How to Make White People Laugh

by Negin Farsad

  I went to Cornell University in upstate New York, and upon arrival I thought it was a foreign land, completely different from Southern California. First off, there were trees everywhere, lush, green ones I had seen only in movies. Second of all, there were basically no Mexicans as far as the eye could see. As the theory went, Mexicans went as far north as Poughkeepsie and stopped. They just didn’t want to go any farther.

  I had never seen so many white people in my life. I remember thinking, Maybe I should try being white? I mean, what does it really entail—wainscoting? I can do that. But on my campus, the gatekeepers to whiteness were frat boys.

  Despite its academic rigor, Cornell has a very entrenched Greek system. During my time there, white people were extremely concerned with it. They were willing to fake-kidnap people to get into fraternities, willing to stand naked and have their fat circled with Sharpies to get into sororities, willing to join a cappella groups. There was no amount of humiliation a white person wouldn’t put up with to get into this Greek system! It was very important. The benefits were apparently huge.

  NAMES BELONGING TO THE SORORITY GIRLS (OF MY MIND)

  Kateland Bananaclip

  Burberry St. Cloud

  Morgan Van Tinkle of the Great Neck Van Tinkles

  Taylor “Feather” Bitsimmons

  Morgan Tannerfly

  Tanner Morganfly

  Mackenzie Sticks

  Lizzie Flatterly

  Jenny Cortland Wassterstein-Hudson

  Madison Doilybean

  Ashley Grandmolding

  Snowflake Tibbles (sister of Pantaloon Tibbles)

  Maggie McSnippens

  Veronica Boatsmooth

  Jackie Windsails

  Karen McMonogram

  Lilac Duster

  Jordan Periwinkle

  Capri Greystone

  Basically, if you got into the Greek system, you got invited to all these parties where you got to meet all the other white people who had also humiliated themselves to get into the Greek system. You would then see these people all the time and you would make out or date or masturbate alone in adjacent rooms. You would live exclusively among each other, which usually meant around white people.2 Full sorority houses would be matched up with full fraternity houses for mixers and if that mixer ended in a mild pseudo-rape situation, then congratulations, you totally did it right!

  My first brush with the Greek system was in the first two weeks of my freshman year. I followed Molly and a group of blond newbies to a frat party, dressed in my outsider best—Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, flowy dark medieval skirt, army boots, dark burgundy lipstick, and, for ultimate confusion, dangly Iranian earrings. Our frat hosts were wearing baseball caps and flip-flops, and button-down shirts that weren’t tucked in; some of them had T-shirts inexplicably hanging out of their back pockets. Occasionally, there was a polo shirt.

  I walked into the party thinking, I can pass, but when the full scale of the whiteness hit me, I realized passing wasn’t my choice. I didn’t get to choose whiteness. You’re rewarded whiteness.

  NAMES BELONGING TO THE SORORITY GIRLS (CONT’D)

  Selena Ploughbow

  ’Nessa Crabtree

  Heather McKinKin

  Britt Marble

  Brittany Unicom

  Abigail Pincenez

  Holly Chateaubriand

  Geraldine Saddles

  Charlotte Chesapeake

  Allison Cufflinks

  Joni Habbidash

  Missy Winslet

  Cupcake Livingston

  Evangeline Townsend

  Lior Goldbergberg (Jewish sorority)

  Ambrosia Buchanan

  Summer Winterly

  Olivia Hornswaddle

  Claire Binghampton

  Courtney Bing-Hampton

  Langley Pleats

  Cheyanne “Throw Pillow” Templeton

  In my school, the rewards for that whiteness were doled out at frat parties. The blond girls with me were immediately branded for potential boning, so they were given beers and a tour of the premises. I was left to fend for myself while fighting my way into the keg line. Despite my sizable rack, I was not branded. No white-boy boning for me. Whiteness was beginning to look extremely unappealing. (I mean, I had to lose my V eventually, and if I couldn’t get any play at white parties, how was that gonna happen?) I thought I’d at least get some kind of weird frat-boy fetishist who thought my features were exotic or something. But no. I fought to get my one beer and ended up walking back to the dorm alone, like a straight coat-check girl who’d just finished her shift at a gay bar.

