How to Make White People Laugh Page 3

  After those first two years, my parents moved me and my brother to Roanoke, Virginia. Roanoke wasn’t in the glamorous “This is where Homeland was filmed” region of Virginia. Oh no. It’s that part of Virginia that is “the South.” In fact, when we left, and I started school in Palm Springs as a second grader, I was officially deemed the new girl at school, named Negin, who was Iranian but spoke with a redneck Southern accent. I would say things like “Y’all wanna play tetherball?” Now, a Southern accent on the West Coast already feels misplaced but coming out of the mouth of an ethnic second grader, that shit is bizarre.

  Here’s what I remember from Virginia: I had a best friend in preschool named Angela. Everyone in my class was blond. Everyone. The teachers thought I had a language problem, because I was pretty quiet and my parents spoke Farsi to me at home. They asked my parents to stop doing that.

  My parents thought it was important for me to speak both Farsi and Azeri at home. Besides, my grandparents and most of my aunts and uncles didn’t speak English, so speaking these other languages would be my only connection to them. Plus it’s more fun to yell at little kids in Farsi. The first time I came home from a hard day of finger painting, snacking, and napping, I started speaking English to my parents. My dad panicked, and then he had a flash of brilliance: He pretended that he didn’t understand English. That forced me to speak to him in Farsi. I took this on valiantly, considering myself some kind of three-year-old United Nations interpreter. From that point forth, I never ever spoke to them in English. To this day, it feels really weird to speak to them in English.

  What my dumb little baby brain doesn’t remember is that this was around the time of the Iran Hostage Crisis, which was a “total hoot” (I’m paraphrasing Ronald Reagan here). Here’s the rundown if you don’t know: Just after the Iranian Revolution, the new regime went nuts and took some hostages from the American embassy and held them for what seemed like forever (444 days). The American public was superpissed, which was sensible, because what the fuck? But the by-product of that super-pissed-ousity (new word) was anti-Iranian sentiment.

  REAGAN WAS WEIRD ABOUT IRAN A LOT

  First there’s a hostage crisis in which we, the American people, learn that we’re supposed to hate Iran. Got it. But then, Reagan decides to sell arms to Iran, then use the profits to fund the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He had a thing for the Sandinistas and Congress was like “nuh-uh.” So Reagan decided to creatively circumvent the law and fund them anyway. What’s weirder was that at the time, we were also funding Iraq, which was in a war with Iran. What I’m saying is, we were supporting both sides in this war. It’s like thumb-wrestling with yourself. This whole sordid affair became known as “The Iran-Contra Affair: A Nation Thumb-Wrestles with Itself.” A guy named Oliver North took the fall, but various reports indicate that Reagan and George Bush the elder knew about it. But it didn’t matter because the scandal slid off of all of them like a polyester romper. Bush went on to be president, and North went on to be a Fox News commentator.

  When I was still being burped, my brother was already rolling through high school in that nonglamorous part of Virginia. Those days were tough because he was a mustachioed fourteen-year-old who had moved from Connecticut. So at first, the kids taunted him by calling him a Yank. The fact that Yank was still in use then was both (a) deeply hilarious and (b) a wee little sign of the continued fissures in American society that have remained and festered so long after the Civil War.

  Once the kids realized he wasn’t a Yank but an Iranian, the bullying really ramped up. Feelings were hurt and punches were thrown. In many ways, because of the big age difference, my brother had to have the experience that I was protected from. He came to the United States not speaking English; he had to experience the most racist welcome; he grew facial hair far too early; and my mom dressed him like a middle-aged accountant. I’m not sure what would have happened to me if we had stayed in Virginia.

  Reverse Record Scratch!

  Back to Retirement Community High Jinks!

  In Palm Springs I was a quiet kid. I didn’t ruffle any feathers, I wasn’t speaking up for justice, I wasn’t fighting for causes. But all of that changed when I turned eight years old.

