How to Make White People Laugh

by Negin Farsad

  Biff from Back to the Future

  Gossip columnists

  Awards show fashion commentators

  Exxon

  People who sell derivatives

  People who brag about their Blu-ray libraries

  The recipients of the statement “Why you gotta hate?”

  People who describe a movie they just saw in too much detail

  The kid who didn’t pick Abraham Lincoln for his dodgeball team in second grade

  Monsanto

  Flip-flop enthusiasts

  Smokers who overgesticulate with lit cigarettes

  Workaholics who make everyone look bad even though everyone’s normal

  People who write listicles (that’s me)

  The people who started “Gamer Gate”

  The people responsible for multiple reboots of a franchise

  The guy who invented high heels

  Haters 2.0: The Trolls

  No hate taxonomy would be complete without looking at the modern-day digital hater. These are your lunatics and assholes, vermin and brutes, monsters and jackoffs, your degenerates and diabolical villains who—under the guise of anonymity—populate the comment section of all Internet sites everywhere.

  Like most ethnic ladies, female comedians, females, and humans who have visited the Internet, I have been hated on real hard by this devoted group of virulent misanthropes. My voice and nose have been criticized on YouTube, my jokes have been punished and misunderstood on Twitter, my e-mail has been dumped on with hate mail wishing me to die in various forms, critiquing my lipstick, asking me to change everything about myself. But to be fair, I also get fan mail asking if I wouldn’t mind being set up with someone’s brother, mail apologizing for the climate of a town I just performed in, and mail just plain old appreciating my work. Of course the fan mail is delightful—who would pretend otherwise?! But the hate mail, that can be as enjoyable as a Pap smear.

  Here is a nifty list of some of the comments I’ve received on the Internet:

  I watched and you were disgusting.

  Your video gave my computer cancer.

  U guys are gay I hate U Americans why are U soooo STUPID gosh have a brain.

  In response to a show announcement: It is not even worth selling for 15$. You Muslims are not even human beings. Looking at your faces at stages won’t make anyone laugh. Most people in this world are familiar with your vile and intolerant religion. It is not you Muslims that are violent. It is Islam and Allah itself that are violent. You Muslims should not be allowed to live.

  (For the record, this commenter was really mad about a free show, not a $15 (or as he said, “15$”) show.)

  Hey Dicksucker—did your boyfriend blow his aids infested wad up your butt this weekend, fag?

  go live in another country, better yet work in State Prison for 10 years and then tell me about how insensitive America has become. The real fact is ISIS is training right now to kill your whole family and shit down your neck hole after they remove your head with a dull blade.

  I’m sorry if you suffer from jealousy that you never had what it takes to be a real man.

  This is the kind of idiocy that keeps Isis going.

  You communist punk.

  Stop whining you pansy lip flap.

  What an idiots.

  Negin farsad your parent did not raise you the right way. you are a bitch.

  This cunt would be killed in Afghanistan.

  is there anyone who can kill these rats in the comedy show please… i can pay u up to $50.

  God her voice sucks and is annoying. My ears are starting to bleed after this shit.

  She looks jewish lol but still funny.

  Trolls are like the bedbugs of the Internet. They happen, they bite hard and leave an ugly mark, and you get a dog to sniff them out and then kill them. But inevitably they pop up on another side of town. It’s a real scourge, and because they can create endless Internet bullhorns (additional fake accounts), their voices get needlessly amplified.

  VOICE MAIL HATERS

  These guys want all the anonymity of an Internet troll without all that typing. Their whole shtick is to leave voice mails on people’s phones. My parents were the recipients of one of these audio gifts from a voice mail hater. At the time, their phone number was listed and because mine isn’t, the hater looked up my parents’ number. They said something like “We know what your daughter does and she’s un-American, and you are, too, and if she keeps doing what she’s doing she’ll suffer the consequences.” Something like that. My dad deleted the voice mail in a fit of anger—I have learned that my parents don’t like receiving death threats on my behalf. They also don’t like that I receive death threats. I can’t say that I’m fond of it, either. Mostly, I would like everyone to leave my parents out of it. They’re really nice people. Way nicer than me. Also, I’m a comedian. How is death a proportionate response to not liking my jokes? What if someone breaks your leg? What would your response be to that? Would it also be death? Because, see, it’s weird for “not liking jokes” and “broken leg” to merit the same response. A more reasoned response would be not listening to my comedy.

  You might think that troller comments matter only to the author being trolled. You might think, Hmmph, it sucks to be them because these comments are HARSH! Never mind the fact that, yes, it does suck to be them, but it turns out you, the comments section reader, are also being affected. The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication—a magazine fancy enough that it is not carried in the supermarket—published a study where they had one group of people read a scientific article without reading the comments, and then a separate group read the same article including the comments. The people who read the comments had a way more polarized view of the contents of the actual article.5

  Trolls create conflict where there might be none through Twitter wars, exponentially growing comments, and needless back-and-forths. They create multiple identities to send the same hateful message. They make noise where there’s no real noise, just one shitty troll being a meanie. That’s right, they’re meanies, and they treat the Internet like it’s a schoolyard for their bullying.

