Call it like they see it

In 2004, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced a $20 million initiative to produce 20 hours of “America at a Crossroads,” programming pertaining to the post–September 11 USA. Of the more than 400 people who submitted ideas, one was Glenn Baker, a D.C. resident whose bio states he’s made more than 40 PBS documentaries “exploring global security issues.” He took a different tack (how has comedy changed since September 11?), his idea was accepted and then honed (Middle-Eastern Americans delivering culturally based stand-up), and a mere four years later, Stand Up: Muslim American Comics Come of Age airs on PBS Sunday 11.

But the title is misleading, and the doc might not be doing the service it intended.

“The word Muslim, at least the way it’s talked about in the media, is an undifferentiated term,” says Azhar Usman, a Chicago-based comic of Indian heritage who appears in the film. “It’s both overinclusive and underinclusive: You think all the comics are going to be Muslim, when in fact one is not [Dean Obeidallah]. Plus, the film purports to talk about Muslim-American comics but it fails to talk about African-Americans, which make up one third of Muslims living in America. People don’t think about that.”

The five comics in Stand Up, however, do have something in common: They’ve all struggled with stereotyping and pigeonholing because of the way they look or the religious beliefs they hold. Usman jokes about the fear he senses in fellow plane passengers; Egyptian-born Ahmed Ahmed, who recently appeared in Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show doc, gets plenty of auditions but mostly for background terrorists in movies and video games; Obeidallah, who’s part Palestinian and part Italian, claims people have a hard time accepting his comedy, since they know only the worst about Middle Easterners; Tissa Hami endured a tormented childhood as an Iranian in a mostly white New Jersey town during the hostage crisis; and Maysoon Zayid’s material about being a Palestinian Muslim causes walkouts much more frequently than jokes about having cerebral palsy or being a virgin.

When it comes to educating viewers on the plight of these individual comedians, the doc certainly does its job. But Usman, a scholar of the Koran and a former attorney, believes it reflects a problem rooted in the general misconceptions most Americans have about Muslims. “Muslim has become an invented category, for the purposes of American sociology and politics: Whatever white America thinks is Muslim is Muslim. If they have an Arab-sounding name, they must be Muslim. It’s high time we begin to be honest in America,” he says. “It’s worse given that the doc is on PBS. They have a public responsibility to educate and inform, but in some small ways they’re contributing to preexisting stereotypes. It could have provided a great opportunity to address those.”

Yet Baker doesn’t seem too concerned. “Since the Crossroads series deals with the impact of 9/11, I wanted to look at whose ethnic identity was most affected by those events, and it’s people of Middle-Eastern origin—anyone who’s had trouble going through an airport since 9/11,” he says. Thus he chose not to include African-American Muslims (he lined up a perfect comic candidate, Preacher Moss, but he claims the story didn’t fit the context) and picked the term “Muslim American Comics” as “kind of a shorthand.”

“I could have called them Middle-Eastern American, but it starts to become too many words,” Baker says. “All of the comics are culturally Muslim—Dean grew up in sort of a mixed family, so you could say he was. [Similarly,] I’m not sure if you’d have to say ‘Christian-American comedians’ about people who, if they had to check a box, would say Christian but they don’t necessarily go to church or believe a lot of that stuff. But that’s sort of their heritage.”

Still, Usman doesn’t think the shorthand helps. If PBS reflects the public, then clearly the public isn’t well informed; even something as seemingly innocuous as an imprecise title contributes to wrongful conceptions about Middle Eastern Americans. “After 9/11, everyone wanted to know what ‘these people’ were talking about,” Usman says, “but it’s high time we nuanced that discussion.”

Stand Up goes up Sunday 11, 9pm on PBS.