How to Make White People Laugh

by Negin Farsad

We never stopped to analyze our relationship or talk about it, but after a year I started to notice that he didn’t call me his girlfriend, either. The double standard I had so artfully crafted was now undoing me. In the meantime, I quit the fancy job and decided to go to grad school, preceded by a summer of waiting tables in Paris.

  Before I left I started acting weird and grouchy. I was pent up. Todd knew something was wrong, and because I couldn’t “talk” about my “feelings” like a normal person, he pried it out of me. He turned off all the lights, drew the shades, got us both naked, and had me turn away from him in the pitch-black darkness, then said, “What’s wrong?”

  And so I answered, “I’m going to Paris. Is there any reason I should be faithful to you? Are you even my boyfriend?” Todd paused, and then replied, “You know I’m not really into labels, what’s the difference what we call ourselves anyway?” And then the horrible, ugly, oh-god-I-have-two-X-chromosomes-and-there’s-no-hiding-it truth came out: “The difference is, I love you, and you don’t love me.”

  Silence.

  A breakup ensued. In hindsight, we broke up because we were too young to settle down, and because I needed to talk about more cocks onstage. Variety is the essence of cock jokes. To recover from the breakup, I went on a boning spree in Paris (it was more like a make-out spree, if we’re being technical). French men are good for this sort of thing. It ended in a couple of solid bits about STD scares and French condoms.

  But five years later, Todd was still on my mind. By this point I didn’t have a day job anymore. I was doing stand-up, making movies, writing for shows, and generally going through the slog of show business. We talked on occasion and slept together on occasion. But we never got back together until the Great Spilling of Guts.

  Like most Great Spilling of Guts, there was a moment of vulnerability—usually a feeling I only allow myself to have if it gets a laugh. We re-declared our love, made a bunch of cheese ball admissions as if we were in an episode of Gilmore Girls.

  And voilà, we got back together. Now, what I didn’t know at the time was that the man I loved was living with another woman, cheated on her with me, just when she thought she was getting a ring. What I didn’t know is, in all our backslides over the last five years, he had cheated on many women with me.

  When I found out, I decided to overlook it, because I believed in the Negin and Todd Exceptionalism Clause. The one that said being a cheating bastard is morally reprehensible and super hack, unless you’re this one magical couple named Negin and Todd, in which case its gonna work out just fine. And we were kinda magical, we had bits together! We were going to walk every block in Manhattan! We were gonna paint the walls odd colors! We were totes adorbs!

  We were great for two years until he lost his job, became a corporate unemployment statistic, and I became his figurative punching bag. I had no idea how much of his identity was melded into that corporate credit card. Take away a man’s corporate credit card and he becomes a surly, barely tolerable eunuch.

  He pledged to see a therapist, to crawl out of his anger hole. I was scheduled to go on a tour for a month. When I came back, he was gone. There was no note, he didn’t take any of his things from the apartment—he simply disappeared. A disappearance like in a Julia Roberts movie. See what I mean?

  I never felt so thoroughly broken. The tears fell uncontrollably, like I was rehearsing for an allergy commercial. And to top it all off, I had to invent my own closure. But my job was still to make people laugh, to tell jokes about Facebook and immigrant parents. I would cry all day long, get to a venue at night, wipe off my face, and tell jokes. My eyeballs would give me ten to fifteen minutes of stage time before they would start spurting again.

  “Use the pain,” comics would tell me. “Talk about the breakup,” they would say.

  Once I tried. I told some miserable bit about how, to stop the sadness from the breakup, I had resolved to be a pothead. “Do any of you smoke pot? See I don’t because I turn everything into a goal with achievement markers, I would be a really high-strung, competitive pothead…” As I meandered through the bit, my eyeballs couldn’t hold out, I burst into tears in front of an audience of twenty-two Manhattanites. Yeah, I’m a professional. I hope you guys enjoyed the show.