  When I see a troll, I try not to engage, because if you engage, you escalate. It’s like that lame bacteria in your gut that feeds off of sugar. Cut off the sugar and the bacteria dies. It’s hard to cut it off, because brownies are delicious. Yelling at an asshole can also be delicious, momentarily. But at the end of the day, it’s better to let the thing die off.

  The Drive-by Hater

  This is where bigotry takes a turn for the lazy. In my travels, I’ve seen a proliferation of this new generation of bigots: The drive-by haters. I was in Salt Lake City for a show. Salt Lake is the capital of Utah, the most religiously homogenous state of the union, and that religion is Mormonism. As one of the newer religions on the block, the Mormons are maligned. Most of what people know of them are from HBO’s Big Love and Broadway’s Book of Mormon. So basically, the Mormons are considered a people who have a lot of wives with whom they break out into choreographed song-and-dance numbers. I’m not saying I’m jealous of this “multiple wives” stereotype, but it does have a gentler ring to it than “terrorist.”6

  Lest we forget, there are Mormon feminists out there who will tell you polygamy is no longer a thing among polite Mormon society but also that the church still denies women the priesthood. Turns out, like all other religions, Mormons aren’t without their problems and fissures. But alas, they still shouldn’t be so maligned.

  But I digress. My point is, I was standing in Salt Lake City in front of the main Mormon Temple with excellent fellow comedians Dean Obeidallah and Kareem Omary, and I was holding a sign that says, HUG A MUSLIM. If you’ve never stood in front of a Mormon temple soliciting hugs, you haven’t stood. Those Mormons brought with them hugs so tender and warm, so loving and mirthful—yeah, exactly that, mirthful—that it warmed the cockles of my heart. My heart cockles were hard, overburdened and scarred with little patches of snow and
potholes. But those Mormons, man, each touch smoothed out a piece of scar tissue until my cockles were as smooth as Sofia Vergara’s calves.

  In the midst of this mirthful display—a display that gave me the weeps and sent our associate producer, Leonard, to literally sob behind a statue of a famous Mormon until he composed himself—in the midst of this display, there was a dude who drove up to the adjacent stoplight, rolled down his window, and when the light turned green, he yelled out his window, “Go back to your own country!” He was driving away as he said it, so I couldn’t see what he looked like. It could have been a woman with a very gravelly manvoice. It could have been a fellow Iranian, putting on his best bigotry accent and pulling one over on me—who knows? But I’m pretty sure it was none of those things, it was simply a guy who hates Muslims. What was worse is that he didn’t even stop the car! This wasn’t the first time this had happened to us. This happened to us in other cities like Tucson and Birmingham—always some guy at a stoplight, summoning his little racist courage, and then saying something horrible as he drives away. These drive-by haters are either cowardly or really busy and have somewhere to be.

  Drive-by haters are also the most likely to put a swastika in their dashboard window, bumper stickers that say, THERE’S A FEMINIST IN MY TRUNK, and the I WANT YOU TO SPEAK ENGLISH car decals. They want to be racist with their accessories but might stop short of actually doing anything about it. It’s kind of like teenagers who wear various punk/anarchy-themed gear but report to geometry class on time every day and get good grades.

  Drive-by haters are also the most likely to confuse Sikhs with Muslims. They see a turban and they have a knee-jerk reaction. In fact a survey showed that about 28 percent of respondents misidentified a Sikh as Middle Eastern (they’re usually Indian).7 Basically, I wouldn’t say this group is big on research or accuracy.

  I will say for the drive-by haters, that at least they’re not as lazy as the online haters. Those guys can clock in a full day of bigotry without leaving their laptops. Now that’s lazy.

  The “Mission-Oriented Bigot Whose Group Affiliation Gives Them Cover for Hating” Hater

  There is another category: the Organized Mission-Oriented Bigot Whose Group Affiliation Gives Them Cover for Hating Hater. It’s a working title. These guys have institutional affiliation—oftentimes a church—that give them some kind of legitimacy (at least in the face of any nonanalytical observers). When I was doing a screening of The Muslims Are Coming! in Centralia, Washington, I met some of these folks. A small but mighty group of local Christians protested my screening. They held up signs asking people not to see the movie because I was going to try to convert them to Islam. The picketers were in for a rude awakening, because you actually learn very little about Islam from my movie. Spoiler alert: I’m not a Muslim scholar, so the movie is not about religion, it’s about cultural acceptance. Plus, I talk about jizz and vaginas throughout the film, so it’s more likely to offend evangelical Christians and Muslims rather than convert anybody to anything.

  I invited the picketers inside to see the movie. It was cold and raining, and I’ve seen enough Twilight movies to know that it’s not safe in Washington State once the sun goes down. Alas, they didn’t bite. But they did at least stand in the lobby during the screening, because most religions don’t want you to get rained on. While I was nice to them, sincerely invited them inside, I didn’t push too hard. There’s a fine line between making yourself open and available, and offending or proselytizing.

