What’s so funny about an atrocity followed by arguably a genocide in the Middle East? Well, nothing.
But that’s nothing new for Muslim American comedians. The Trump years were no picnic, either. Or 9/11. Or, or …. This list is long. Humor, like mineral water and rabbits pulled from hats, has magical healing properties. Something like hope slips in while we laugh even when the joke is gallows.
And so the Arab American Comedy Festival, which began in the wake of 9/11, has thrived somehow and is celebrating 20 years with a national tour despite show cancellations in response to Gaza, the first cancellations over politics they have encountered.
Panels Sunday night at the Muslim House, sponsored by the Doris Duke Foundation, took place after a demonstration on Main Street in support of ordinary Palestinians trapped in Gaza and quiet blowback ever since from supporters of Israel’s right to defend itself.
The first panel, “Laughing in the Face of Hate,” featured the humorists who started the Arab American Comedy Festival: Dean Obeidallah and Maysoon Zayid. Obeidallah, by ethnicity half Palestinian and half Sicilian, has family in Gaza. Zayid, a Palestinian American born in New Jersey, was just back from a trip to the Palestinian territories. She goes each year to work with children in refugee camps.
Park City has a Jewish community large enough to support Temple Har Shalom and Chabad of Park City. By contrast, the closest mosque is in Salt Lake City. Families of hostages came to Sundance, as did enough Muslim participants to fill the Muslim House next to Walgreens on Sunday evening.
As elsewhere in America, tensions have run high since the Hamas terrorist attack Oct. 7, 2023, and the Israeli military response. Death in Israel and Gaza — 1,200 Israelis in the atrocity, 25,000 so far in Gaza — has rippled to Park City as harsh words and chants, making conversation more guarded, or as the next panel on “cancel culture” in a Muslim context put it: self-censored.
Of course, that’s far from what stand-up comedy is all about. And so serious and perhaps uncomfortable facts about Muslim life in America slipped in the panel discussion. Hate crimes against Muslims, as well as Jews, are way up, Obeidallah observed. He also pointed out that Black voters had more rights in 1965 and women more protections in 1973 than they do today.
“Progress is not permanent,” he intoned. The refrain was repeated often that evening, through this panel and the ones that followed, as well as sidebar conversations.
Practically in the same breath, he added, “It could be worse. They could give hurricanes Muslim names.”
Then, suddenly, the hour-long panel with the comedians was winding down. Almost time to make way for the next panel on cancel culture.
“No!” Zayid cried out. “We’re not leaving here until Palestine is free!”
Laughter exploded among the packed house of a couple of hundred or more people. She was joking, of course, while also hitting that raw nerve square, hammer to nail.
This was just the point moderator Sam Gill, president and CEO of the Doris Duke Foundation, was scratching at when he asked them, “Why comedy?” On the surface, at least, this seems such an unlikely way of getting across serious truths, in this case as serious as it gets for subject matter — terrorism, genocide.
“I think sometimes people think of comedy as levity,” he said. “And in moments like this, it feels to me like there’s always this hierarchy.”
He listed what he called “analytical knowledge,” then news, then documentary, maybe serious fiction, drama.
“At the very bottom is comedy,” he said. “You guys would obviously challenge that. So what is it comedy can do?”
“When you make people laugh.” Zayid quipped, “they’re less likely to kill you.”
Lots of laughs followed, which she let play out before she talked about how the body changes, including the heart beating differently, when people laugh, and some room opens then for human bonding, even if only a crack.
Obeidallah said his stand-up in New York City has mostly white audiences.
“You’d be amazed at how open minded they are,” he said to an audience decidedly not mostly white this evening.
He told a story about teaching his white audiences to understand the word “inshallah.” So there’s at least one thing they can learn about Muslim culture as a result, he said.
It means “God willing,” and he said the expression is overused, almost like “um,” in ordinary conversation among Muslim citizens, as if God were concerned with every little thing in daily life.
He shared an anecdote about asking once where the bathroom was at a restaurant.
“It’s over there.”
“Thanks, I’ll be right back.”
“Inshallah.”
His larger point was that if you know someone who is Muslim, or you know something maybe ordinary about Muslim people that reveals something of what all people share, and you can do this while making them laugh, well, you may very well save lives.
Perhaps that is where comedy or even mild humor fits in this alchemy, as that elusive stone fixing human empathy. But then, that’s a lot of philosophy for this most mysterious human reaction — sweet, genuine laughter.