by Negin Farsad
Ugh, how many times have you heard a lady say, “Oh, I’m not qualified for this” or “I don’t really know what I’m doing” or “I’m not sure this PhD means very much.” Come on! You’ve heard it a million times. I just wanna grab those ladies and say, “Turn your vagina down, get in there, and don’t let those nutsacks talk over you. And when you’re done, demand that the air-conditioning be turned off, because why do we have to work in a refrigerator because some guy gets the occasional pit stain???”
Of course, the male-female divide isn’t all in our heads. When you look at the top 100 highest grossing films of 2013/2014, only 2 percent were directed by women!5 That’s a single digit—in fact, it’s the first single digital after the first single digit. It’s a low-ass digit. That’s just in my business. In the tech world, only 26 percent of U.S. computing jobs were held by women in 2013.6 So the lacking confidence in your head meets the actual crappy statistics in real life—the “craptistics”—and then voilà! A lady feels bad and then sees doom and then feels bad again in a horrible loop that’s being held together by pantyhose.
That loop worked hard in my brain tentacles. I resisted writing until I realized that the parts I was getting from the boys were, in a word, dogshit. There was the “dumb sorority girl”7 or the “nagging housewife,”8 or my personal favorite, the “woman standing in corner.” It wasn’t long before I exhausted every nagging voice I could think of, and every dumb sorority girl nuance I could eke out, and every standing pose available to a bipedal mammal. If I wanted to do something about the comedic parts I was playing, I had to write them myself. I started teaming up with peeps in the group to ease my way into writing. Some of those guys would be lifelong friends, collaborators, and recipients of my mass e-mails.
I started with writing superhero, video game, and fart-based materials. I wanted to blend in, I wanted to be one of the boyzzz. Sometimes I would write a female superhero character that just ended up being androgynous.9 Frankly, I didn’t know how to write a female character that was in a position of power. I just hadn’t seen very many of those. So when I thought about a corporate office sketch with a bunch of CEO characters being you know, “hilarious,” the way CEOs are, all the men around the table were white, with erectile dysfunction. If it was a sketch about an ad agency coming up with “hilarious” commercials, the leader of the group was always a guy.
But college was all about learning how to make a stink. So, I started to make a stink about the lady characters in our sketches. I started challenging the boys in the group on their casting and their narrow vision of women in sketches. They weren’t always sensitive to where I stood, but that was only because they’d never encountered the issue before. I was probably the first person in their young lives who said, “Instead of two men, why can’t we show two female baseball fans making fools of themselves?” Or “Why can’t I, a woman, play a male president and wear a man’s suit? Guys play women all the time. I mean, Milton Berle built a whole career on it, right?”
There were battles, there were laughs, there was an awakening of my tits. But I was really naïve about the makeup of the group, worried that if we brought any more women into the group, I would have fewer and fewer parts. I operated from a “glass is half empty… of vaginas” philosophy. I was shameful and I was scared. The opportunities for me, even in that idealistic college situation, looked so scarce. Everywhere I turned in my limited little comedy world I saw white dudes with brown hair and glasses. We even had a sketch lampooning the sheer number of them we had in our group called “White Dudes with Brown Hair and Glasses.”
Sometimes it still looks scarce, but the answer should never be: Get me in there and keep all of them other ladies out! What was it that Madeleine Albright said? I think she said something like “There’s a special circle of hell reserved for women who don’t help other women,” or maybe she said, “There’s an especially terrible sketch with no speaking parts for female actor/comedians who don’t help other female actor/comedians.”
Years later, I was on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore on Comedy Central. At the end of each show, each panelist gets asked one of those catch-22-type questions. If the host—the indomitable Larry Wilmore—thinks that your answer is sincere, he awards you a Keeping It 100 card (like keeping it 100 percent real, for those of you who don’t speak street). The question for me: If you could definitely eradicate one of these things—but not both—would you eradicate Islamophobia or Sexism?
