by Maz Jobrani
“How could she divorce me?”
“Dad, you haven’t seen her in eight years.”
“Dat’s true, but I vas vorking on a poem for her. Dese tings take time.”
“You were living with another woman in another country.”
“Don’t change deh subject. Your modder is very unge-rateful.”
“And also very realistic.”
“People in deh community,” he said, “vill talk.” Which was the main reason for his anger.
I’ve never figured out who these people are, but I do know that Iranians live in fear of being judged by other Iranians. Anytime your parents don’t want you to do something, they automatically pull the “community card.”
“Don’t be a comedian, deh community vill talk.”
“Don’t date be-lack people, deh community vill talk.”
“Don’t be gay, deh community vill talk.”
“And vhatever you do, don’t be a gay, be-lack comedian. Deh community vill be very confused.”
When you’re a kid and your parents guilt you with talk of the community, it really makes you upset. Like you’re letting down 2,500 years of Persians and their history. The weight of the whole Persian Empire rests on your shoulders when the community speaks. You walk down the streets in Westwood and you think everyone is aware that you’ve chosen to become a comedian. To Iranians, the only occupation worse than a comedian is terrorist. You can swear they’re shaking their heads in disgust. “Did you hear about Jobrani’s son? He became a comedian. Yes, a kelown. A circus kelown. Dis vill ruin deh reputation of Persians all over deh vorld. Ve had an empire. Now ve have a kelown!”
With my father the poet in exile in Iran, and my grandfather the poet cursing at the radio at night, I was now the man of the house and faced with a major dilemma. I received a letter from New York University offering me a scholarship to earn my Ph.D. NYU would pay for all my education and give me a stipend as well. It wasn’t the top university for political science, but it was a very good school. The advantage of going to NYU over UCLA, which I had also gotten into and was a better school, was that my education costs would be covered. You’d think that your parent would be happy to hear such good news. When I told my mother she began to cry.
“Vhy you go to New York? Your fadder leave me and now you leave.”
“I thought you didn’t like him?”
“Dat’s not deh point. You are man of deh house. You must eh-stay.”
“I’m only twenty-one.”
“Deh shah ran a country at your age.”
“His father was a dictator.”
“And yours vasn’t?”
“Leave Dad out of it.”
Leaning in for the kill, she whispered, “People in deh community vill talk!”
Man of the House
The guilt worked. In the back of my head was this tiny voice reminding me that what I really wanted to do was comedy. Had I gone to New York, I would’ve been far away from home and might have had the guts to give it a try. But my mom pulled her Jedi community trick and I gave in. I decided to attend UCLA and live at home to be the man of the house. When you accept such a weighty role, you soon realize that the reality doesn’t live up to the title. Whereas the shah got to run a country with ministers and generals and armies, and possible access to all the unmarried women in the land, I got to help my mother read her mail, drive my brothers to school, and help Grandpa with the English pronunciation of his cursing. I was more of a chauffeur/butler/profanity coach, a.k.a. a utility player.
Once in a while I got other man of the house duties, when my mom would make me sit my brothers down and talk to them. My father’s departure left a void of male energy in the house, so my two younger brothers had run a bit rampant, putting my mom through hell in the process. Now, as the man, I had to fix the problem and get the boys back on track. Being an older brother and trying to act like a father did not go smoothly. Especially since my younger brothers had grown up in America, on the American hormone-infested diet of Big Macs, Whoppers, and Twinkies, which made them bigger than me. It isn’t only the fries that get super sized—it’s also the immigrants. I would sit them down and do my best, giving them fatherly advice, but it never sunk in, mostly because the “when I was your age” speech isn’t as effective when you were their age only five years earlier. Real fathers told their sons about fighting in Vietnam or World War II. My war stories were much more passive.
“You should be grateful,” I’d holler at my indifferent brothers. “When I was your age we had the Falklands War. It lasted seventy-four days and I wasn’t even there. Then, of course, the invasion of Grenada. That lasted at least two weeks and I had to watch it on Nightline with Ted Koppel and his big hair. Every. Single. Night.”
Screw the Ph.D.
I wasn’t scaring anyone straight. Man of the house by night, Ph.D. student by day, I had delusions of grandeur. I had studied abroad in Italy my junior year as an undergrad and met a professor who inspired me toward academia. His name was Vincenzo Pace, but he went by Enzo. He had a goatee and would wear professorial blazers with elbow patches to class. He also had a gold pocket watch that he would pull out every day and look at as the last few ticks counted down to the beginning of class. Then he would flip the watch closed, put it back in his pocket, and very dramatically hold his hands in the sky in a pensive way, calling out the subject of the day in Italian.
“Allora . . . Maometto.” Which meant, “So . . . Mohammad.”
This was a sociology of religion class. We would discuss the prophet Mohammad or Jesus or Moses and their philosophies. Something about the way he carried himself, how he spoke about these deep ideologies, made me believe that being a professor was exactly the vocation for which I’d been searching. On the one hand, it would make my mom happy because it would be an honorable profession that the community would look upon favorably. On the other hand, it would place me at a university where I could discuss ideas and debate with like-minded people, a modern-day prophet of sorts. Plus, I would be surrounded by young coeds the rest of my life. What prophet doesn’t want that? It was all coming together splendidly—until I started studying for the actual Ph.D.
