Since humans first laughed out loud, comedy has been used as a bridge, a nudge and even an outright push.
Prejudice. Bigotry. Fascism. Stereotypes. What's not acceptable at the dinner table is fair game on Comedy Central.
Now, Arab-American comedians are using humor to fend off the slings and arrows of public perception since 9/11.
Azhar Usman, a stand-up comic from Chicago with a full beard and Muslim head covering, tells his audience how refreshing it was to perform recently in the United Kingdom.
“In America, I'm so used to people hating me for being a Muslim,” Usman said. “It was nice to finally be hated for just being an American.”
Ahmed Ahmed, who grew up in Riverside County and now lives in Los Angeles, is a member of the “Axis of Evil” comedy troupe.
“The only difference between Muslims and Jews,” Ahmed tells an audience, “is that Jews never like to spend any money and Muslims don't have any money to spend.”
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“Stand Up: Muslim-American Comics Come of Age”
When: 12:04 a.m. tomorrow
Where: KPBS/Channel 15
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Tissa Hami, wears the traditional hijab and jokes about praying in the back of the mosque with the other women, while the men pray up front.
“We're not in the back because we're oppressed,” she said. “We just like the view.”
Maysoon Zayid is a Jersey girl who dresses like a Valley girl.
“I'm sparkly,” she explained. “I want my Allah to be bling bling.”
Usman, Ahmed, Hami and Zayid are among the young comics featured in a new PBS documentary “Stand Up: Muslim-American Comics Come of Age.” It's the final installment of “America at a Crossroads,” a series that began airing last year about post-9/11 challenges. This one runs an hour and will be shown very late tonight on KPBS-TV (technically, very early tomorrow, since the start time is listed as 12:04 a.m.)
Don't let the horrid time scare you away. Even with its sometimes R-rated humor, “Stand Up” is well worth putting on your DVR for your own prime-time viewing.
Interspersed between their gigs are interviews with the comics and some of their family.
Hami, who was born in Iran but raised in Massachusetts, said she doesn't think she would have gone into stand-up comedy had it not been for 9/11. She wanted desperately to do something to right an image borne of the horror of the crumbling twin towers.
“We are Muslims, we are Americans and there is no contradiction,” agreed Usman, who travels with “Allah Made Me Funny: The Official Muslim Comedy Tour.” “There is nothing more quintessentially American than stand-up comedy.”
After 9/11, Dean Obeidallah switched briefly to using his middle name, Joseph, as his last name because of the backlash. But then he realized that was wrong.
Instead, Obeidallah, who is of Palestinian descent, co-founded the hugely successful New York Arab-American Comedy Festival. His goal: “Let's collectively try to do something to define who we are the right way.”
Of course, no Arab-American stand-up routine would be complete without airline humor.
The audience laughs as Ahmed confides, “When I get on the plane and see another Arab, I get scared.”
Usman points to his traditional Muslim garb and tells the audience: “Think about it. If I was a crazy Muslim fundamentalist terrorist about to hijack a plane, this is probably not the disguise I would go with.”
The jokes are not always easy to listen to. Some come too close to the comfort zone. But isn't that a mission of comedy, to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted?
Consider Mel Brooks, who pushed the envelope into the outer limits when he wrote “The Producers,” which features a frivolous romp about – of all people – Adolf Hitler.
In an interview with Mike Wallace for “60 Minutes” two years ago, Brooks, who is Jewish and a World War II veteran, gave an eloquent answer to why he thinks it's OK to make fun of the man who led the Holocaust.
“Hitler was part of this incredible idea that you could put Jews in concentration camps and kill them. And how do you get even? How do you get even with the man? How do you get even with him? There's only one way to get even,” Brooks explained. “You have to bring him down with ridicule. Because if you stand on a soapbox and you match him with rhetoric, you're just as bad as he is. But if you can make people laugh at him, then you're one up on him. And one of my lifelong jobs has been to make the world laugh at Adolf Hitler.”
We may never be able to laugh about Osama bin Laden – and certainly not the lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. But maybe we can learn to laugh with each other as friends, neighbors and comrades – Muslim, Jew, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and none of the above. Maysoon, one of the young women in “Stand Up,” put this this way: “I think by poking fun at Arabs, we're just letting people see the humanity of Arabs.”
Sandi Dolbee: (619) 293-2082; sandi.dolbee@uniontrib.com
