Funny Muslim Woman, I think I love you

She sounds cool =)

Most of the good press I've read/heard about her just talks about how it's great that there's finally a Muslim woman comic. And it would be great, if she were actually funny.

Now, I don't drink alcohol. It's against my religion to drink alcohol, but my English friends, they always seem to have such a great time when they go out. They get drunk. They wake up in the morning and say, ‘I had a brilliant time last night. Where did we go again? Who is the father of my child?’ I want to be drunk, I want to cry, fall over and roll down the street. It looks like so much fun.”

I mean, is there even a joke there? What are people laughing at?

(xpost)

arguably women are greatest at social comedy.

arguably that reinforces a traditional stereotype.

arguably that stereotype arises because of the way women are socialised.

arguably foucault allows people to use stereotypes in a left-wing manner.

arguably.

..Oh that is so true..

"mecca me laugh" or "that's halal from me folks!"

I thought the exact same thing. I kept waiting for the humor and it never came.

The notion that hangovers, amnesia, and other life-changing trauma = pleasure.

But then Catholicism always does look peculiar to those raised in other traditions.

Much of Shazia Mirza's material is fabulous and for the Muslims who understand *some* of it better than non-Muslims, it's extremely funny and they can relate, plus seeing that viewpoint on television is edifying for them. Asians in the media in Britain (am helping friend prep her British Asian megahistory magnum opus for the delectation of my publisher, hence am drawn to this subject like moth to flame) at present have their greatest successes in the continuum which takes in news journalists, presenters and comics, but of these only a scattering are from Muslim backgrounds (many more are Hindu and Sikh). If you are white/Anglo it is very hard to know what it feels like to see your experiences, at least on the box, for years seemingly mediated by people who have never set foot in an Asian home. So when someone's true experience gets through and resonates in a funny way, of course it's major.

In five years she'll probably be as boring as Meera Syal.

Nabisco! Quick derail, how's it going?

Correct. However this has nothing to do with that, as I saw her on TV.

I think her bigger problem was that she doesn't consider herself a comedian, but an actress, which definitely came off in her act. She was a better performer than her material, I felt.

you know people, lots of comedy doesn't translate into text, i'd bear that in mind

I agree completely, but I remember laughing at a few things in the NYT Magazine profile about a year and I didn't laugh once at the 60 Minutes piece. Her delivery is terrible. (Not that live comedy translates that well on video either)

I'm glad she's around, though. My impression is that she's more Dick Gregory than Yakov Smirnoff.

Authority, however, is something I have in abundance on the topics of a) stand-up comedy, esp. with reference to women comics and b) contemporary Asian personal and political issues in Britain.

My POINT, since you demand it spelled out, is threefold:

1. Mere bravery in the face of social adversity never suffices for good art, let alone comedy. Obviously it can help, but there must be some funny there anyway.

2. Such public reactions as "hey, she's Muslim and she's telling jokes about it!", "hey, he's Russian and he's telling jokes about it!", or "hey, she's handicapped and she's telling jokes about it" obviously expose existing social stereotypes (and aren't very far at all from public reactions such as "hey, he's black and he's articulate!"). If that's the basis of your comedy, you owe your career to such stereotypes, and in fact do much to further them -- because once the stereotype is gone, once you're no longer exceptional simply because you're a "funny Muslim woman", the show's over and no one cares about you any more.

3. Marketing-fed journalists have been fed and attempted to feed the media-consuming public folks like this before, and they all disappear.

1a. It is bloody difficult to be a woman comic - the only female Perrier winner was offered much less work than her male counterparts in the wake of the prize - and deeply subjective; you can be denied work because some troll in a suit with zero sex appeal decides you don't have any either, which never happens to male comics.

2. Only time will tell re. how much 'issues' wind up propping her career, or how much her presence becomes 'niche marketing'.

3. Such a sweeping generalisation of what journalists do and do not accept from marketeers and PRs is kind of silly WRT comics, whose initial push has to be grass-roots anyway. A good journalist pays attention to this sort of activity rather than the press release, especially in comedy (it can take ages for a comic to get agents, PRs etc. and notices from people like me provide a resumé to take to future representation). And do these issues-based comics disappear? I don't think so - they either become larger than their 'issue' or preachers to the converted. It is really too soon to say which of these Mirza will be, and I wish someone would ask her more complex questions in the features they produce, to flesh this out.

4. A lot of Asians in the media try to cover mainstream issues but the mostly white editors still are guilty of 'you are called Singh = please interview that man in a turban for us'. Only Asians in the political media seem to have moved past this marker.

OK, I'm not the best judge of stand-up comedy, because as a whole, I don't find it funny. But she was not just "not funny" she was downright offensive as well.

Making fun of your own ethnicity is one thing, but not when you're just repeating tired old "Paki" jokes that weren't funny the first 100 times I've heard them. Is it different because it's *her* telling them? If there is some kind of message, it gets lost in the tedium.

If her act had stopped there, it would have been a fairly cringeworthy one trick pony. But she went on to make repeated fun of people from the Isle of Wight ("Oh, you're all so inbred, you've never been off the Island, have you even seen a black person before?" and other stuff that I'm sure every person on the Island has heard a hundred times before) and when that failed to raise a laugh, she just started calling random audience members homosexual on account of their facial hair. It wasn't just dull and unfunny, it was utterly cringeworthy.

If it were someone on the street making those sorts of cracks, they'd have been ignored at best or beaten up. It's not funny because it's on a stage and stuck in a "comdedy" environment. The "novelty" value of having "Ooh, it's a Female Muslim Comedian" is just not enough to justify the unfunniness and tedium of her delivery and her material. That's tokenism of the worst sort.

this woman is funny

... your turn!

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