  The American Family Association is a well-oiled machine that falls into this category. They have organized radio and television shows that broadcast on regular old cable. Having a media presence shows that you’re not so crazy that you can’t hold down the responsibilities associated with airwaves and content. The AFA uses this airtime to talk about Jesus and God in a way that sounds very Christian and loving. And then bam! They hit you with stuff like:

  The homosexual agenda represents the single greatest modern threat to freedom of religion and conscience.

  —Bryan Fischer, AFA

  There is no spirit of God in Islam. It is the spirit of Satan. It is the spirit of darkness. It is the spirit of tyranny. It is the spirit of bondage.

  —Bryan Fischer, AFA

  Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.

  —Bryan Fischer, AFA8

  That was a fun little Muslim-and-gay sandwich, wasn’t it? If they hit you up with a bunch of loving stuff from the church about being saved and God’s love, it’s easy to squeeze in these little hate nuggets, because the group affiliation provides cover. Hence the “Mission-Oriented Bigot Whose Group Affiliation Gives Them Cover for Hating” Hater.

  Reform Hater

  Then there are people like Gov. George Wallace of Alabama. For those of you who don’t know, Wallace was a towering figure of the Civil Rights era but on the wrong side. He said stuff like: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” And after losing his first gubernatorial bid to a more radical white supremacist (yeah, he wasn’t even the worst guy on the racist spectrum) he said to his aide: “You know why I lost that governor’s race?… I was outniggered by [the opposition]. And I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again.” George Wallace hated black people. He didn’t want them to vote, he didn’t want them to cross a bridge and march into Montgomery, he didn’t want them to use the same doors or the same seating areas as white people. And when everyone else was bobbing their heads to Diana Ross and the Supremes, George Wallace had to forcibly stop his hips from swaying and remind himself that he hated black people. That’s commitment.

  But what has always fascinated me is that he is probably the most historically storied figure to dump his earlier ideology and admit he was wrong. Yes. He did that. In 1972 he survived an assassination attempt that paralyzed him and bound him to a wheelchair. His wife had died a few years prior from cancer, and things were just not going his way. He was still governor of Alabama, mind you—and would serve four terms total; his last nonconsecutive term was in the ’80s! But as the story goes, he was in constant pain and he had time to reflect and realize, “Holy shit, racism is horrible.” (I’m quoting the inside of his brain.) In his later years, he would go to any black church that would have him and ask for forgiveness.

  In 1979, at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, he said to all black parishioners: “I have learned what suffering means. In a way that was impossible [before the shooting], I think I can understand something of the pain black people have come to endure. I know I contributed to that pain, and I can only ask your forgiveness.” Some were skeptical up until his death in 1998, but others really believed that he turned it around. I for one, would like to think that he evolved, he improved, he found reasonableness.

  But when George Wallace was at his prime, he was the kind of old-fashioned bigot that you just don’t see anymore. He was rash and loud, he would scream invectives at the top of his lungs, and he was definitely not worried about how he came off in YouTube videos. They really don’t make bigots like that anymore.

  Other Famous Turnarounds

  Alan Chambers of Exodus International, the “pray the gay away” operation to turn gay Christians into heterosexual ones so they wouldn’t be eternally damned. After twelve years of helming the organization, Chambers admitted the reparative therapy didn’t work and that gay Christians didn’t need to repent in order to go to heaven. Boom! A turnaround!

  Malcolm X was a Civil Rights–era heavy hitter. He spent his early years as a member of the Nation of Islam, where he preached that white people were the devil and that black Americans should completely separate from them. Then he went on a hajj—a Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca—came back, and renounced all of his earlier positions on white people. Kablam! A turnaround!

  John Quincy Adams had a total boner for manifest destiny in his early years; he thought America was d
estined to expand from coast to coast. But later in life he fiercely resisted expansion, because it meant the expansion of slavery. As a result, he opposed actions—war and otherwise—that would lead to the biggening of the country. Manifest destiny? More like Non-ifest no-way-stiny! Turnaround!

  Bill Maher Maher was a truly funny comedian who spent many years on his HBO show talking mad shit about Muslims at every opportunity. He made claims like “hundreds of millions of Muslims” supported the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Which, is, you know, ludicrous. Then in 2025—which is a date in the future—Bill Maher realized that Muslims are normal people. He remained an avowed atheist but took a more loving approach to Muslims. He and Pope Francis started a new talk show on HBO called Pope Talk with Bill Maher and a Pope. Pope Francis, it turns out, does great bits.9

  The taxonomy of hate is useful, because it helps you figure out what kind of haters you’re dealing with and whether you should make an attempt at bringing them in the fold, whether they’re too far gone to bother with, or whether you’re crossing that fine line between reaching out and goading.

  I did cross this line once. The goal of The Muslims Are Coming! was to make ourselves available to people who were curious about Muslims. To stop them in their tracks in the middle of their daily lives, offer them pastries, and engage. We did this quite effectively by setting up an Ask a Muslim booth in the middle of town squares. People asked us questions, or they hurried by, or they were so intrigued by the free pastries that they stopped for a sweet, and then got roped into conversation. It was fun, it was sometimes difficult, and it was always eye-opening.