make some news headlines that got into the papers, then to women who weren’t allowed to leave their homes. The only problem is I was thinking about all these brave heretical ideas as I forced a smile and wrapped the hijab around my head.

  I don’t know what’s to blame for me succumbing so quickly to the tradition; maybe it was being shamed, maybe it was my codependence, maybe it was my aversion to conflict, maybe it was mirror neurons. I couldn’t begin to understand the intricacies of being a woman in the Middle East, but my motivation for acquiescing was ultimately that I just wanted to be respectful of the woman begging me to put it on. She had probably endured so much of her life being disrespected that I didn’t want to be yet another person dismissing her existence. Maybe I was wrong to think that way. Maybe the most respectful thing I could have done for her was to refuse and set an example, showing her that she, too, could refuse to put it on if she wanted to.

  For the first couple minutes, the hajib felt very weird. It was itchy, I was tripping over it, I couldn’t get to my pockets with ease, and black is not a flattering color on me. I’m so pale and awkward that I looked like the Grim Reaper with a knee injury.

  Now, the scariest part of all this was not that the lady screamed at me, or that I almost tripped over the cloak-like contraption numerous times. The scariest part was that after about ten minutes, I totally forgot I was even wearing it. It went from annoying and cumbersome to weightless, even comfortable.

  That night we did the show for Beirut. Perhaps as a mini revolt against having to wear the hijab that day, I wore a short-sleeved button-down, revealing my forearms with aplomb. However, that night I felt less victorious. I felt like a phony. Earlier that day I had acquiesced to covering myself with an oppressive symbol of misogyny, and that night I was onstage, talking about how strong and empowered I was.

  The shows went well, and again I was surprised that the same country that hours earlier made me cover up in a mosque was the same country that found it hilarious that I was talking about balls. The whole dichotomy was exhausting. I needed this region to just make up its mind already: Were they sexist or not?!

  I left the next day without saving anyone. All I had were some stories I didn’t know what to make of yet and some trying-too-hard photos of myself trying to look cute in front of old jaunty fountains.

  A couple years later I did a network TV show and had the same impulse to use my platform to set an example for women. I wanted to create complicated female characters that challenged their circumstances and didn’t conform to what society wanted them to be. I wanted them to find strength in vulnerability without depicting them as overly needy and sensitive. But if they were overly needy and sensitive, the guy was tolerant and understanding of it, instead of exhausted and annoyed by it, which is a stereotype I feel is sexist toward men. Trust me, women can be exhausted and annoyed by needy women too. I tried to make a show in which the gender roles were reversed, where the guy (played by Chris D’Elia) wanted to get married, and the girl (played b
y yours truly) didn’t. I thought maybe it could be progressive, subversive, or at least funny to flip the script: to depict a man as emotionally intelligent, sensitive, and capable of true love and a woman as impulsive, commitment-phobic, and uncomfortable with vulnerability. Since stereotypes of women and men are so deeply ingrained in our psyches, my character was often thought of as “crazy” for having a masculine side and Chris’s was often thought of as “a pussy” for having a feminine side.

  The show seemed to be taking off well. It tested well with focus groups; it made emotionally numb comedy writers laugh; it even made some emotionally dead comedians laugh.

  Imagine my surprise when, once we got picked up, I learned that I couldn’t say most of what I had planned to say on TV. A lot of the stories I wanted to tell were “too dirty.” On network TV we can’t say Jesus, God, ejaculate—basically nothing people text about after ten P.M. You can’t show a Coke if Pepsi is a sponsor; you can’t have a sports jersey on a wall without jumping through numerous legal hoops. If you mention the NFL, I think you immediately just get stabbed in the neck. You also can’t say something is “inside you.” That rule alone killed like half the stories I wanted to do. After going to the Middle East and being able to say whatever I wanted onstage, I was very confused about being censored back in America the free.

  When I was shooting this TV show, the bags under my eyes were very, well, baggy. And not like the sultry “that girl likes to party” nineties model type of smoky eye. No, it was more like the kind of eye bags that cause people to ask you if you’re okay while looking very concerned. Pretty much every conversation started with “You seem tired” or “Rough night?” No matter how many cold compresses I put on my eyes or how many products my makeup artist put on them, I looked like a hungover panda.