  Imagine little Negin, wearing some really fly red corduroy pants (that looked more like high-waters because I kept growing out of them, but I refused to wear anything else). I was standing in line at the tetherball court, dutifully waiting my turn when Shelly Camonellie4 cut in front of me. Yeah, she fucking cut in front of me. Now listen, I never had real athletic abilities. I couldn’t bat a ball or volley a serve or racket a tennis. I was more your scholarly, thinking kid. But I fucking knew how to take people down on the tetherball court. I was quite good. I could serve a ball with sheer force (no bosom getting in my way). The ball would whip around and around and around that pole. The sun would glisten off my knuckles. I could suddenly speak Portuguese and my feet would slightly levitate off the ground. I left other kids in the dust, crying and urinating all over themselves.5

  TETHERBALL: FROM “VIOLENT” TO “PLAYGROUND”

  The history of tetherball has long been disputed. Or rather it hasn’t been disputed so much as nobody really cares. But, the earliest account of tetherball goes back to ninth-century Tatars who lived in modern day Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. As the story goes, Tatars would take the head of a vanquished enemy, attach it with a rope to a pole, and then beat it with a stick. Now, it’s a really fun playground activity for children.

  But Shelly Camonellie… oh Shelly! She didn’t want to see me have a good life. She wanted to take over the court and bully the rest of us into submission. She was good at that. But on this day, of my eighth year, nestled in the badass resort town of Palm Springs, where manicured golf courses bring grown men to their knees, I, Negin Farsad, told her off. I said to Shelly, “Suck my dick, Shelly Camonellie.” Now, I was eight years old, so I didn’t know what a dick was or what sucking had to do with it. But I had heard the phrase before from some fifth graders and I knew, intuitively, that it applied to this situation.

  I was a perfect student with perfect grades and perfect attendance. I’m talking straight O’s. I never got in trouble. But on this, the “Suck my dick, Shelly Camonellie” day, a teacher overheard me. I was immediately scolded, embarrassed in front of a jury of tetherballians, and taken to the principal’s office, where I was sentenced to Lunch on the Stage.

  The cafeteria was totally regular looking and also doubled as a theatre for elementary school productions. But during lunchtime, that cafeteria stage had a very sinister use. Very “bad” students were punished by having to eat lunch in silence on that stage, facing all the “good” students.

  This was my first brush with public performance. At first, it was humiliating. But a few minutes in, I realized that my reputation was altering. I wasn’t simply the goody-two-shoes girl that never got in trouble. I was the girl who stood up for myself and told people to “suck a D”—whatever that was. I could eat tater tots in front of dozens of kids and not break. And in a most ridiculous fashion this act of civil disobedience—yes, Thoreau!—made me realize that I can stand up for things. That standing up for things wouldn’t kill me.

  A year later I stood up for myself on something that wasn’t about tetherball dominance. The elementary school didn’t want to put me in the gifted and talented program in fourth grade. I think it had something to do with my abilities in English. I knew instinctively that being in this gifted and talented program was going to have major life consequences. We put kids on tracks in this country, and that determines everything about where that kid will end up all the way through college and beyond.

  So, I put my emboldened pants on, the way only nine-year-olds (and North Korean despots) do, and marched into the principal’s office. I recruited my mother for support. In her thickly accented English, she said, “Vhy isn’t my daughter in ze class for ze smart children?” They hemmed and hawed, and we got our way.

  Y
eah! Civil Disobedience, motherfuckers! Ain’t nobody gonna not put me in the non–gifted and talented classes… wait, huh? I mean, Ain’t nobody gonna keep me outta the classes that aren’t… Oh, double negatives, you got me again!

  Showing up for the fight became something I did over and over again in life. But as is my custom, I tried to make the fight funny. As the old saying goes, you attract softer punches when you’re wearing a clown nose.