  As school started in earnest, I also discovered that whiteness involved a deep and abiding commitment to Dave Matthews. Well, that was just asking too much. There’s no way me and my Björk CD collection could join. Not that it mattered, because I couldn’t pass anyway.

  But Cornell had its own racial issues a brewin’, and I just happened to be there at the right time to get mobilized by them. You see, part of the reason Molly was so noticeable in my dorm was that she was a sorority-bound white girl and we didn’t have those in Low Rise 7. Low Rise 7 was the name of our dorm, but others were called stuff like Baker Tower, named after a notable moneybags alum. At Cornell, there were a select few of us (hundreds of us) in these less savory, less popular dorms with really functional names and numbers and very little class spirit. Hey, at least we weren’t Low Rise 9—they were the last of the practically named Low Rises. How embarrassing.

  Class spirit was spread very unevenly on our beautiful campus at that time. This was mainly because incoming freshmen got to select where they lived. We each handed in a form over the summer with our top three dorm choices, and we generally got one of those dorms. Seems simple enough. But the result was: West Campus had most of the white people, and all the people of color ended up on North Campus. Separate but equal.

  Cornell was big on legacy. Fathers wanted their sons to join the same fraternity. Mothers wanted their daughters to join the same lacrosse team. Multiple generations would graduate from Cornell, and because this dates back decades, all of them were white. Even if their parents didn’t have Cornell credentials, they went to top-tier universities, sent their kids to the best private schools, and had remarkable connections. These incoming legacy students had more information on Cornell. They could ask a relative or a connected family friend, “Hey, what dorms should I rank?” and those contacts would say, “The dorms on West Campus.” And then they would say “What are your thoughts on pleated khakis?” and the family friend would say, “I’m pro, very pro pleated khakis.”

  WHAT THE CAMPUS ELITE DID ON PARENTS WEEKEND

  Manage orchids

  Train parakeets

  Wear little tennis outfits to brunch

  Procure season-specific monogrammed umbrellas

  Attend secret underground skin-care societies

  Tailor various trousers

  Hold private monthly conference calls with Kelsey Grammer

  Do weight test comparisons of precious metals

  Design customized watch bands

  Get drunk

  Me, I knew one guy. The brother of my one Iranian friend in high school went to Cornell. I asked him where to live and he said, “I don’t know, I lived in North Campus.” No shit you lived in North Campus—you were a minority!

  But see, so many of the white students ranked West Campus that not everyone got their wish. So, people like Molly slipped through the cracks and ended up in a North Campus dorm with a Chinese-American roommate and an Iranian-American bestie. Most of these students tried to transfer out of these lame loser dorms. Others just waited it out until they could pledge a sorority/fraternity and be reunited with their people.

  I lived next to the Ujamaa house, so I interacted with black students all the time. Plus I had two Indians and a Latina in my suite, and then there was Molly and her Chinese-American roommate down the hall, so I was getting the full spectrum of diversity. Basically, the people of color were d
oing great at meeting people of color. The white students were doing great at listening to Dave Matthews.

  To Cornell’s credit, they did place some kind of multicultural half floor of a dorm on West Campus. So about a few dozen out of several hundred students on West Campus were minorities. But that wasn’t enough, because eventually tensions flared.

  In response to the segregation, Cornell thought that first-year residents should not be allowed to live in “program housing.” For example, African-Americans who wanted to live in the Ujamaa Residential College, a program house dedicated to “the rich and diverse heritage of Black people in the United States, Africa, the Caribbean, and other regions of the world,” would be prohibited from doing so as first-year students. But program houses were the de facto centers of racial identity. It almost seemed like the university wanted to reduce their presence on campus by limiting the number of people who could live in them. It was as if they wanted these centers of identity—these places where black, Latino, and Native American students felt at home, felt a sense belonging—to eventually die off.

