For Palestinian American comedian Maysoon Zayid, making slightly inappropriate jokes has always been the way she copes.
“The doctor who delivered me was drunk,” she said in our interview, joking about the fact that she has cerebral palsy.
“That’s a dark way to start out a comedy routine,” she said.
Zayid is a cofounder of the Arab American Comedy Festival, which will come to the Town Hall in the Theater District for its 20th year on Sunday.
She said laughter feels more important than ever in light of the Israel-Hamas war.
Zayid and Dean Obeidallah (who appeared on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show” on Friday) cofounded the festival in 2003, as a response to the 9/11 terror attacks. They wanted to show Arabs experienced many of the same issues as everyone else.
“The whole point of it was to combat the negative stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims in media,” said Zayid. “And to help Hollywood realize that we were more than just terrorists and taxi drivers.”
Both founders expressed dismay that two decades later they still feel the need to combat hostile generalizations about their community.
“The spirit of the festival has been to try to humanize our community,” said Obeidallah. “And it’s so odd that 20 years later we’re back to that moment.”
Obeidallah, who has Italian and Palestinian heritage, said it’s especially hard to see reports of young Arab people experiencing bullying and harassment. He cited a CNN article about a recent rise in anti-Arab and Islamophobic incidents across the country.
Zayid said she’s disheartened by the “dehumanizing,” “bigoted,” and “awful” memes she’s seen posted on social media by people whom she’d considered allies.
“I expected the Trump people to tell me to go back to my own country,” she said. “I didn’t expect people I had shared a stage with in the past to be like, ‘If your godson dies too bad, so sad. But you know, an army’s gotta do what an army’s gotta do.’”
Despite the political climate,…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply