How to Make White People Laugh

by Negin Farsad

  No Reptiles Allowed in This Friendship

  I also didn’t have Mexican friends because… well, I was strange. But I envied them. They had groups and cliques—an Identity! They had their own slang and dress code and Sabado Gigante!

  And there it is, the crux of being an Iranian-American Muslim in Palm Springs, or a Romanian-American Greek Orthodox or a Sri Lankan–American Buddhist or a Belgo-Bulgarian-neo-Pagan Cotton Candy adherent: You have no posse! No large-scale peer group. You’re just sorta riding the cultural train solo, which is totally sad. So if you’re like me, you glom onto other, more populated minority groups. Sometimes they accept you, sometimes you join the drama club.

  I could best be classified as “that one ethnic girl on campus who dressed like the love child of Kurt Cobain and a drunk Roma gypsy.” I was all Doc Martins and burgundy lipstick, large T-shirts and colorful Iranian scarves. It was a look, to say the least.

  Yet I still viewed the Mexican plight as my own. I saw the debate over immigration grow and grow and turn as ugly and resistant as a calcified bunion on the big toe of America. And for its part, Palm Springs was an extreme example of what was happening in the country:

  There were the Old Rich People—they were the ones with all the money and the extreme landscaping needs. There were the Leisurely People, some gay, all somehow independently wealthy—these were the people who weren’t that old and kept a winter house in Palm Springs, and could afford to jet around and make the desert one of their many stomping grounds. These people had hard-ons for cacti and air-conditioning.

  Then there were the People Who Had Regular Jobs, which consisted of a slew of minorities and a handful of middle-class white folk. Overwhelmingly, the People with Jobs were Mexicans; underwhelmingly, they were my parents.

  The Mexicans took the jobs nobody else wanted, did hard honest work, and at the end of the day came home to insulting news reports about how they were stealing jobs or how we should be an English-only country or about how Del Taco was considered Mexican cuisine. Despite their vast numbers at my school, they self-segregated, had their own popular people and did their own thing. But did they actually self-segregate? Or, like the nerds, did they not feel welcome in mainstream white culture? I didn’t feel too welcome. I got straight A’s and could grow a beard better than any of the boys in my class. Plus I was a member of one of those stupidly underpopulated ethnic minorities.

  So I longed to hang out with the Mexican kids, to throw down Spanish slang, to celebrate my fifteenth birthday like it was a really big deal.2 On the surface, I looked like an Iranian-American-Punk-Gypsy-Goth girl. On the inside, I said things like “We gotta take the mantle of Cesar Chavez and fight for worker’s rights, man.” And I said it in the voice of the Taco Bell Chihuahua. This may sound culturally insensitive to you. But there was no such thing as cultural sensitivity when I was growing up… eh… it was a lot like today.

  The Taco Bell Chihuahua was taken off commercials in 2000. But take heart, ridiculous cultural icons still abound! To this day, the Washington Redskins are still called the Washington Redskins. The term redskin has a very negative history, not unlike the N-word for the black community. Luckily we have gotten to the point where horrible images of black Americans as coons, sambos, brutes, etc., are less and less common and are deemed socially unacceptable. The Washington Redskins would never be called The Washington N-words—that would be shockingly outrageous!! There is cultural policing on that score. But Native Americans are one of those underpopulated groups—you know, because American settlers were really effective at killing them. (It’s one of those early American ideals that we don’t talk about when we’re rubbing one out to our Founding Fathers.) We have a blind spot for some groups when it comes this kind of icon building.

  Where being a Mexican really had an advantage was roll call. All the teachers were familiar with the iconic American names—the multiple Jennifers and Chads had nothing to be embarrassed about (even though you’d think being just another “Chad” would be embarrassing—it wasn’t; it made you more acceptable). But my teachers in Palm Springs were also familiar with all the iconic Mexican names. The Rodrigos and Juans, the Aurelias and Marianas. But there was no such familiarity with the ol’ Iranian names.