I said Sexism. I cited my mother—she was the first thing that came to mind. That shit affected my mother and it’s still around! We can’t have that! Besides, all women suffer from sexism—if we get rid of that, we could free up the white ladies to fight against Islamophobia, right? Newly freed-up white ladies would make wonderful allies for all kinds of fights if they didn’t have to deal with sexism. Imagine the possibilities!
The fight in being a woman and the fight in being a person of color is the same fight, but being a woman and a person of color just adds twelve extra steps. Like you can make a turkey for Christmas dinner, or you can make things real hard for yourself and go for the turducken. Going for the turducken isn’t easy; for starters, you have to debone three separate birds. What a nightmare! And to pull that off at Christmas dinner? Being a woman of color is like always going for the turducken. I believe Gertrude Stein used the same analogy.
It was in this little microuniverse of gendered politics, protected by the low stakes of college sketch comedy, where I figured out that I wanted to have my lady parts and my comedy, too. And cake, I really wanted cake. Throughout college, my Interests definitely had their way. They boned me real hard. And thank God, because I wouldn’t have started writing without them.
CHAPTER 7
Bootleg Islam
One of my tried-and-true methods of making white people laugh—or you know, having a pleasant connected chat—is describing my experiences with family, especially family in Iran. People tend to find it fascinating. They’re surprised to learn that Iranian life is equal parts humdrum and repressive. They’re amazed to learn that neuroses strike mothers of all races, ethnicities, and faiths uniformly. They ask questions about the food and the scenery, the clothes and the customs. At first I didn’t share much of this stuff, because I thought it was common knowledge, like I would bore people. You might not tell me every detail of a trip to your aunt’s house because you think it might bore me (or worse yet, bore you as you’re talking about it). But how wrong I was! Because family gripes are the great connector, they’re the foundation of 93 percent of all comedians’ careers, and they are the ultimate social lubricant.
Sometimes I find myself telling people about a particular trip I took to Iran, soon after I moved to New York City. I went there for my cousin’s wedding. This was the first time I would be traveling to the Islamic Republic of Iran on my own. Up until my eighteenth birthday I had always traveled with my mom. My dad and brother never came with us, because they feared being drafted into military service. For Iranian males, military service is mandatory, and even though my brother was an American citizen, the Iranian government, like honey badger, don’t care. Which is to say, because he was born in Iran to an Iranian father, Iran will always have citizenship eyes for him. Whenever he walks into a room, Iran will always blush. If he ever calls collect, Iran will always accept the charges. Citizenship in Iran is forever, even if the person has totally moved on, is seeing another country, or is even totally citizened to another country! This makes Iran a stalkery ex. What it has meant for my dad and brother is that they weren’t able to go back until well after military age.
But me and Moms did go, because this was the very very rare moment where being a woman actually gave us more freedom. We would spend long summer months in Iran. Our family would throw hundreds of parties, give us tons of gifts, like handcrafted little Persian rug mouse pads and jewelry boxes with ancient Iranian designs. These things cost a ton at Pottery Barn but you can get them for a dime in Iran. My point is, the
whole country is a great shopping experience.
My second point is, the whole country is filled with party hosts. These people love throwing parties. If there was an Olympics game for teatime, Iran would not only take home the gold, but the Olympics committee would create some kind of new metal—the Platinum Titanium Deluxe—and then Iran would take that home, too. I know you think the British are supposed to be the undisputed leaders of teatime, but that’s only because America has better relations with the Brits and have thus popularized their teatime traditions. In Iran, teatime is constant, and it’s everywhere. If you go shopping for clothes, you’re offered tea and pastries. If you’re visiting someone at the hospital, a magical elf appears offering tea and pastries. There’s tea service in prisons. You can rap on a neighbor’s door, ask for a spare extension cord, and bam, there’s a tea set just waiting for you. They anticipate your extension cord needs and have three forms of pastries waiting just in case.