  My friend Anyeley, a Ghanaian-American salsa addict, was the minority liaison to the administration at the time. She remembers trying to get the administration to listen to her. She felt frustrated with their questions, with the fact that they didn’t understand what program houses meant to her fellow students. She felt so defeated in her dealings with the university that at one point she cried in a committee meeting. A photo of her crying made it to the campus newspaper. She cried because she was nineteen with erratic emotions. But she also cried because she didn’t want the university to take away the program houses where minorities like her got to let down their guards and just be. Molly would cry years later when this kind of distinction finally made sense to her. Have you ever worn Spanx all day and you come home, take off the Spanx, and let your gut hang out? Being a person of color on campus all day is like wearing Spanx, and a program house is where you let your gut hang out with no shame.3

  Then Al Sharpton drove up to campus to say, “Nuh-uh.” That’s right, the West Campus–North Campus divide got to be so bad, and the university’s response was so wrong-headed that student-organized marches across campus were joined by marching royalty Al Sharpton! He thought the university’s plan was ridiculous and mocked it: “We want more blacks and Latinos on campus; we just want them to merge with everyone else so we don’t know they’re here.”4 He was right. The university’s panties were in a bunch over the wrong thing. Only 1.4 percent of students lived in those program houses. They weren’t the real problem.

  Looking back on it, it was disgusting that Cornell let this unofficial separation exist. How could they not see the generational and racial effects of these dorm selections? But schools like Cornell were so old that it took them a little time, a little marching, and a lot of Al Sharpton, to figure out what was going wrong on campus.

  This incident on our campus was huge for us students. We were all vim and vigor and ready to march and get angry. Some students even staged hunger strikes. I did not. But I did take advantage of the seemingly endless supply of seasoned curly fries, and I was extraordinarily devoted to the Sweet Rachel5 sandwich at Collegetown Bagel.

  But I did march. And I… felt things. I had little pangs of anger. I looked upon the old men that ruled the school and realized that they had huge blind spots. That they alone couldn’t possibly be the answer to our school’s segregation problem. That without us—the marchers of color—there would be no fair solution.

  To the school’s credit, they changed their policies, and dorm selection was randomized while maintaining program housing. The face of the entire campus changed.

  That experience made me aware of race, and I never did look back. Once you see the racial divide, you can’t unsee it. Cornell made me into a protester. And you know what? Eventually I did buy a Dave Matthews CD. I’m human, after all. I’m happy to report that there are now more Mollys hanging out with more Negins. As it should be.

  CHAPTER 6

  My Lady Parts and My Comedy Parts

  The struggle of holding a protest sign in the cold, followed by the act of getting a hot chocolate at Collegetown Bagel, did a great job of politicizing me and activating my burning desire for hot chocolate. (Did I mention that protesting in the cold was… cold?)

  But while that was going on, I was also in the throes of another hot burning desire: comedy. Who said you can’t love two things at the same time? You can. And it can really complicate your academic schedule.

  I was hooked on acting in high school. But I assumed that interest, along with my acne, would fade by the time I was in a serious academic setting. Oh Negin, you naïve little co-ed. Thinking that an interest would fade just because school was absurdly expensive. Thinking that an Interest in comedy would simply vanish because you didn’t want to disappoint your parents by studying something so buffoon-like and self-serving. Did you know that your Interests don’t give a rat’s butt about tuition? No, they don’t. Did you know that your Interests couldn’t give a flying fuck about “career stability”? No, they don’t give a fuck—a flying or an earthbound fuck. Your Interests are a great big bag of dicks. And they’re ready to bone.

  For some people, Interests align with financially sound and respectable career choices, and for other people, quite sadly, they don’t. Interests scream loudly in some people’s heads, creating their own mosh pit like at some ’90s grunge concert. And for others, they’re weak piddly little flirtations that have virtually no lumbar support. My Interests gave me tinnitus—instead of a ringing in the ear it was the voice of Lewis Black yelling, Fucking go into comedy you fuck. And then I would see a vein on Lewis Black’s head pop.