  But I leaned into the dark rooms we comics inhabit. I leaned into the jokes about dating again. I leaned into the thrill of an unexpected laugh and the thrill of bombing. It was nameless, faceless audiences that got me out of the depression. Audiences who aren’t going to disappear unless you really suck. I probably have a horribly deep psychological problem if I need mass audiences to keep me going but… eh, details. Thank God I had them, because that shit was painful. I love you, audience. As for Todd, he just became another cock joke.

  What I realized months later—because after a major heartbreak you only sort of realize things months later, you’re too foggy and defensive to realize during the relationship or even in the middle of the “sob and pint of ice cream” afternoons—what I realized was that we were doomed from the start. If there was one thing he did to ill effect was ask, “Why do you call yourself Iranian-American? Why don’t you just call yourself American?”

  When he first asked the question, I shook it off. Todd grew up in Westchester but his mother is from Philly, and so he happily recognizes the Rocky Steps as part of his family’s history. Yet, he doesn’t accept Tehran’s Jamshidieh Park as part of mine. But the question became more frequent. Once his shit started to unravel, he criticized so many aspects of my Iranianness. Mainly that I insisted on recognizing my Iranianness. Embodied in him is that thing that some white folk just don’t understand. I get this question from people when I’m touring. Why do you insist on calling yourself Iranian-American? As someone once said to me, “If you want to be American, you just gotta be American.”

  I get it. It’s hard to understand why anyone would have a pull to another language or another custom or another religion when the United States gives us everything we need—I mean, hell, every man, woman, and child has access to Pop-Tarts and streaming movies for just $7 a month? America is great. But for the eighteen years I lived at home, I spoke an entirely different language every time I walked in the door, I ate different food, I had different rules. Some of those differences I loved, some of them I hated, but they all existed in a meaningful way. It might be hard for other people to imagine the indelible mark they left, but I really hope they’ll try.

  So, love, I learned, has to include not just long walks on the beach at sunset, dutiful delivery of chocolates at socially designated times of the year, and generous foot rubs—although all of those things are 100 percent necessary, of course—but love has got to include me being Iranian, and the man being okay with it.

  To find this magical man I went online! Oh yes, I swiped and clicked and messaged my way into many a relationship. I could sniff out assholes from a mere pose in a profile pic; I could go from message to date in less than three exchanges, I could tell just from someone’s list of favorite books if he was potentially delightful or a potentially effete snob. Not to brag, but I was good at online dating.

  Here’s the darkest admission: I like people. I’m what scientists call an extrovert. Even when I went on a date and knew within five minutes that I would never be able to make out with a dude—that I was more sexually attracted to gym socks than I was to this dude, that a life spent in romantic involvement with a Beanie Baby was more realistic than a second date with this guy—I could find something about them that was interesting for the one hour of polite conversation. In fact, I wasn’t polite. I pried. I poked. I prodded. “Where did you grow up? Where did your mom go to school? Did your sister lose her toe in that accident? Was the neighbor professionally good at Ping-Pong or just amateur good? When you say ‘poetry challenge,’ did you force yourself to write in iambic pentameter or was it more free-flowing? When you first saw your dog hump the furniture, what did you make of it? If your father was still alive today, would you tell him about the poker ga
me where you cheated him?” And so on and so on. I went down every line of inquiry until the person I would never date again left me with a kernel of something interesting. Something I could write about in a book someday.

  In this way, I went on a first date with a man who grew up in a cult that he later escaped, a man who grew up on a farm and had social occasion to sit on a bale of hay, a man who built robots, a man who wanted to be a writer but was probably an alcoholic, a man whose shrill voice detailed an even stranger relationship with his mother, a man who grew up in an African war zone, a man who after three years couldn’t stop wondering if he had yelled too much at a former student, a man who was by all definitions a star fucker and couldn’t stop dishing on C-level celebrities that he dated, and more. Everyone was interesting to me, a few made it to the next round, and I had three pretty solid four-to six-month relationships because: Internet.

