by Maz Jobrani
On Tuesday nights the Comedy Store hosted black comedy night. The rumor was that Eddie Murphy occasionally hung out in the back to watch comedians perform. This was around the time when everyone was talking about when he was going to get back onstage and do his next comedy special, so there were always whispers when he was in the club that he was looking for inspiration. I was just back from Australia for a day, and rather than taking the night off and relaxing, I decided to go down to the club and do fifteen minutes to get a workout. For nearly a month I had been on the road, doing shows that were four times as long. Doing an hour show and doing a fifteen-minute show are very different beasts. They require completely different rhythms and timing, and it was just one of those late Tuesday nights, an empty audience, when my act was not as good as it should have been.
There were three rooms at the club—one was the Main Room, which on Tuesdays hosted black comedy night. There was the Original Room, where I was performing, and the Belly Room, which has nothing to do with this story. Eddie Murphy was rumored to occasionally hang out in the back of the Main Room, but never in the Original Room, where comedians mostly worked out new material. What are the chances that a comic legend, and the one rock star performer who influenced my comedy from the beginning, would happen upon the workout room on the one night I was truly awful? Since I’m telling this story, the chances are pretty good.
I was having a bad set and the audience was quiet, maybe one guy in the room laughing. At one point I thought to myself that maybe I should do some older tried-and-true material to win the audience over. What if someone big was watching? Then I decided it didn’t matter if someone big was watching. I had been doing shows in this room for years and not caring about who watched. That was the magic of the Original Room and why I had been able to grow as a comic—it made you not care about anything but working out your material. All these thoughts were running through my mind as I was doing my set. That night, I resolved to stick to my guns and not pander to the audience. If I was going to bomb, I would do it on my terms.
I came offstage. A comedy groupie who hung around the club came over and told me the news. “Hey Maz, Eddie’s here tonight.”
You know the person is important if you can refer to him by his first name and you instantly know who he is. Eddie is Eddie Murphy. Oprah is Oprah Winfrey. Michael is Michael Jordan, or Michael Jackson, or Michael J. Fox, or Michael Moore, or Michael Ian Black, or . . . okay, this theory doesn’t necessarily work if your name is Michael.
Eddie Murphy had been sitting in the back of the room, listening to my set. My horrible, shitty, desperate set. I looked up and saw that he was occupying Mitzi’s chair—the same one I had been so scared to walk by years before. The chair you have to walk by to exit the room. I took a deep breath and proceeded to walk in his direction. I tried to act nonchalant but was hoping he would grab my arm: “Hey kid, you weren’t that bad tonight. Have you thought about wearing a turban?” Okay, I was hoping he wouldn’t bring up the turban, but I wanted him to acknowledge me.
Unfortunately, he didn’t pull a Mitzi. He let me walk right past. It really had been as bad as I thought. I walked down the steps and into the Comedy Store hallway, where I had to wait for my friend Anthony to come out so we could leave. When who walked out but my idol, Eddie himself. I stood there, hoping he might say hello, or offer me a handshake. Nothing. He gave me a quick look and then averted his eyes. He couldn’t even bear the sight of me.
Suddenly those two mediocre comics who bombed in that bar almost twenty years earlier, way back at UC Berkeley, and made me believe I could do better, came rushing back. What if I had become that mediocre act for Eddie? I saw him making a comeback and going on a late night talk show to announce his return. At some point Jimmy Kimmel would lean over: “So, Eddie, what inspired you to come back?”
“Well, Jimmy, I was inspired by mediocrity. One night I saw this horrible Iranian comedian perform and I told myself right then—I can do better. He was awful. He didn’t even wear a turban.”
Washington, D.C.
The first time I visited Washington, D.C., to perform was with the Arabian Knights. That’s not an all-male Middle Eastern stripper revue. It was the name of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour before we changed the name. “Arabian Knights” was a name given to us by Mitzi Shore, who had put us together in the first place because she’d had the epiphany that there would be a need for a positive voice for Middle Eastern people in the near future. She had this epiphany before the September 11 attacks, but given how often you saw Middle Easterners get killed in Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal movies even then, it wasn’t hard to deduce that we had replaced the Russians as the bad guys in the West. Ever since Rocky Balboa knocked out Ivan Drago in Rocky IV and he gave the speech to the Russian audience after the fight—“If I’s can change, and you’s can change, everybody can change!”—the Russian reputation has been on the upswing. Unfortunately, our reputation has plummeted. Mustafa has replaced Yuri because someone has to be the bad guy.
We showed up in D.C. to perform in the middle of the week and the place was packed. I had no idea that we would do so well, but it turned out that there were a lot of Middle Easterners and Muslims, as well as other liberal-minded people, who were sick of seeing us portrayed only as the bad guys and curious to see how we would do as entertainers. It seemed there had already been a fan base that was waiting for us to appear. We were filling a void, and the shows got bigger and hotter every time we returned. D.C. proved that Middle Eastern people aren’t simply interested in kidnapping Americans; sometimes we like to make them laugh as well. (But when we do kidnap Americans, we are quite serious about it and you shouldn’t laugh.)