  I had a teacher my sophomore year who would run down the attendance sheet and roll her r’s real good for Veronica and Gabriela, she would get her Mayflower twang on for Greg and Jennifer and then it got to me: “Megan?” No, Negin.3 “Megeen?” No, Neh-geen. “Megreen?” No… and then she busted out with Noodle? That’s right, she called me Noodle Farsad. And then she laughed, laughed hard at her own joke.4

  She ultimately settled on calling me NF. For the entire semester. Because she admitted that she just couldn’t get it right, “and it will be easier if I just call you NF.”

  I don’t know if your high school was like this, but our Sex Ed and Drivers Ed were the same class. So the teacher would spend the first half of class talking about three-point turnabouts, then switch her focus to what happens in the backseats of cars: hardcore fucking. I could handle being “NF’d” during the car talk, “NF, are you supposed to yield to left-turning cars in a two-lane street?” But Sex Ed was harder to, um, swallow. “What is the function of the labia, NF?”

  There I was, Noodle Farsad. My dreams of rubbing elbows with Mexican cool kids were quickly fading. I could recruit only one solid Mexican into my fold. His name was Leonard. He would later change that to Leonardo because of the obvious “Le-Nerd” iteration of his name. (He also later came out of the closet as a gay Mexican, which is a crossover category, so he got ten points for that.) Le-nerd would tell me amazing stories about his culture; one of them was about the Thanksgiving Bean. You know how regular American families like to have a stuffed turkey for holidays? Well, in Mexican families, they like to have a giant stuffed bean. Basically, they take a bean and grow it all year long till it’s as large as a turkey. And then, for holiday dinners, they stuff that bean with rice and salsa and smaller beans.

  How fascinating! What an interesting tidbit about Mexican culture! I went around telling every old, gay neighbor I could find about this beautiful Mexican tradition. The beans that bring them together for our nation’s most treasured holidays. What a thoughtful way to fuse American and Mexican cultural heritage, I thought. I could just picture vast Mexican landscapes covered with plump beans. Cheerful visitors going on their annual giant bean-picking trip—which is a lot like pumpkin picking but it’s bean picking. I pictured Mexican families walking along bean patches, a smiling papito laughing at how big the bean is and pretending it’s too heavy to carry. A little niñita satisfied that her parents picked the bean that she, not her little brother, wanted. The mamita thinking she should pick up a family sized bottle of Beano for their holiday dinner, because we all know how Abuelo gets! My mind went places. I told people, so many people, about this interesting facet of Mexican culture. Until I found out that Leonard was lying. Like a Mexican.*

  Despite my best efforts, by senior year, I had only two Mexicans in my address book.5 They were solid, and one of them was even a bestie, but I was far from embraced by the larger (cooler) Mexican population on campus. I couldn’t figure it out, and the sheer exhaustion led me to a high-profile position as Academic Nerd and Drama Geek Crossover girl. It took a truly special person from the league of dorkdom to have been both the president of the debate society and vice president of the drama club. Having excelled in calculus and to have painted theatrical sets after school, I was that kind of truly special dork.

  My best friend, Anca, was a volleyball-playing Romanian immigrant who had no other Romanians to lean on. We shared a deep and abiding embarrassment over our immigrant parents. If you got a good grade they never said, “Hey, great job.” In both our mother countries, good grades were assumed, not celebrated. As girls, boys were forbidden or at best tolerated. For us, high school was a series of lies: “I’m going to drama practice.” (Read: I’m going to the Homecoming Dance that I’m
not allowed to go to.) Or if my mother asked me why I was wearing pants when it was so hot out, I would say, “Oh, my body temperature is so weird, it doesn’t even feel like ninety degrees.” (Read: I wasn’t allowed to shave my legs until I was sixteen! Sixteen! So my hairy-legged humiliation in high school—located in the desert of Southern California—was constant.)