  I grew up and kept fighting. But, my adult kerfuffles have a lot less to do with tetherball. Here’s one of my more recent fights:

  The New York City MTA Up and Ran Some Bigoted Ads

  In the fall of 2014, the MTA put up posters all over the subway and bus system that promoted hatred of Muslims. A known hate group, headed by a very loud and public Muslim basher, raised $100,000 for the campaign. That money could go very far, because the MTA subway system sees over five million eyeballs a day, or rather ten million eyeballs and five million pairs of eyeballs, assuming all the eyeballs come in pairs. My point is, that’s a lot of people consuming gleefully hate-filled messages urging them that Muslims suck.6

  This wasn’t even the first time that this Unpleasant Bigot spent that kind of money to put up posters. She also spent money to make the Ground Zero Mosque a controversy—the thing that wasn’t even a mosque but an Islamic cultural center. She had all of America talking about the Ground Zero Mosque, as if a few blocks away from Ground Zero was sacred, as if that one strip of land sandwiched between a Subway (pun intended) and a strip club was in any way hallowed ground. But she’s got some other impressive credits to her name; for example, she’s on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s very elite, very hard-to-get-on list of hate groups. She was also praised for her work by a neo-Nazi gentleman who goes by the moniker “skinjob88”—he’s apparently very hard to impress.

  With the hundreds of thousands that this Unpleasant Bigot spends on the Muz-hate machine, she could have bought a property in Belize with multiple custom-made rocking chairs. She could have bought her own binder clip company. She could have spent it all on an entire city’s lifetime supply of bubble gum. Well, maybe a small city like Boca Raton, FL. She could have done anything, anything else, instead of spend the money on hate.

  To add further insult to injury, the Unpleasant Bigot’s posters were exceptionally unattractive and poorly designed. They were all negative space, ridiculous lettering, and low-resolution images. If you’re going to be bigoted, at least choose a better font.

  The MTA was trying to get out of posting them but a court order, citing free speech, forced them into it. I, for one, can’t get enough of that First Amendment. Sure, it protects hate speech, but that’s what “freedom of speech” has to mean. It can’t play favorites, it can’t create a clique of “cool speech” and “super unpopular speech,” like it’s a mean girl in high school. Freedom of speech has to accept everything. Parents can’t have a favorite child, and freedom of speech can’t distinguish between hate speech and… er… great speech.

  FREE SPEECH IN OTHER COUNTRIES

  Our free speech rights are totally dope! The bee’s knees! The mom’s jugs! All’a that. But it’s easy to take it for granted. You could hop over to some European countries and you’ll definitely get better coffee and non-GMO foods, but you will not know where you stand on freedom of speech. Some of their rules are fuzzy; they ban some forms of speech but not others. In France, everyone has “freedom of speech,” but there it means you cannot deny the Jewish Holocaust but you can deny the Armenian Genocide. Weird right? After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, sixty-nine people were arrested in France for defending terrorism. Jail!* Some of those were teenagers sending around ironic cartoons. Hate speech or speech that is suspected of inciting racial hatred does not get protected in fancy countries like the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. So basically, if you ever want to do any “opinion expressing,” America is the least confusing place to do it. The rest of the world has really complicated speech laws that probably have hidden riders like the number of bowls of red M&M’s that are supposed to be in the green room. It’s a mess.

  So while I was disappointed that the posters had to go up, I was also glad that we live in a system where the posters could go up. In New York, some individuals and groups took it upon themselves to deface the hate-filled posters. I understand that because it’s hard to look at them when they’re talking about you, or a neighbor you love, or an aunt by marriage that makes great muffins. But to me, defacing wasn’t going to be helpful. Defacing shuts down the conversation.

  My options for retaliation were: (a) stand in front of each poster yelling at passersby, “Don’t look at this poster!” (b) shutter myself at home for a month and order Pad Thai until the posters were gone; or (c) make my own posters.