  But the man that now makes me blush on the regular, that guy I met in real life. Cliché of all clichés, he’s an actor, and we met because we have the same acting coach. Ugh, I know! It’s so totally stupidly show business! We met at our acting coach’s annual holiday party, but little did I know that he was on a “celibacy tour,” reeling from a breakup that resulted in his pants being bolted shut. His celibacy tour amounted to him going out to various social events but not sleeping with anyone. It would be another year until we actually went on a date.

  When it came time for me to tell my parents about this nice young man, I had to break it to them that he was not only an actor—what parent wants their daughter to be with an actor??—but that he was African-American with a smattering of Polish. That’s right, suckas! I got my exotic interracial coupling! Of course, my parents, like some immigrants from countries with a homogenous population, gave in to a tiny bout of racism. My mom would say things like “I don’t care that he’s black, I don’t hate black people, I just think your life will be so difficult with a black man.” Of course, anyone who has to specify that they “don’t hate black people” is standing on very rhetorically sketchy ground. Ground composed of cotton candy and delusion.

  But once they met Jason, every last drop of potential bigotry, any mild racism, any doubt about his humanity, all melted away till my parents were puddles of welcoming. (In this case, puddles are very welcoming.) That, my friends, is the power of exposure.

  Our gooey DNA will muddy up the American gene pool. That’s my mandate to all of you: Go forth and bone, bone someone from across the tracks, across the economic tracks, across the racial and ethnic tracks, across the religious tracks. If you want to make white people laugh, it helps for them to feel sexually sought after in the first place.

  Prove OkCupid wrong; defy the statistics, go after the woman of color, and not just the Asian ones. And hyphenated ladies, don’t distress, because it turns out that according to another study of that same OkCupid data that “receiving an interracial contact and replying to it makes you send over twice as many new interracial messages in the short-term future than you would have otherwise.”4 That’s right, if you are an Afghan-American and you reach out to a white guy, he is more than twice as likely to reach out to another Afghan-American in the near future simply because you e-mailed him first! The simple act of reaching out immediately opens up the recipient to new possibilities in interracial dating… and interracial boning. Come on, that’s great! High five!

  CHAPTER 13

  Do Immigrants Spit Out More Patriotic Babies?

  After eleventh grade, I went to the Junior Statesmen of America summer school program at Yale. This was summer camp for kids who didn’t like fun. It was like a supersized debate team on steroids. It was a program for kids who were capping off their summer not with the beach, but with intense SAT prep. Type A dork-jobs from all over the country would apply to get into this program and the ones who got there—well, we thought we were quite special. And we were, because we were exceptionally uncool.

  PhD candidates en route to professor gigs were our teachers and taught us real-deal American history, that is, they went three extra steps beyond your average high school textbook. They even did that thing where they copied pages out of rare books and handed them out as part of our reading. This kind of nontextbook handout seemed very glamorous to me. I pictured elite intellectuals like Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir exchanging bits and pieces of obscure French texts with each other, saying things like “Ah yes…” and “This writer understands the essence of being” and “Simone, there’s moutarde all over this chapter!”

  I basically chose to spend an entire summer doing homework. I was a pretend college student on a fancy Ivy league campus. (The campus was Yale and they would later reject me, but as we established in chapter 2, I’m totally over that and I really don’t care and I never think about it anymore, I mean, yes, I’ve delicately preserved my Yale T-shirt from that summer, but now I have excellent and totally nonenvious friendships with people who went to Yale and any residual bitterness I may have gets siphoned into my YaleWhy DidYouRejectMe.com website, so honestly, I’m fine now.)