  We also never knew quite where we fit in. Throughout high school, among the college-obsessed nerdbombs, there was a constant debate over affirmative action. People endlessly questioned whether it was fair for black and Mexican students to have a leg up, or could it really be defined as a leg up if there was never a level playing field to begin with—we asked all the typical questions on the issue. It was heated and emotional for a lot of students who felt that they were being slighted by the system. It was an interesting discussion, but I always wondered how colleges saw me in this debate. I didn’t think I deserved a leg up, but at the same time I didn’t want to be treated as any Tom, Dick, and Harry who submitted an application. The debate over college admissions seemed to fortify the binary discussion of race, and it continued to leave me and my hyphenated peeps in the lurch. For example, if anyone looked at Anca, they would think she was white. But she was born in communist Romania. Her life there didn’t involve any white privilege. Her immigrant struggle involved… struggle… so would college admissions think of her as white? All we could hope to do was mark the X in the box next to “Other.”

  The lure of Mexicans for me, as an unclassifiable minority, was still strong—they were still the biggest legitimately recognized hyphenated-American group in town—and it came to a head senior year of high school when Essy—the one other Iranian kid in my grade, who at this point had dissociated himself from his reptile friends—started dating a Mexican girl from the ESL program.

  Our high school had a sizable English as a Second Language program, and Essy managed to charm one of the girls in this group. Did they speak one another’s language? Not quite. Did they speak the language of lust? Definitely.

  A romantic pairing like this rarely happened. The sectarian fissures in our school ran deep. As any ’90s movie about high school will tell you, the jocks stuck with the cheerleaders, the grade-obsessed competitively leeched off each other’s homework, and the theatre people melodramatically walked the halls in turtlenecks. But here was this Iranian-American Muslim kid, who took only Advanced Placement classes, going after a Mexican immigrant in ESL. It just wasn’t done. The student body looked at them like they had jungle fever. It was like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, except dinner involved tortillas and no shared language and it was actually a lunch high in trans fats served in the poorly lit school cafeteria.

  Essy was rejecting the high school classifications passed down by generations of pent-up hierarchy fanatics. Sure, he mostly wanted to get to second base with a chick, but on a subconscious level, Essy was seeking a cross-cultural coalition.

  And actually, a Mexican girlfriend made perfect sense for an Iranian dude. Both parties were immigrants’ kids with strict parents. Both parties had a more flavorful handle on food. Both got their grandmothers to dance at parties. And both had sun-tolerant skin. It was a marriage born in an American melting pot! (Or American salad bowl or mosaic or scrapbook or vase of potpourri or any other things-mixed-into-a-thing metaphor.)

  But the haters looked at both sets of immigrants as objects of concern. And it helped them for us to be divided. I’ve performed all over the country and one thing has always been true: you rarely ever meet someone who loves the Muslims! But hates the Mexicans! You never hear someone say “Asians are the worst! But African-Americans are the best!” If you hate one group, you’re kind of likely to hate them all. So often my question is: Why aren’t minorities in the United States building bridges and finding that commonality?

  At the end of the day, minorities of every stripe are all actually in the same boat. And that boat is full of compost. Because in the 1990s the Taco Bell Chihuahua was dressed in a beret to look like Che Guevara—not unlike today’s depiction of the hook-nosed Muslim terrorist, which itself is derived from the old stereotype of the miserly Jew. The Washington Redskins mascot matters to all of us—turn it one degree the other way and it’s The Washington Terrorists, or the Washington Sambos, or The Washington Brownskin Terrorist Sambo Bagels. What was it about “the silence of our friends”?6

  Minority groups should form strategic alliances, because the bigotry one group faces is just another side of the bigotry another group faces. Bigotry is very predictable that way.

  What was striking about Essy and his Mexican girlfriend was that we all found it so… striking. But why would we? Their experiences in the world as hyphenated-Americans are so very similar. Minorities should come together, because they understand what its like to be a minority in the United States. The only difference is that some of us are a part of the popular cultural discourse, and some of us aren’t. Luckily those differences didn’t stop those darned kids from making out behind the bleachers during first period.

  CHAPTER 3

  Negin and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

  aka High School

  Everyone has that quintessentially awful and horribly beleaguered high school moment. It’s that instance where all the good that high school provides—academic preparation for college, young adult socialization, Funyons—is sucked into oblivion and replaced by something terribly embarrassing.