They’re not just good hosts; they insist on making you feel kingly. First there’s the hellos. In the United States, we walk into someone’s home and we’re likely to say something like “Hey, how are you? I love your place! Thanks for having me.” And then the host will say something like “Oh thanks, so glad you could make it.” That’s about the size of the hellos. But in Iran, the hellos start with the recitation of a couple of ancient poems, probably from Rūmī. There might be a quick nod to some kind of more modern sonnet, topped off by a couple of platonic epistemologies on the nature of having a guest. They like to start with a solid, discursive foundation.
Then, the hosts looks at you—I mean really looks at you. They breathe you in and then they offer a thousand blessings. I never know how to respond, so I usually offer two thousand blessings in return. They take those two thousand blessings and raise me. Soon we’re jumping up to ten thousand blessings. I don’t want to shy away from this. What am I, a pussy? I can do more than ten thousand on a bad day. I just go for it. I say, “I wish upon you one million blessings.” In most Western societies, this is more blessings than is strictly comfortable for the average person. But in Iran, they go full-hog “infinite blessings,” and then you know you’re a goner. You’re so fucking blessed, you don’t know how to take your upcoming tea.
So after the twenty minutes’ worth of hellos in the form of poems, blessings, and a healthy debate on the nature of greetings, you move into the sitting room. Not unlike their American counterparts, these sitting rooms are covered in plastic until you, a very important guest, can luxuriate your behind in the soft cushions of the Louis XIV imitation couch. That’s when the tea comes out—there’s no question if you would have a tea, it’s just forced upon you. You wouldn’t be able to say, “Oh, I’m off the caffeine, no thank you.” I imagine you would just be banished from human society if you did that. So the tea is a must. But then come the pastries.
When it comes to the delivery of pastries, Iranians move like those high-speed vampires. They take out the good china, and before you’re even able to comprehend physical movement, you’re eating fresh almond cookies and baklava. They have to act fast because those almond cookies are fresh. Have you ever eaten a fresh almond cookie? It melts in your mouth. No! It melts on contact with your lips. You’re probably really fond of an almond cookie you had in Chinatown or something, but lemme tell you—that almond cookie don’t know shit. I don’t mean to start a new war in Asia, but those Chinese almond cookies taste like paint sticks compared to the transcendent almond cookies of Iran.1
You can’t have just one cookie. That’s when the Iranian host activates the age-old tradition of tarof. Tarof goes like this:
Host: Please, have another cookie.
Guest: No, thank you. I’m full.
Host: Don’t be ridiculous, have another cookie, you look like you’re going to starve.
Guest: No, I’m fine, really thanks.
Host: I woke up at 5 A.M. to go to the bakery, to stand there before it opened, to ensure that you were getting a fresh almond cookie delivery, and I waited for three hours until it opened so I could buy the very first, the very freshest, batch of almond cookies, for you. Only for you. You must have another.
Guest: No, really, I’m good, thanks.
Host: I’ll slice my own throat if you don’t have another almond cookie, it is the most fresh and delicious almond cookie in all of Iran.
Guest: Okay… okay… put the butter knife down. I’ll take another cookie.
Host: And another baklava?
Guest: Gah!
That’s tarof. Sometimes it turns into a psychological thriller, but mostly Iranians want to make sure they treat you real nice and that you’re stuffed by the time you leave. They are aggressively hospitable. Which is why their international reputation of being uncompromising on nuclear proliferation has never made sense to me.
So I always had fun in Iran. To have access to dozens of cousins and aunts and uncles and great-aunts and grandmothers gave me a sense of belonging.
I had always traveled with my mother. She always had a chador-type thing on hand for when we entered the Islamic Republic. Oh, I should probably explain: chadors are those long pieces of fabric, of any color, that women in Islamic countries drape over themselves. It’s not a burka; you don’t cover your face, you just drape this piece of fabric over your head, and hold it under your chin. Chadors are perfect for those moments when you’re in an Islamic Republic and you just have to run out of the apartment and grab some milk from the corner store, but you don’t feel like putting your arms into sleeves. Catholics may recognize the similarity between chadors and a nun habit. Tourists in London may recognize their similarity to the plastic poncho that the tour guide gives you in case it starts raining and you’re on the second story of a double-decker bus.