D.C. is one of the best cities in which to perform comedy. It has an international culture, and the people living there are very politically minded. Whereas in Los Angeles you might come across an actor who tells you he is preparing for a part in a film in which he plays an FBI agent, in D.C. you meet the actual FBI agent. You ask people what they do and they tell you they’re with State (the State Department), the Agency (the CIA), the Feds (FBI), etc. I get excited and nervous at the same time—excited that they have such important careers protecting the country, nervous that they’re protecting the country from people who look like me.
I start rambling. “Are you packing a gun? Have you ever overthrown a dictator? Do I seem suspicious to you? I feel suspicious. Wanna search me? If I were you, I would totally search me.”
My Jewish Heckler
It was as an international man of comedy that I returned to D.C. in 2006 to do another Axis of Evil show at the Warner Theatre. It was our biggest show to date, in front of eighteen hundred people, a truly electrified crowd that was exciting to be a part of. In the middle of my set, I did a joke making fun of John Bolton. Not Michael Bolton, the balding guy with the ponytail who sings “When a Man Loves a Woman.” I know there are probably a lot of jokes a comedian could make about Michael Bolton, but as a bald man myself, I have a degree of respect for a balding man who once sported a ponytail. That’s badass. Rather my joke was about John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations with the walrus mustache. If you are reading this and live in D.C., you probably already know who he is. If you live in Los Angeles, you’re probably putting down this book, picking up your phone, and googling “Ambassador Mustache.”
I had worked Bolton into my routine because he had gone on TV and said that the United States would not call for a cease-fire in an ongoing battle between Israel and Lebanon because he didn’t think it would accomplish anything. This incensed me. There were people dying on both sides and everyone knew that if the United States called for a cease-fire, it might encourage the two sides to stop fighting and lives would be saved. I intended to save the day—with an admittedly half-assed joke where I made fun of his mustache. The joke fared well in front of the liberal D.C. crowd, where it was met with some applause and support. However, a few nights later I
did the same joke at the Comedy Cellar in New York City in front of twenty people. It didn’t go so well. New Yorkers take facial hair seriously.
First of all, I had gone from performing in front of a packed house on a Saturday night to performing in front of twenty people on a Tuesday. That’s the life of a comedian. We get up wherever and whenever we can. And, in fact, those smaller crowds are where we work out new material. I’ve performed in coffee shops, strip clubs as mentioned, even Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. (Side note: If you’re ever performing at an empty AA meeting, don’t open with “Good to see everyone tonight. Finally, a comedy show without a two-drink minimum. Am I right?”)
The Tuesday evening I tried out the Bolton joke at the Comedy Cellar, a young Jewish guy in the audience didn’t have the same politics as me when it came to Israeli-Lebanese bomb hurling. How did I know he was Jewish, you ask? I believe the yarmulke on his head gave it away. The Bolton mustache joke met with a few laughs, but more importantly, my Jewish nemesis booed loudly.
I wasn’t sure if I had heard him right. “Sir, are you booing peace?” I asked.
“You need to educate yourself,” he told me. “You sound like an idiot.”
Comedians expect to do their sets, for the most part, without interruptions. Typically a drunk person, or someone just talking too loudly, might cause a disturbance, but you point it out and the person quiets down. But when someone flat out tells you you’re an idiot—in front of an audience, albeit of only twenty people—you have to acknowledge it. You’ve been shown up. It’s called being heckled. It is your job, as a comedian, to bury that person, shame him, ruin what is left of his night, if not his life. You have to impart such a great comeback that the audience roars in laughter and comes back to your side, putting the heckler in his place.
When the guy told me I was an idiot, I came after him fierce. “No, sir, it is you who is the idiot!”
I know that’s not the wittiest retort, but it got my point across. I was angry at this guy and wanted to debate him on the issue. However, I had a microphone in my hand and nineteen other people staring at me, waiting to see me thrash my heckler. I really didn’t have time to get into a discussion about Middle Eastern politics. I just wanted to put him in his place, but my heckler was ready for me.
“YOU are an idiot, man!”
“No,” I insisted, a stage veteran all the way, “you are!”
“I said it first. You are!”
“No, it’s you!”
“You!”
“You! You! You!”
It quickly devolved into a fourth grade playground fight, two idiots unable to come up with a better comeback. He was angry. I was angry. The whole room was tense. It began to feel like this guy was going to rush the stage, or I was going to jump into the crowd.
It’s important to remember: I was an Iranian guy after September 11, in an argument with a Jewish guy, in New York City of all places. If I jumped on top of this guy, there was a very real possibility I would end up with a one-way ticket to Guantanamo. Furthermore, I’m not the “jump on top of hecklers” type. I’ve only been in one real fight my entire life.
