Hitting the Funny Bones of Contention
Axis of Evil Comedy Tour Detonates Some Explosive Stereotypes

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 8, 2008

Maz Jobrani, one-fourth of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, has a bit about how people of Middle Eastern descent can't seem to bust through the stereotypes of a post-9/11 world. "You never turn on the TV and see a United Airlines commercial with a Middle Eastern pilot," he says in the routine. "You'll never see one standing there saying, 'Come fly the friendly skies . . .

"'I dare you.' "

The gag is the essence of the Axis comedians' shtick, and just about the whole point of their tour, which tonight returns to the Warner Theatre. The idea, says Jobrani, who is of Iranian descent, is to demonstrate that Arab and Muslim Americans can turn cultural differences, suspicion and even existential dread into comedy and social commentary.

A tall order, sure, but Jobrani & Co. are part of a grand stand-up tradition. Members of "outsider" groups -- including Jews, Italians, blacks, Latinos, gays and Asian Americans -- have been disarming "mainstream" audiences by joking about themselves and their cultural idiosyncrasies for decades.

Even before a Comedy Central special and DVD vaulted them to national prominence (and a tour of the Middle East) last year, Jobrani and fellow comics Aron Kader, Ahmed Ahmed and Dean Obeidallah were mining some rich but uneasy territory. Their subjects range from riffs about terrorism and profiling (what it's like to navigate airport security with a name such as Ahmed Ahmed) to current events and people (rising oil prices, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israeli-Palestinian relations, etc.).

At its best, the material offers some inverted perspectives on themes that otherwise might remain one-dimensional. Kader, who grew up in Reston, tells a story about visiting a cousin in Amman and listening to his Jordanian relative rant and rail about America's world dominance. "United States, you think you are so big and strong and powerful!" says Kader, 33, mimicking his cousin's thick accent. "You are a paper tiger! You will fold!" Without missing a beat, his cousin asks brightly: "You hungry? We got Burger King, McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Appleby's. . . . You look tired. You want coffee? We got Starbuckus! You like Starbuckus?"

Says Obeidallah: "This isn't two hours of Arab 101, because we have to make you laugh. But there is an underlying message."

Part of that humor involves self-identification with a group, and the concerns that go with it. In one routine, Jobrani says he can't help watching the news reports of suspected terrorist plots and saying aloud, "Please don't be Middle Eastern, please don't be Middle Eastern." Just once, he says, he'd like the news to focus on the mundane and everyday in his former country. "I'd love it if they could go to some guy in Iran, and he would go, 'Hello, I'm Muhammad, and I'm just baking a cookie.' "

The Axis of Evil comics -- the ironic appropriation of President Bush's phrase ought to tell you where their humor is coming from -- have plenty of outsider cred.

Jobrani, 36, immigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area with his family when he was 6. Ahmed, 37, was born in Egypt and grew up in Southern California. Obeidallah and Kader are U.S.-born, but the result of only-in-America cross-pollination: Obeidallah's father is Palestinian and his mother is Italian Catholic (he was raised in northern New Jersey as a "pork-free American," celebrating Ramadan and Easter).

And Kader's father, also of Palestinian descent, married into a pioneering Utah family. Which makes Kader part Muslim and part Mormon (he jokes that "going on a mission" has wildly different meanings to Mormons and Arabs).

The four comics had kicked around the comedy circuit as solo acts until Mitzi Shore, the longtime proprietor of the Comedy Store in Los Angeles (and mom of comic actor Pauly Shore), suggested booking "anyone who was tan," as Jobrani puts it, as the Arabian Knights in 2000. The cheesy name took hold (although Jobrani isn't Arab), and followed Jobrani, Kader and Ahmed for several years, during which they had successful midweek gigs at the DC Improv.

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?