  I did an interview with comedian Brian Posehn for my film Nerdcore Rising. (Oh yeah, later in life I would make a feature documentary about nerds who rap called Nerdcore Rising. It’s very nerdy, as in Weird Al Yankovic is in it, that’s how nerdy it is. Though to be clear, Weird Al is a gentleman among mere nerdleman and should run for president of the United States, but I would totally support him if he wanted to run for president of a smaller, less demanding country, or student body president of a high school that would bend the rules and let him run.) But anyway, back to Brian Posehn,1 the inimitable nerdian-American who, by this point, had a stellar career in stand-up comedy and an equally stellar career in comic books and also played a damned fine gay neighbor in the Sarah Silverman Program.

  Brian told a story about his first day of high school. He arrived on campus with his best friends from middle school, excited about what the year would hold. But on that first morning his best friends decided to diss him—they calculated that Brian, who dressed like a geek and had weird interests, would drag them down. Some might call this an “efficient cost-benefit analysis” others might call it “dickholery.” That was the last time his friends ever acknowledged him. He cried as he told this story—a man who at this point was in his thirties and had legitimately succeeded in Hollywood—he full-on cried. I bet you that memory taints everything that happened for him in high school, like pit stains that will never wash out of your favorite T-shirt from that one band you claim you discovered.

  For me, it was this: I was a drama geek and as such it was my duty to be in plays. I took this very seriously. Our entire department took this very seriously. We all thought we were little Dame Judi Denches, running around being professional actors. There were auditions, cast lists were posted, cheers of exhalation were walloped, tears were shed. It was such an emotional thing, you didn’t know if you were walking into a Jazzercise championship, an obstetrics delivery room, or a high school theatre class. Like our rivals, the sports people, we dedicated our lives to it. We rehearsed every day after school, we built sets on weekends, we memorized lines between periods. So when I was cast in something it was serious business.

  Each semester the drama department was called upon to share (promote) what we were doing at Assembly. Assembly is that frightful collection in one room of all the students in the school. A brew of teenaged angst, optimism, hormonal depravity, SweeTarts, backpacks with one of the pocket zippers open, and shame. It was held over a few periods, because we had a big school and not everyone could fit into our small theatre at the same time.


  We presented the funniest scenes from this play for Assembly repeatedly over three or four periods. It was the last show of the day, and the moment came where the main dude character has to choose between us gals. I was on stage left wearing a black dress, and the other girl was stage right wearing a red dress. The guy stood in the middle, comically hesitating and fumbling through a soliloquy about whom he should choose. He made the case for choosing me, at which point one kid in the audience yelled out, “Don’t choose that fat ugly bitch.” He yelled this in front of three hundred people. The fat ugly bitch he was referring to was me.

  Then dozens more voices joined the chorus—“Yeah, that bitch is fat,” “Fuck that ugly bitch,” “Yo homey, she fugly,” etc., etc. I’m paraphrasing, here because I couldn’t make out every single one of the many ways in which they told me I was a hideous monster.

  At that point the main dude (and my buddy Steven) had to make the case for the girl in the red dress, and the audience cheered—“Yeah, choose her, choose the red dress!” “She’s hot, don’t go for the ugly bitch,” “Yeah, go get that blondy,” etc. Again, I’m paraphrasing because they all chose the blond girl with their own special locution. Little did they know that we had created an entire backstory for the blond character in which she’s really into taxidermy and eating dry ramen. But you know, those are the kinds of nuggets that the audience just isn’t privy to. Alas, unfortunately for them, and their clear fetishization of red dresses, the playwright chooses the Iranian-American girl with black hair.

  I can’t quite tell you what it feels like to stand up in front of three hundred people and hear them call you fat and ugly. In high school, it amounts to the worst day of your life. Or as I called it then, “This is worse than the one day my mom caught me borrowing $20 from her purse.” Or “This is worse than the one time Drew told everyone I liked him and I swear to God I didn’t but like multiple people thought I did.” Or better yet, “This is worse than getting rejected from Yale”—kidding, I’m totally over that rejection! I don’t care about Yale anymore! That’s a crazy comparison!