How to Make White People Laugh

by Negin Farsad

  The offshore tax havens in the Cayman Islands solidified what I learned at that first corporate job. I was exposed not only to the sameness that rankles the corporate world but to the lengths people and companies will go to earn more money. After a little over a year at that job, having used the printer and laminator for every imaginable task,12 I decided it was time to go to grad school. If anything, being around corporate folk—with their expense accounts, extra pairs of shoes under their desks, tape dispensers, and casual cultural bias—being around them made me feel even more of an outsider, made me feel more committed to the black cause. Of course, I hadn’t figured out yet that I actually might have my own cause.

  Corporate America also made me feel more committed to public service. I didn’t want to expend my energy helping Fortune 500s find lost money. I wanted to help people with no money have the opportunity of ever getting money at all. Or justice. Or just… something nice out of life. So that was when I applied to the African-American Studies program at Columbia University. (Please reread the Introduction for an incomplete but hopefully entertaining account of that time.)

  But being around these corporate dudes with their concentrated wealth and money also made me realize how much I wanted to bring them into the fold. How, ultimately, they’re a part of the solution. How they’re not bad people, they just don’t see what the problem is. Why would they? They’re surrounded by comfort and really great laminators. So we have to figure out how to bring them into the fold.

  CHAPTER 9

  My Own People Don’t Like Me Very Much

  As I mentioned before, Muslims don’t necessarily have the greatest icons here in the United States. The ones we do have are on the crap spectrum—that’s the end of the spectrum that’s loaded with bigotry, essentializing, infantilizing, theologocentrism,1 and dog poop. Oh yes, I did just casually use the word theologocentrism like it was no big deal. Dropping ten-dollar words has the subtextual weight of saying, “I read a book once.”

  Pretentious ten-dollarness aside, here’s the deal with theologocentrism: Scholars have had a tendency to explain all observable phenomenon in a majority Muslim country by saying, basically, “they’re like that because of Islam.” In some major corners of academia, Islam is a catchall for anything a researcher doesn’t understand. Of course it’s not limited to academia. The world of infotainment has also grabbed hold of Islam to explain things they can’t fully comprehend, by which I mean everything. It’s easier to say, “Post-9/11 terrorism exists because of Islam” than it is to say, “Post-9/11 terrorism exists because the western response to that act of terrorism has been addled by inconsistent policy processes that focused more on war than on nation building, and those shortcomings have in turn created an environment in which antiwestern sentiment might thrive.”2 See! That shit can’t fit on a poster, much less in Don Lemon’s mouth.

  Because everything spins on Islam’s wheels, it’s easy to fall into the trap where we take the icons we’re given—like gun-toting terrorists or burka-clad ladies—and fight them on their own merits. We end up saying stuff like, “You can’t say that Muslims are terrorists because Islam is peaceful!” I’ve personally gone on rants trying to explain to people: “Hold up! Muslims exists on a spectrum; some are very conservative, and others are as secular as your best Christian friend who only goes to church once a year and/or never but still call themselves Christian. What’s the diff, guys!?”

  We twist ourselves into knots convincing people that Islam is peaceful and varied before we realize that, wait a second, you can be a Muslim while also recognizing that Islam doesn’t even explain half of your behaviors! Islam can be peaceful all it wants. It’s not the only relevant detail about a group of people. Islam is a hot-button word in the United States, but what if it doesn’t explain anything about us? What if it doesn’t explain terrorism at all?

  It’s not in the scope of this book for me to explain terrorism—there’s plenty of smart people to do that who are not comedians by trade. But I mention it because the need to shoehorn Islam as the major reason for everything in post-9/11 America defines so much of how we see mainstream American Muslims. We’ve created an arsenal of icons based on this shoehorning, and those icons do not represent me or fit my worldview.