  So I called up my fellow Muslim comedy buddy Dean Obeidallah7 and I said, “How about we raise the money to put up a series of delightful posters about Muslims? And, is it possible to get a zit on your toe? Because I think I have a zit on my toe.”* After five solid minutes of research we figured out that the minimum ad buy for the MTA was in the neighborhood of $17,000. We didn’t think we could raise as much money as that other group did, but $17,000–$20,000 was within our begging capacity.

  We went online, shared a PayPal button, and within three days we had raised about $19,156.24 or thereabouts. And with it, we designed a couple dozen posters, put them online for feedback and narrowed it down to these lucky six.

  The Fighting Bigotry with Delightful Posters Campaign was an interesting challenge because we had to work with the MTA, a pseudo-public-private entity. It serves a huge ridership and does great work in that arena, but it is also a slow-moving bureaucracy that can drive you so crazy you end up scrubbing the grout in your bathroom. Some aspects of these posters didn’t make the final cut. For example, we weren’t allowed to make the joke in very small font on the very bottom right of the poster that said, “Defamers, draw penis here.” For those of you who don’t live in New York, it was a nod to the fact that subway posters always get penises drawn on them.8

  We weren’t allowed to use the words poo or genitals, and we even had to change our font at one point. At every turn, I was surprised by the MTA’s nitpicks; the word poo used comedically was bad, but like an entire poster campaign preaching hate of Muslims was totally fine. What??? But we worked with them every step of the way and tried to remain delightful, because you will attract more bees with honey. After five months we had a date—on April 28, 2015, our posters were set to go.

  Then there was a hiccup: The MTA decided to ban all political content. They made that rule change on April 29, 2015, the day after our posters were supposed to go up. But through an innovation of time travel, the law was imposed a day before it actually took effect.9 What’s crazy is that somehow, Muslims and their frittata recipes are considered “political” content. We’ve somehow gotten to the point where just saying the word Muslim makes something political. It isn’t. And in our case, it’s a joke.

  Afterward, we got tired and decided to shut up about it. Kidding! We decided to get legal. We launched the Fighting bigotry with a Delightful Lawsuit campaign. Our First Amendment rights got sucker-punched, and we wanted to punch back. Besides, if you let someone like the Unpleasant Bigot do awful anti-Muslim poster campaigns, you have to let the comedians do one fun and loving campaign, right? You have to let Muslims tell the story they want to tell, right? If you’re gonna let Victoria’s Secret show hot ladies peddling lingerie, you gotta let everyone sell the thing they’re trying to sell. And what I’m trying to sell is that Muslims are hilarious.10

  A few months later, the court rendered a decision, siding with… THE COMEDIANS. That’s right, a couple of lowlife comics took on the MTA and the comics won. Judge Colleen McMahon reminded the MTA that the posters aren’t political “unless we have reached the unhappy moment in this country where the mere mention of one of the three Abrahamic faiths is ‘prominently or predominantly political’ simply be
cause that faith is Islam.” We haven’t reached that unhappy moment so the MTA has to put them up because LAW told them so. I had never quite experienced this particular feeling of victory. I imagined it was what hot blond girls feel like every day.11

  The MTA got this one wrong, but the F train still got me to my gigs on time, so at least it was doing its primary job. Tetherball was where the fight began. And the fight has taken me to some interesting places since then. So thank you Shelly Camonellie for trying and failing to ruin my life.

  CHAPTER 2

  Hairy Legs, Short Shorts, and the Mexification of Negin Farsad

  I mentioned I grew up feeling black. Except that in Palm Springs, the only black people we had were Mexican. So I initially went with that.

  Palm Springs High School was over 40 percent Mexican.1 As a student there, I was one of two Iranian-Americans in my class. The other Iranian was the kind of kid you could picture having a pet iguana (and in fact, he had a pet iguana), so our friendship was a nonstarter. People expected us to be friends because we were both Iranians, but I have a strict No Pet Reptiles friendship policy. I’m sure you understand.