Hitting the Funny Bones of Contention

But the trio ran into resistance from club owners when they sought to become weekend headliners. In response, they decided to take matters into their own hands. Pooling their money, they produced their own shows. The first "Axis of Evil" show, at the District's Lisner Auditorium in November 2005, sold out. It was followed by dates in 16 cities, and the Comedy Central special last year.

At first, according to Jobrani, the vast majority of the tour's audience was of Middle Eastern extraction. But now about half the crowd is "non-ethnic," which Jobrani takes as both a sign of acceptance and an indication that people are "curious" about a different set of perspectives.

Over time, the comics have sensed a shifting social climate for their brand of humor. Obeidallah says a club owner advised him not to use his last name (which means "humble servant of Allah") or to talk about his Arab heritage in the months after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

But the event became a kind of an awakening, especially for Obeidallah, who co-founded the Arab-American Comedy Festival in New York in 2003. "I used to be an American white guy," he says. "I'm more in touch with my heritage now. I heard so many ignorant things being said about Muslims that I just got tired of it and had to speak up. Comedy is one way of doing that, of fighting back."

The start of the war in Iraq in March 2003, and the election of 2004, created other pressures. Before then, Jobrani says, "we could do a Bush joke and people would laugh and not think about it. After the war started, people would freeze up. They bought into the argument that if you don't support the war, you're not supporting the troops, and if you're criticizing the commander in chief, you're not supporting the war."

At one point, Kader says he toned down his Bush material. But after one show in San Diego in 2004, a group of Navy pilots approached him and told him: "We're fighting the war to preserve the right to criticize the people in power. You have to do it. That's real comedy."

By the time the Axis tour got going in earnest in 2006, there was no holding back. In fact, the comics say, the anti-Bush material goes over about as well with American audiences as it did with Arab audiences during the group's tour last fall of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Dubai. "He's united the world in laughter," Obeidallah says.

The only taboo subject in the Middle East? "They more or less told us, 'Don't talk about local politics,' " says Kader.

Obeidallah says now the challenge is to evolve, to branch out from just being "ethnic" comedians riffing on ignorant stereotypes. Not for nothing do each of the Axis comics lionize Richard Pryor, who was not just an "African American comic" but a universal one.

On the other hand, Obeidallah still jokes about one of the silver linings of having an Arabic last name in an Anglo culture. In a world of identity theft, he asks, do you think a thief would steal a name like Abdul Nasser Aman Abdullah?