  Okay, so if you’re like me, you might think there must be cultural touchstones from the mother country to hold on to. Iranians certainly don’t define themselves as Islamic terrorists. But there again, for the hyphenated types—your Iranian-Americans, your Moroccan-Irish-Americans—the traditional icons from the mother country don’t always work, either. For example, Iranians love poetry. That’s a nice stereotype and there’s truth to it because when in doubt, Iranians will bust out some totally insightful Rūmī poem in Farsi. Somehow reciting poetry settles questions, quiets arguments—it’s like eating mac ’n’ cheese, it makes Iranians feel all warm and mushy inside. But being a poetry nerd doesn’t really speak to me. I don’t know any of Rūmī’s poems. No offense—I’m sure he was a nice guy—but I’m American, so his oeuvre is alien to me. I’m more likely to recite Mos Def. And if you’re Russian-American, you don’t want wooden dolls inside of slightly bigger wooden dolls inside of slightly bigger wooden dolls. You take gin instead of vodka, you might prefer BLTs to borsht and you kinda don’t “get” Yakov Smirnoff.

  But at the same time you might not understand why Americans go Dutch on bills,3 why they’re so friendly to strangers, or why they take improv classes. Because you’re not fully American, either, you’re this Third Thing, you’re a Russian-American and you have to forge this Third Thing identity in the United States. And it’s not easy.

  Like the hypothetical Russian-American, I’m a Third Thing—Islam doesn’t explain me, Iranian poetry doesn’t explain me, and apple pie doesn’t explain me. And yet I understand all of those things. Being a Third Thing is a designation for people who straddle worlds, who may have a foot in every door yet their butt is hovering between door frames and they may even have more than two feet, and either way they’re definitely going to pull a groin muscle.

  How do you know you’re a Third Thing? For me, after the world got stuffed with Muslim iconography I didn’t recognize but was lumped into, that was when I knew. You know because you’ve been squeezed into a category that may technically be true but still doesn’t fit right. You squirm in it. It’s like having a rock in your shoe or wearing underwear that rides up your junk. Sure, they’re technically underpants, but they don’t fit right. Sure, I’m Muslim, but the way some people say it rides up my junk.

  You also know you’re a Third Thing when you hang out with friends and you will totally dump on your own people but get very mad when anyone else tries to join in on the dumping. I can say all I want about Iran, but you!? You better be careful, because I’m not gonna let no one talk shit about Iran! But, you were just saying how—nuh-uh, zip it! You’re a Third Thing when you complain about the identity and you defend the identity in equal parts.

  I know a fair number of black Americans—some of my best friends are black.4 Some are of Caribbean or West Indian descent. They have to fly the Third Thing hard. I had a friend who would constantly correct people—“I’m not African-American, I’m from Trinidad”—but when black people were under attack, he would immediately switch to “As a black American” and drop the Trinidad. It never seemed odd to me. He just didn’t want to be lumped into the black American population. He didn’t want people to wholesale erase Trinidad. Why do people feel the need to erase anything? Let the man be a Third Thing!

  If you’re not a Third Thing, let me try to explain the feeling. Have you ever been at a summer camp that was overly athletic? (… she says, having been at a summer camp that was overly athletic.) You’re supposed to be excited, you’re supposed to have fun, your parents drop you off at this day camp every morning and you are filled with… dread. And then one day you find out that some of the kids are doing crafts off the field in a room, with window screens to keep out the bugs, and you ask if
you can join them and be a part of that summer camp? There’s papier-mâché and paints and puppets, and it is heavenly. That’s when you know, you are the kind of person who likes “summer camp” writ large, but you’re not the type of person that likes the sports part. Some might call you a nerd. If sports and arts and summer camp were nations, immigration stories and ethnicities, you would be a Third Thing. Except that Third Things are kind of third-y all their lives, and summer camp is only six weeks long.

  Even though my parents are full-on Iranians, I never learned the intricate customs—there’s a far-reaching set of rules and a whole language of etiquette. It’s so complicated! You could offer to buy someone a coffee and it could be interpreted as an insult depending on the other person’s relative age, income, citizenship status, gender, level of indigestion… I mean, it’s nuts. My parents gave me some basic Iranian rules but by no means all of them (plus I think they find it hilarious when they see me struggle). So, when I meet Iranians, I can speak to them in Farsi, and I can say nonformal American-style greetings, but I’m always inadvertently breaking rules that I didn’t even know existed!

  All of this happens because I’m that weird Third Thing and I’m trying to forge my own way, but it’s not easy. And when you’re a Third Thing, you’re addressing a heretofore nonexistent Third Thing Audience or Third Thing Sympathizing Audience. You’re now the de facto voice of your people’s Third Thing subgroup, and the people in the First and Second Things aren’t necessarily going to like it.

  This could mean many things

  I feel like I’ve been trying to build a Third Thing Sympathizing Audience since I was a kid. In the professional world of comedy, trying to forge this Third Thing identity has been a task, lemme tell ya! I mentioned this project before but, I made a film for which me and fellow comedian Dean Obeidallah rounded up a bunch of Muslim-American comedians—in a nonviolent way—and we toured the country. We went to places like Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Arizona, you know, places where they naturally love the Muzzies. We called the tour (and subsequent film) The Muslims Are Coming! which to some meant “preventative warning lecture on the coming Muslim apocalypse” and to others meant “live Muslim fetish adult pornography.” To most it meant “stand-up comedy show featuring Muslims.”

  We filmed the shows, which were free and open to the public, as long as the public was okay with the occasional swear word and with seeing an unusually brown lineup. We made the shows free because we wanted to remove all barriers to entry. If you were like “Eh, I’m not sure about those Muslims and besides, I’m broke,” we didn’t want the broke-ness to be an excuse. We didn’t want you to choose between “Hot Pockets from the Piggly Wiggly for dinner” or “tickets to a comedy show featuring a bunch of Muz-types”—we wanted you to have the Hot Pocket and the Muz-types in one delicious, incongruent meal, high on carbs, high on fat, and well over your recommended daily dosage of Muslims.

  Now I’m not gonna lie: When we first set out to do these shows, there was a lot of concern. Friends in New York thought that people in the deep South were going to react badly. They thought that people would say mean things and maybe even… do something physically violent. I definitely was not as concerned about the violence because I thought, come on, I look like a cartoon character, with the voice of Butters from South Park. How could anyone attack me?

  And yet, we did plenty to elicit public attention. We would set up an “Ask a Muslim” booth in the middle of a town center so people could ask us questions. We invited people to come “Bowl with a Muslim”—an event that taught us that Muslims bowl very badly. (This explains why Barack Obama bowls so badly.5) We handed out flyers at farmers markets and gun shows and we were generally visible.

  An actual photo of Negin reading a newspaper

  It was the visibility that had my friends and family concerned. Let’s be honest—the South gets a pretty bad rap. They thought those Southerners were gonna brutalize me. That they were gonna unfurl large-scale Confederate flags and protest my shows. That they were going to show up chewing tobacco and demanding the immediate deportation of all Muslim comedians.

  Basically, the South has a PR problem not unlike that of Muslims. Because the Southerners I met (not to mention the large number of Mormons I met in Utah and Idaho) were far from that. They were open, welcoming. They had honest questions about us—questions like why don’t we denounce terrorism, or would Goldfish constitute halal food. I didn’t find them particularly racist, I didn’t think they were trying to run me out of town, and I generally had a great time. I did see too much gun appreciation in the South, but nobody’s perfect.

  THE BEST, MOST HORRIBLE GUILTY PLEASURE SHOWS AND THE SOUTHERN STEREOTYPES THEY SHOWCASE

  1. Here Comes Honey Boo Boo—If the South were judged on this show, then it’s full of stage moms and/or people nicknamed “Chubbs” and/or people who happily self-identify as rednecks and/or believers in the healing power of cheese puffs.

  2. Duck Dynasty—If everyone in the South were like Duck Dynasty they would be proudly redneck (which is slightly different from “happily identifying as redneck”), zealous hunters, and all gun enthusiasts.