One thing you never hear about in the prophet business—it takes a shitload of studying to get a handle on all those complicated philosophies and theories. I remember getting into my Ph.D. classes at UCLA and discussing what our purpose was in the practical world as academics. The professor kept telling us that our goal in life would be to publish or perish. So basically we had to keep writing books on our theories and go around the world defending ourselves. If we were lucky enough to come up with a theory that a politician actually liked, then we might get to apply our ideas to the real world. In essence, we were living in a theoretical world, but every month when I got my tuition bill it didn’t feel theoretical at all. Eight thousand dollars a year so that I could live in a theoretical world? At least they gave us student identification cards which got us two-dollar discounts at the movie theaters in Westwood. I figured if I saw four thousand films I would break even. In theory I had come up with a solution that was brilliant. In reality, I was an idiot.
I wasn’t happy, either as the man of the house or a prophet in training. Something was missing. Eventually I dropped out of UCLA and began working at an advertising agency. I had to do something in an office just to get my mother off my back. I figured if she saw me going to work in a tie every morning, she would think I was doing something useful.
“You are not a lawyer, but at least you look like von!”
The first day on the job, the others in the agency told me to lose the tie. “We’re much more laid-back here, so just dress casually.”
When I told my mom, she almost rescinded my man of the house duties. “Casual? Vhat the hell does dat mean? It is an office. People vear ties in an office. You tell dose Americans dere is notting casual about vork. You ar
e supposed to be uncomfortable at vork, from vhat you do to vhat you vear. I swear if it vere not for dis regime I vould move you back to Iran and make you vear a tie.”
“Mom, they’ve banned ties in Iran.”
“Den you vear a turban. Anyting to make you uncomfortable!”
A few months earlier I had seen Roberto Benigni receive the Grand Prix award for Life Is Beautiful at the Cannes Film Festival. I had become a fan of Benigni from my year in Italy. Seeing him win the award and rush the stage to kiss all the judges as well as Martin Scorsese’s feet (who was the president of the festival—Scorsese, not his feet) inspired me. I remember thinking, I want to be THAT excited about what I do in my life.
One day I was dubbing a video copy of a play I had performed in and there was an older man who worked at the agency who saw bits of my play. He was a producer at the ad agency, named Joe Rein. Joe had always been complimentary to people and was one of those gems you meet in life. Watching me dub the play, Joe asked me if I had ever thought of pursuing acting professionally. I told him it had crossed my mind and that I was hoping to save money and pursue it when I turned thirty.
He took me into his office. “Look,” he said, “I’m in my sixties. When I was in my twenties there were some things I really wanted to do. I kept putting them off and never got to them. So if you really want to do it, then do it.”
It was the light bulb moment I had been waiting for. I realized that you live once and you cannot live the life your parents expect of you. All those years of struggling with my Persian identity and the obligations I had to my parents and the community had finally been revealed as futile. From that moment, I decided to prioritize acting and stand-up. Now there was only one last obstacle. In hindsight, a rather monstrous one. I had to tell my mother.
“Deh acting crap again?”
“Not just acting. Acting AND comedy.”
“So da man of da house vants to tell jokes?”
“It’s my passion, Mom.”
“Your passion should be to make your modder happy.”
“We’re not in the old country. In America you’re supposed to pursue your dreams.”
“Okay, den I vould like to pursue my dereams, too. My deream is dat you go to law eh-school, get your degree, get a good job, and buy your mother a car. Preferably a top-of-the-line black 401(k) Mercedes, vith leather seats. Or ve can vait till next year and you get me a 402(k). Something to make the community talk.”
Los Angeles had gone to her head.
Part Two
Stand-Up and Pat-Downs: Life on the Road
Hollywood, California
Comedy didn’t just begin the day I had the light bulb moment at the advertising job. It was something I had been subconsciously pursuing since I was a teenager. I’ve developed a basic philosophy throughout my acting and comedy life that applies to everyone, regardless of one’s career or passion: You’re either inspired by greatness or you’re inspired by mediocrity. One of those two extremes is what throws everyone into pursuit of his dreams. Meaning, you either see something that is so great and inspiring that you leap into action and attempt to replicate it. Or you see something so mediocre and pathetic that you immediately think, Look at that sad bastard. I can do better.
Take fire, as an example. Some younger readers might believe that fire came about when the iPhone created the lighter app for use at concerts, but I’ve got a different theory. Fire came about either when a caveman saw a fellow cave dweller successfully light fire and then get laid by all the hottest, hairiest cavewomen that same evening, or it came about when the same guy saw a fellow cave dweller rub some rocks together and explode in flames and said, “Well, I can’t do any worse than that.”
