Muslims Coming Up for Air, And Laughs...A Great Development.

Note: A truely great development is under way with the rise of muslim comics and 'stand up comedy'. This is marvellous. The comics in this story are not yet booked to appear in Australia. Great pity...can't someone do something about this?
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Read on...and laugh




In a comedy of terrors
Waleed Aly
July 8, 2006


Shazia Mirza jokes about her pilot's licence.


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AdvertisementMel Brooks once insisted that no subject, however dark or serious, is unfit for comedy. He should know; his musical comedy The Producers derived much of its humour from the Holocaust. Still, stand-up comedy scarcely thrived in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, particularly in the United States. Some sores were just too sensitive to be prodded.

But according to the cliche, humour equals tragedy plus time. If this could be true of the Holocaust, it was inevitable that September 11 would eventually provide swathes of new material, opening up new comedic spaces. Yet few would have expected Muslims to fill them.

Enter Azeem, Azhar Usman and Preacher Moss, three American Muslim comics who form Allah Made Me Funny: The Official Muslim Comedy Tour. The trio came together in 2004 and have toured across the US and Canada, attracting extraordinary attention at every stop. Their media file is impressive, with reviews and interviews in The New York Times, Time, American television and, in Britain, the BBC and The Guardian. The reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, though smacking of quaint curiosity.

Muslim comedy? Surely, in the popular imagination, there is no phrase more oxymoronic. The public Muslim is pathologically humourless. Not surprisingly, these Muslim comedians are under no illusions about the cynicism that confronts them.

"A lot of people don't expect the tour to be funny," Usman admits frankly. Azeem agrees: "They think a Muslim comedy show is like going to a prostate exam and telling him he's going to have a great time."

Muslim comedians, meanwhile, are emerging with surprising regularity. Arab-American comics, many of whom are Muslims, have long been a fixture in the US. Across the Atlantic, British-born Shazia Mirza is perhaps the first person to do stand-up in a headscarf. Her career took off with the opening line of her first gig after September 11: "My name is Shazia Mirza. At least that's what it says on my pilot's licence." Other Muslim comics joining Mirza at last year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival were fellow Brit Paul Chowdhry and Danish-Egyptian Omar Marzouk.

Perhaps, then, it is to be expected that Allah Made Me Funny is shooting for the mainstream. What began in mosques and Islamic community centres has now ventured successfully into some of the US's best-known comedy clubs, such as The Improv. This is a calculated step, designed to force Muslims and non-Muslims to come together and interact through laughter.

Also, this is a comedy tour with a pedigree. It is the brainchild of Preacher Moss, a veteran of the industry who has written for Damon Wayans, George Lopez and Saturday Night Live. Azeem has shared the stage with Steve Harvey, Adam Ferrara and John Pinette.

Moss and Azeem are black American Muslim converts of about 20 years and their roots have left an unmistakable imprint on their acts. Much of their material trades on the kind of racial observational humour mastered by Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor.

The result is a kind of black-Muslim fusion. Azeem recalls being 17 and telling his grandmother, a devout southern Baptist, that he had become a Muslim. "I said, 'Grandma, I'm a Muslim.' She looked up and said, 'No, you're not. You ain't never been to jail."'

In many ways, Usman is the odd one out. The Chicago-born former lawyer is the only one of the trio born into a Muslim family. He is also probably the least experienced, having started performing what he calls his "Muslim schtick" only a few months before September 11. His act hasn't changed substantially since. "The main difference," he says, "is now people care."

Usman is right. To borrow from John Howard, the times suit him. Muslims in the West find themselves in an intense spotlight, and this can be thoroughly exhausting. "Muslims need a laugh," Usman says, and Moss quips that after September 11 the tension and paranoia were so high that you couldn't even tell a Muslim a knock-knock joke. Try it, he says. "Knock knock." "Don't answer it!"

This environment guarantees no shortage of stereotypes waiting to be given the stand-up treatment. "Muslims are the most peaceful people on the planet Earth," retorts Azeem to the common perception that Muslims are violent. "Y'all don't believe it? Think about it. Mike Tyson ain't won a fight since he became a Muslim."

Like all good comedians, Azeem, Usman and Moss are quite prepared to laugh at themselves. Usman's character comedy brings us "Sheikh Abdul, the radical imam", who intersperses vitriolic lectures with announcements about double-parked cars and meetings to re-elect the mosque committee that has remained unchanged for 37 years.