  3. Nashville—This scripted hour-long drama teaches us that old money rules, Southerners still wear hats at certain horse-based events, and you should never trust anyone who’s trying to launch a country music career.

  Traveling in Arizona presented its own can of worms, or rather a can of lizards, because the climate there is too dry to support worms. We really wanted to film in Arizona because of SB 1070, a draconian law that allows cops to stop anyone if they suspect the (brown) person doesn’t have papers. This is the kind of law that’s secretly (but maybe overtly) designed to scare Mexicans, mostly the undocumented ones. It’s a self-deportation law that’s lousy on civil rights; what’s worse, it could lead to bigoted action by law enforcement that’s weirdly legal. It could just as easily be used to scare people in other brown groups, like Muslim ones, or really tan white people wearing turbans. Oh yeah, mark my words, turbans are the next fedora.

  In fact, a good family friend was stopped in Arizona under the auspices of SB 1070. She’s a nice, Iranian lady in her sixties, an American citizen, and has been living here for decades. She was driving her Mercedes through Flagstaff, looking at new houses because she was thinking of moving there. A cop stopped her because he thought she looked shifty. They asked to see her papers. That was when she launched into a lecture. She gave the cop a total talking-to in eloquent and perfectly threatening English on the nature of freedom, the beauty of civil rights, the ideological reasons that drew her to the United States. By the end, the cop was like “May I leave?” Turns out stopping a supposed illegal wasn’t worth a lecture. She decided not to move to Arizona. The police there pose a very real threat. Even when you do have papers, being stopped at will does not make someone feel like they are a part of this great American experiment.

  SB 1070 aside, it turns out that it was our own show in Tucson at the El Casino Ballroom that had me rattled. It was not a comedy club by any means, but the kind of cavernous hall where families might have quinceañeras, or maybe a local group could stage dance contests, or maybe the Hell’s Angels could have a regional meetup, or… you get my point, there was some notable square footage. It was awesome and we sold out the four-hundred-person room to an extremely diverse crowd. Except “sold out” implies we sold tickets, which we didn’t; that shit was free.

  In most of the cities we traveled to, we performed to mostly white audiences. There weren’t many Muslims in the audience at all, because (a) there aren’t that many Muslims in the United States (varying estimates show that 1–4 percent of the population is Muslim), and (b) Muslims are presumably already on board with the message of the tour, so no need to beat a dead horse. But the Tucson audience was about 15 percent Muslim. We were surprised, because we just didn’t know that Tucson had so many Muslims—let alone Muslims who like to go out and see comedy. I got on stage to do my s
et, peppered as it is with dating jokes, a riff on Truck Nutz, musings on the role of genitals in international diplomacy, and a couple of hilarious renditions of my mother in various states of disappointment.

  During my set shit got, as they say in the industry, real. A group of Muslim women wearing the hijab were seated together (the hijab, you’ll recall, is what Muz ladies cover their hair with and sometimes couple it with a long, jackety thing). There were maybe twenty of them. During the genital and dating stuff, one lady motioned for all the girls to get up and leave. They all did. It was quite a display, and they were very noticeable. I had to pretend like it wasn’t happening, and the other 380 audience members had to pretend like they weren’t distracted. After they left, I had to continue my set while pretending that I didn’t want to hurl myself in front of a bus or—to be less morbid—in front of a slow-moving bicycle.

  Those ladies walked out on me because they considered my material “shameful.” To a regular American audience there’s a lot of run-of-the-mill misogyny (women aren’t funny, etc.). But the crudeness of the material is generally upheld as a gleaming example of the extent to which lewdness is welcomed in comedy. My material isn’t racier than the average comic’s, not by a long shot. But to that Muslim minority in the audience, it was shameful. The male comic before me did a bit on how he found a stack of porn mags as a teenager. It was a great bit and no one in the audience left. Is there a double standard? Maybe. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if these Muslims felt that jokes were best served with a side of penis.