In fact, there are a lot of covering-up rules in Iran. Here are some of the basics:
Ladies, you gotta cover your hair! Don’t let that shiny mane out for everyone to see like some sort of slut. You gotta cover that shit up! It’s the law.
Ladies, you gotta cover the contours of your body. Don’t let everyone see that slim waistline like some sort of slut. You gotta cover that shit up! It’s the law.
Gentlemen, you gotta cover those shoulders up! You can’t wear wife beaters out in public like some sort of slut. You gotta cover that shit up! It’s the law.
So there are some personal coverage issues, the burden of which is shouldered mostly by the hot ladeez. But there were other fun laws like: Alcohol is banned, and anything from the West is considered contraband. So keeping these rules in mind, I had to take care of a few things before I traveled to Iran. My mother wouldn’t be traveling with me this time, so first, the hijab.
Hijab is the set of clothes that conforms with the Muslim notion of modesty. But to be clear, for most Muslims that definition is usually up to the ladies themselves. There are plenty of Muslim countries, let’s say Lebanon, that don’t have the hijab codified into law. Iran requires the hijab, but still its definition of modesty is subjective and it changes with the seasons. Literally, when it’s warmer, sometimes, they’re a little looser on what constitutes proper hijab. You could go out with your headscarf fully exposing fabulous bangs or three-quarter sleeves on your long jacket. You might see some wrists up in there! I should note though that even Koranic scholars themselves can’t agree on how to interpret the concept of the hijab. Basically, the whole head-covering thing gets a lot of attention for what it says or doesn’t say about Islam and women.
My grandmother covered whenever she was in the United States; it made her feel more comfortable. It never bothered me that she covered, and I didn’t think it made her less of a feminist. In fact, it was my grandmother, not my grandfather, who clearly ran shit. We needed her approval on things. She had the intensity of a Queen Mother character you might see in Game of Thrones. Sure, her son or husband are technically the kings, but she’s the one that’s telling the Master of Coin how to negotiate trade agreements with the Warden of the N
orth. She’s the one who put a bounty on her dwarf brother’s head via raven! My grandmother was a lovely person, so she never actually put a bounty on anyone’s head, but she could have if she wanted! What’s more, she never proselytized. She never tried to get anyone in her family to be more or less Muslim. For her the degree of involvement in Islam—the chadors, the prayer, the eating—was strictly opt-in. Do it if you want, let’s not make a fuss. She was a woman with agency, and she chose to cover up in the U.S. when she didn’t have to. It made her feel better. Just like high-waisted underwear make me feel better. And now you know.
But for women in Iran, it’s legally sanctioned. So, I had to get myself some Islamic headgear. My first instinct was to go to Macy’s. I asked if there was some sort of “Muslim section” of the store. It is, after all, the world’s largest department store. The saleswoman at Macy’s was stumped. There were no Muslim outfits to be found so instead she showed me some really frilly and diaphanous scarves. I thought I should wear a thicker and more dour fabric, just to be safe, so I ended up buying a navy blue bed sheet from the Martha Stewart collection at Kmart. I figured the mullahs wouldn’t mind 120-thread count.
Armed with my bedsheet hijab, I got on a plane and landed in Tehran. The first thing I noticed was that Tehran is hot and sweaty. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m from the desert of Southern California, and at a very basic level I understood the heat. But what I didn’t understand was wearing fifteen layers of clothing in ninety-five-degree weather with 60 percent humidity in the name of Islam.
The second thing I noticed was an earthquake that registered 7.0 on the Richter scale. And, don’t get me wrong—I’m from the desert of Southern California, and at a very basic level I understand earthquakes. But what I didn’t understand was that in Iran all the lights go out, buildings collapse, and people actually die. This never happened when we had 7.0s in Palm Springs. I have a T-shirt claiming survival from an earthquake from which everyone survived.