  My roommate that summer was Kiran, an Indian girl from Orange County, California. Kiran is Jain, from one of those religions where they don’t step on bugs (among a bunch of other things; it’s a very old religion, so this parenthetical is not gonna do it justice—you’ll have to pick up a book). I had never met a Jain before, and once I did, I immediately went on to not thinking about it at all. After a week of being at Yale, Kiran and I and my aforementioned Romanian-American bestie Anca (who also came to this summer program) became fast buds. All crushes were immediately divulged to the group, and Morrissey sing-alongs were mandatory.

  Kiran and I both had American flags in our rooms back home, so we decided to put one up in our dorm to fill the gaping hole between the minifridge and the Red Hot Chili Peppers poster. We didn’t have a flag on hand, so instead we taped a bunch of pieces of paper together, drew the Stars and Stripes, and posted it on the wall. It was a pastiche DIY flag that would have made Martha Stewart wince. But we felt good about it.

  Once it was up, we had Anca, the Romanian immigrant, take a picture of us pledging allegiance to our (basically ugly) flag.

  You know, we were that classic American image: Romanian immigrant taking a photo of a Jain Indian girl and her Iranian-American Muslim roommate pledging allegiance to the American flag made of spiral notebook paper. And we really meant that pledge. We were earnest. We were cheesy bastards. But we loved and still love our country like hardcore motherfuckers. Kiran went on to be a lawyer, working as a city attorney for Oakland, California. Anca went on to get an MBA and is now a business owner with fourteen happy tax-paying employees. And of course you know what happened to me, unless you skipped all the way ahead to this sentence.

  You know who made these embarrassingly patriotic girls? A bunch of immigrants. Immigrants who fostered a very particular love of country. Correction: They didn’t just foster that shit, they insisted on it. Immigrants never take this country for granted. They actively think about how fucking awesome it is. They thought about how fucking awesome it was for years before they ever even saw the place. That’s actually why they came. And then they pass that adoration on to their kids. Their kids then make weird paper flags for their dorm-room walls.

  Our on-the-margins ethnicities aren’t correctly categorized or recognized. Our Americanness is questioned and threatened. Our place in the conversation about race, and the conversation about where we go from here, has never been fully cemented. And yet, we’re hardcore flag-making American patriots.

  So what do we do?

  What I Want from You Already

  You’ve heard me talk about some of the stuff I’ve done with social justice comedy and maybe those anecdotes have given you some ideas. But here is some more on that front.

  Work to Change Your Own Community

  If you’re a white guy, let’s say, you might know a bunch of other white guys. Work to change them. There are those who say, “Be a good ally.
” For some the word ally is fraught, because it implies that we were on an equal footing in the first place, or it implies that we’re all in some sort of war. But as a phrase, “person who supports the anti-bigotry cause” has failed to capture the public’s linguistic imagination, so let’s just say, “Be a good ally.” This doesn’t mean that you have to go into other communities and tell them what works. Let them, you know, be their own bosses. This isn’t Dangerous Minds. We don’t need a “Michelle Pfeiffer knows best” approach; we just need allies who can work on their own front.

  Change That Census

  While you’re changing your own community, you might run into a guy who can change the census. The census currently has five categories: white, black/African-American, American-Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian/other Pacific Islander. That leaves a lot of groups in the lurch. Did you know that the U.S. Census counts people from the Middle East and North Africa as white people?1 That means a Sudanese-American would have to check white. That’s bananas. And Latinos? They’re listed as “Hispanic” under the ethnic origin section but often don’t know what to put under the race section. Like would a Mexican-American put “white” under race? How are they supposed to respond?

  As a result a lot of us respond as “some other race.” In fact, in 2010, “some other race” was the third largest racial group after “white” and “black.”2 But how much information does that convey? It’s white, black, and an amorphous group of indescribable people? How can we build policies or have a basic understanding of our country with that?

  We have five categories, but why not have 105 categories? Is there any rule that says that more than five categories in the census is gauche? Do we not want to embarrass ourselves in front of other, skinnier census forms? Make a longer census form—who cares! Let us figure out who actually lives in this country, how they identify, and what they need! Gah!