Loading ...Countering Anti-Muslim Hostility With Jokes, Via Ads, Film and a Festival
Comedy has long been used by outsiders to ease the worries of a distrustful society, and Muslim stand-up comedians in New York are no different. A coming three-day comedy festival will spotlight their perspective, but their recent efforts to counter Islamophobia through humor have had mixed results.
Last year, when the comedians Negin Farsad and Dean Obeidallah bought ad space from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the aim was to have their posters go up on subway platforms in October. After long negotiations over content and font choices, they received approval from the authority in March for installation on April 28. But the ads never appeared. On April 29, the authority adopted a policy that banned political ads outright.
The decision came in the wake of legal disputes over other ads by a pro-Israel group, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, that were seen as anti-Muslim. Although Ms. Farsad and Mr. Obeidallah said their posters were partly meant to counteract those ads, the main goal was to show Muslim Americans as ordinary people with a healthy sense of humor through tongue-in-cheek “warnings” — e.g., “The ugly truth about Muslims: Muslims have great frittata recipes.” The posters also would have advertised their 2013 docu-comedy, “The Muslims Are Coming!,” which followed Ms. Farsad, Mr. Obeidallah and other Muslim comedians as they toured the United States.
A rejected ad for Ms. Farsad and Mr. Obeidallah’s film.
Now Mr. Obeidallah is hoping for a better reception with what is being billed as the first Muslim comedy festival in the United States, the Muslim Funny Fest, which opens on July 21 in New York. Mr. Obeidallah, who hosts a weekly radio show on Sirius XM and writes a column for The Daily Beast, organized the three-day event with the stand-up comic Maysoon Zayid, known for her popular TED Talk “I Got 99 Problems … Palsy Is Just One.”
The two became friends in the early 2000s. “She was the only other Arab-American Muslim comic I knew,” Mr. Obeidallah said on Tuesday. In 2003, they started the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival to showcase Arab comedians and to counter hostility after the Sept. 11 attacks. It will return for its 12th year this November.
In recent years, they said, they began to feel it was their faith as much as their ethnicity that set them apart, so they decided to host a separate event featuring professional Muslim comedians from various ethnic backgrounds.
Ms. Zayid and Mr. Obeidallah perform regularly for a variety of audiences. “We didn’t start doing the ethnic comedy and Muslim comedy until we felt our community was under siege and that we could no longer just step onstage and be treated as an equal,” Ms. Zayid said in a phone interview.
The opening event will be at New York University’s Grand Hall in Greenwich Village. No alcohol will be offered. “I thought it’d be nice to do a night where alcohol isn’t served, so that people who are far more conservative than I am still feel comfortable coming out,” Ms. Zayid said. The second two evenings will be at an uptown comedy club, the Comic Strip.
Religion has been a favorite topic in stand-up for decades, and organizers say the festival will be no different. “We’re not censoring any of the comics,” Ms. Zayid said. “They can talk about whatever they want. We’re not telling anyone, ‘Oh, this is a Muslim comedy festival, so you can’t talk about the fact that you love bacon sandwiches.’
Source: www.nytimes.com