My inspiration came in both forms. Yes, the greatness/mediocrity principle is not a mutually exclusive principle and is not a zero sum theory. It can be simultaneously applied as a paradigm and, when looked at as a bell curve, the greatness factor has an inverse relationship to the mediocrity factor. If you have no idea what I just said don’t worry because neither do I. It’s just something I picked up in my three months in the Ph.D. program at UCLA and I figured I might as well use some of that language since I spent eight grand acquiring it. I dropped out of academia and with that abandoned my dreams of being a learned prophet. I let down Professor Enzo, my mother, and the entire Westwood condominium community. But there was another mentor I’d always looked up to, and I intended to do right by him.
The Persian Eddie Murphy
I got into comedy because I was inspired by greatness—that of my earliest influence, Eddie Murphy. Growing up I was a big fan of Eddie on Saturday Night Live. His comedy was ingenious and he was everything I aspired to be. I had his albums at home and Eddie even taught me and my six-year-old brother how to cuss. We would go around the house practicing: “Goddamned, motherfucker, punk-ass son of a bitch!” Our parents, being immigrants, had no idea what we were talking about. “Dere English is getting good! Dey are using multisyllabic vords. And complete sentences! Who says American public eh-schools are bad?”
I studied all of Eddie’s sets and TV appearances, and I decided that I was going to make it as a comedian, only younger and better and edgier. My first opportunity to give it a shot was at age seventeen, the peak of my sexual perversity. There was a high school talent show that was looking for acts. I had no discipline and no game plan, and my comedy back then was solely sexual in nature. Things like, “Why are genitalia located in the least agile parts of the body? Wouldn’t they be more accessible if they were on the hand? Then you could go around having sex all day simply by high-fiving each other.” I would write it down and think, Wow, this is brilliant stuff, I’m on my way! The next day I’d read what I’d written and have second thoughts: This is total horseshit. Who the hell wrote this? I was only a teenager and I had no idea how stand-up worked. I had yet to learn it takes years of writing and honing and trying out stuff for it to become good material. Given my lack of confidence, I chickened out of performing at that event, and it turned out to be a good decision. When I showed up to watch the other performers, I saw that the audience was made up of juvenile delinquents from a nearby prison. Somehow the organizers had neglected to relay that small detail. I counted my blessings. The last thing I needed for my comedy career was to be shanked at my first performance. Talk about a discouraging start.
As inspired as I was by Eddie Murphy, I still did not have the courage to do stand-up onstage. I’d been in a lot of school plays up until then. But with acting, there are writers, directors, other actors, the orchestra—an entire army of folks to blame if things go wrong. With stand-up, there’s only one person to blame, and I was not confident enough to risk it. In college, I had no more confidence. I had taken a few acting classes and attended some shows. I remember wandering into a bar, and they were having this stand-up comedy competition for National Lampoon, which was looking for the funniest unknown comedian in America. There were only two guys in the competition, and they were onstage doing their thing. They were both awful. I sat there thinking I could have climbed onstage right then, without any practice, and done a better comedy set than either of them. And boom—just like that, based on witnessing utter mediocrity, I told myself that the next time an opportunity to perform came around, I would take it.
One day I was listening to the biggest hip-hop radio station in the Bay Area and they announced that they were hosting a Dirty Dozens comedy competition for local comics. I had no idea what Dirty Dozens was, but I figured it meant there would be twelve people competing and maybe they wouldn’t have to shower before the show. It was open to anyone, and even though I still had not performed stand-up comedy onstage, in my mind I was the next Eddie Murphy and funnier at least than the two guys I had seen bomb in the bar. I had a buddy record a video of me doing character impersonations and I sent it in. There were more than one thousand submissions, and I was one of sixteen finalists selected to go
down to the radio station to promote the competition that would take place in front of thousands of people in a theater in Oakland. I put on my best outfit, strutted down to the studio, and prepared to take my place among the comedy greats. After a few moments, I realized my mistake: Dirty Dozens meant a “yo mama” comedy competition. While it was very Eddie Murphy in nature, I did not yet have the chops to hang with those guys.
All the other comics were black. And they knew one another from the comedy circuit, whereas I had never performed stand-up. Paranoia set in quickly. I decided they had not chosen me because my act was tight; they chose me to be the dude who everyone would laugh at and boo offstage, like they do on American Idol or Showtime at the Apollo. They were laughing at me, not with me.
But I couldn’t just leave, and I had made a promise to myself that I was going to try. We were shuffled into the deejay’s studio, and the other comedians were going around the room doing their best yo mama jokes directed at one another.
“Suki’s mama so fat she can’t wear a Malcolm X T-shirt because helicopters try to land on her.”
“Coco’s mama so ugly, she make blind children cry.”
“Yo mama so fat people jog around her for exercise.”
I just sat in the corner in silence, thinking, Oh god, please don’t let them notice me. I don’t have any yo mama jokes. And if my mother found out someone insulted her on the radio and I didn’t defend her honor, she would never let me hear the end of it.
“You let dem call me fat? On deh radio? And you didn’t beat dem vith a hanger? You are a disgrace to deh Jobrani name and deh entire Persian community.”