There's also "Uncle Letmesplainyou", an antique Muslim who barely speaks English, has crazy political views and a voracious desire to share them, elbowing others aside to embarrass the community in television interviews. He also brags about the growth of Muslim America to people who don't care. "He's bragging to his friends at work: 'Can you believe it, Bob? Seven million Muslims in America!' He thinks Bob is impressed. He's not; he's scared."

Muslims connect immediately with these characters because they, and the elements of internal community dysfunction they represent, are so achingly familiar. Usman recounts a conversation with a friend who says he is completely uninterested in organised religion. "I said: 'Great! Become a Muslim. We're the most disorganised people on Earth!"' In this way, Allah Made Me Funny gives Muslims permission to acknowledge and laugh at the problems in their own community, as well as to celebrate who and what they are, and to share the process with non-Muslims. "It is therapy," Usman says.

It is also empowering. Through the 1980s, Greek Australians such as George Kapiniaris and Nick Giannopoulos fought social alienation through the wog humour of shows such as Acropolis Now.

In the process they took ownership of a range of ethnic quirks and insulting stereotypes. The xenophobe's weapons were immediately, irredeemably blunted. No one did wog jokes better than wogs themselves. The stereotypes ceased being sources of prejudice and instead became endearing sources of amusement. If wog comedy is tired now, it is only because it has been so spectacularly successful.

It makes sense that American Muslims would do the same. There are few more quintessentially American popular art forms than stand-up. Particularly for maligned social groups, it has long been a simultaneous source of catharsis and rebuttal.

Usman calls this "comedy of distortion", where "the minority group that is the butt of the stereotype [is] using that stereotype, flipping it inside out and exposing it for what it is".

From all reports, the sense of empowerment is observable in Muslim audiences. "The group of people that I've noticed that come out are those persons who, for some reason, have felt spiritually disenfranchised," Azeem says. "What I've noticed is that as they leave, it's like they just came from a spiritual revival."

Plans are afoot to tour Allah Made Me Funny in Britain and requests have flooded in from the Muslim world. Australian Muslims have made similar requests, but so far a tour has not been viable.

If stand-up at its best is a commentary on the human condition and if the lives of American Muslims are by now indelibly politicised, it is inevitable that Allah Made Me Funny would have a political edge. Jokes about the absurdities of modern security measures are high on the agenda. Xenophobes are also useful fodder. Usman wonders how some callers to Fox News get through the screening process: "Yeah, hi, my name is Billy Bob. I'm calling from Louisiana and I just wanna say that all them Muslims - and them Islams, and all them Pakistanis and Afghanistanis and Iraqistanis - they should just go back to Africa!"

Typical of comedy that emerges from social and political tension, Allah Made Me Funny draws heavily on the darker parts of the comedian's condition as a source of inspiration. Comedy has this unique power. As Australian comic Adam Vincent says: "The jester would be the only one who could get away with telling the king what was wrong with the kingdom." Usman is explicit on this point. "There's a history of the underdog using stand-up comedy to speak truth to power. People take notice and are transformed by the experience."

Viewed through this lens, Allah Made Me Funny represents the forging of a new American Muslim identity. And, like all social development, it is not without its resistance. Some Muslims will be uncomfortable with the mix of comedy and religion.

Moss is frank about the challenges. "You know, some Muslims just take themselves too seriously," he muses. When Usman was booked to perform for a Shiite audience, some members of the community objected. It took a favourable ruling from their ayatollah himself before the show could go ahead. Now, Usman is dubbed the "Ayatollah of comedy".


Comment: Would it not be possible for the Australia Council to book this trio of muslim comics to do a tour of Australia? The best way would be to do shows in the great shopping malls all over the country for a month. Other venues could be lunch gigs at major employment venues, the 38 universities; imagine them doing a 15 minute gig at half time in a Bulldogs game! Nothing would help pacify the tensions in the muslim communities faster than good natured laughter.

Instead of continually sucking up to the worn out old businessmen farts and poisonous imams who misrule the poor muslims in Australia, why can't the government show some sensible thinking and pitch policy to a future paradigm that has some chance of success?

'Allah Made Me Funny'...well, we are all funny. It is very hard to have strife between people who are sharing laughs.

I apologise to all public servants and politicians who are offended at this idea because it is out of the square.