  During the First Year Orientation show in that first week of college, I was a goner. The show was designed to woo the horribly awkward freshman—freshman so fresh we still wore our high school theatre company and track team T-shirts. The performing groups wanted us to become their new fans or audition for their open slots, that kind of thing. There were a dangerously large number of a cappella groups performing. A cappella groups are both totally entertaining and an embarrassment to all of humanity. A cappella is like a really juicy episode of Real Housewives of Atlanta, a show you pretend you know nothing about but secretly watch.1 Enjoying a cappella is like that rare moment when you’re alone ordering a pizza—as in an entire pizza for yourself—and you get to say, “Extra cheese, please,” and the pizza shop guy is like, “Well, that’s not an option,” and you’re like, “I’ll pay you whatever you want, just give me double the amount of cheese,” and the guy is like, “Okay, fine.” You hang up the phone and you’re extremely satisfied with your order, because you can never admit to doing shit like that with your friends around, when you have to pretend like you’re the kind of person that never has even ever considered ordering double the cheese on a pizza. That’s what enjoying a cappella is like.

  So there I was sitting in an auditorium with my faux-indifferent posture, like the first week of college was no big deal. I clapped and yawned as the multitudinous a cappella groups sang pop songs from the likes of James Taylor, when finally it was time for the show-stopping sketch comedy troupe: the Skits-o-Phrenics. Let’s just put the name aside for a second to say that they were good. To my little far-sighted eyes they seemed better than Saturday Night Live! They made me laugh from all cylinders and with scant attention to cackling. I looked upon that stage from the mezzanine level and said, “as God is my witness, I will join that sketch comedy troupe.” I said it just like that, with a fist in the air, and a thick Shakespearian affect.

  I was in college, with no intention of comedy shenanigans. But just when I thought I was out, my Interests kept pulling me back in. Yeah, in this analogy, comedy is like the mob and it kills people.2

  I did in fact audition for (and got into) the Skits-o-Phrenics, and by the third week of school I was a full-fledged member. I found out because they showed up to my dorm in the middle of the night with a bot
tle of Boone’s wine and a pack of Ring Dings. That was how they haze-announced that you got into the group. It was very classy.

  Those motherfuckers kept the Interest alive, kept it chomping at the bit, and I became a sketch comedy machine. As a freshman in college, comedy was tied in first place (along with “fighting for the struggle”) as the most important thing in my as-yet-inconsequential life.

  And it was good I found comedy and politics, because Cornell wasn’t exactly an obvious fit for me. I discovered very soon after I got there that I didn’t like nature very much, and Cornell had a lot of trees. So many trees. Nature was everywhere, all these little bits of it, little brooks and gorges.3 Any walk from dorm to class or from class to dining hall involved some kind of grassy, steep, death-defying hill. Students wore hiking boots to class. Everyone had grappling hooks dangling off their backpacks and they really valued their fleece. I hated all of that. I never wanted to be rugged, or strenuously exercised, or a little cold. I wanted to put on my black lipstick and go to a café with my Sartre compendium. You know, like a normal person. Of course, if I wasn’t at a café looking morose, I was doing comedy.

  I would spend hours and hours rehearsing comedy. I would poster the campus walls with our show flyers promoting comedy. I would develop accents, design props, and figure out the best way to tromp around the stage in character performing comedy. The one thing that I resisted for a long time was writing comedy.4

  Here’s why: I was one of two women in a group of about twelve guys. I was convinced that I wasn’t a good writer. To be a good writer meant that I had to be smart. And I was convinced that I wasn’t smart. I’m still not entirely convinced otherwise, but now I recognize that it’s stupid to think that you’re stupid. A lot of women actually feel like this—we’re socialized to somehow think we’re big, fat frauds when in fact we’re overcompensating go-getters.