Back in my early twenties, my friend got into a fight with a much bigger guy outside a bar in San Francisco and I had to back him up. This was a preppy part of town, so it was a preppy fight. We were wearing dress shirts, J. Crew sweaters, and Top-Siders. The other guy was dressed in a tux. (I assume he was coming from a wedding. Or maybe he was a maître d’.) Either way, he picked a fight with my friend and I had to get ghetto on his ass—all the while making sure I didn’t get any blood on my nice sweater. It really never comes out of that type of material. So while the big guy was on top of my friend punching him, I was kicking the guy from behind.
All those years of playing soccer finally paid off. Whereas real fighters train in karate or jujitsu, I only knew how to use what I had learned growing up in Marin County playing midfield for the Tiburon Sharks. The big difference, though, between fighting some random guy in the streets and playing soccer in an affluent neighborhood is that with soccer you get a halftime break where one of the team moms gives you orange wedges and Capri Suns. And that team mom was never my mom, because when you have a Middle Eastern mom you try to keep her as far away from the field as possible for fear that she might bring some kebabs and yogurt soda for halftime instead of oranges and Capri Suns. Yes, there’s such a thing as yogurt soda; it tastes as bad as it sounds.
Anyway, the only fight I was ever in was this one with my friend, which did not have a halftime or snacks. We actually ended up winning the fight because the bigger guy got up, dusted himself off in front of a crowd that had gathered, and gave us a warning as he walked off. (Kind of like Matt Dillon at the end of My Bodyguard when the nerdy kid beats him up.) Even though my fight record is 1–0, I still am not a fan of fights. If you’ve ever seen a picture of me, you’ll realize I don’t have the right nose for fighting. It sticks out too far and is just begging to be broken. So ninety-nine times out of one hundred, I will deal with a fight by talking my way out of it. The other time I will turn and run like a gazelle.
I even have a comedy special called “I Come in Peace.” If I got into a fight in public with a heckler, who would ever buy that DVD again? So this guy and I were going back and forth in the Comedy Cellar and it was escalating. Suddenly, the host, Ardie Fuqua, an affable black comedian, jumped back onstage, took the microphone from me, and began telling both of us to calm down.
Now we have an Iranian, a Jew, and a black guy in a bar, the beginning of a solid joke. In reality, it was turning into a nightmare. Ardie was acting like a boxing referee, telling us both to go to our corners. He got us to agree that we would behave, then handed me the microphone. I had never had an experience like that before where it had gotten so bad the host had to relieve me of the microphone. Comedians are supposed to deal with their own hecklers. Getting another comedian involved made me feel like I wasn’t seasoned enough to handle my own problems. To make it worse, it wasn’t like he took the microphone and told me to leave the stage. He took it, played referee, and then handed it back to me. It was up to me to get the audience back in a fun mood. It was as if someone had a heart attack at a party, died, and once the medical personnel removed the body, the host said, “Okay everyone, let’s not let one dead body ruin the party. Everyone get back to dancing!”
I was trying to set the show back on track and basically struggling to get some laughs. I was steaming, just really aggravated and wanting to debate—and possibly fist-fight—the Jewish heckler. A bouncer finally arrived and escorted the guy out of the club. Now all I could think of was getting offstage and taking this argument outside. But the heckler and I were not to meet again. The club management, rightfully, told me to chill upstairs with the other comedians after my set.
It wasn’t until I was telling some of the other comics what had happened that I realized the irony of the situation. I set out to tell a joke that had a message of peace and human compassion and found myself willing to get into a fight over it. How did I get so worked up? Did things like this ever happen to my heroes of peace like Martin Luther King? Did Gandhi ever get heckled to the point where he wanted to take off his loincloth and slap someone with his sandals: “Turn your cheek so I can slap it, bitch!” Being peaceful isn’t easy.
Getting heckled is a natural part of stand-up comedy. No matter what you say, someone is going to take it the wrong way and yell something at you at some point.
“Babies are adorable,” you might say.
“Go fuck yourself,” some angry comedy expert will inevitably holler. “And tell the babies to go fuck themselves, too.”
Now, if this happened to you in a normal conversation you could take your time, look the person in the eye, and try to understand his point of view as to why the babies should, indeed, go fuck themselves. But when you’re onstage and someone interrupts your set, you must react quickly.
Each comic has his own comeback. One might say, “How do you propose a baby with a baby penis goes and fucks itself?” I, on the other hand, would probably say, “Oh yeah? Oh yeah? I tell you what. You are an idiot!”
Friendly Nuclear Program
Things can get especially volatile when the subject turns to politics. This was the case when the George W. Bush administration took the country into war with Iraq. My relationship with Bush, Cheney & Co. seesawed in the early 2000s. When they won the election I was upset and called foul on the recount. However, when September 11 happened, I found myself supporting their call for justice. I even purchased an American flag and stuck it on my car. (Fine, that was mostly so people wouldn’t mistake me for al-Qaeda and shoot me, but I also felt very patriotic.)
I remember loving Bush, listening to his speeches and eagerly hollering my approval. That’s how patriotic I’d become: I loved George W. Bush and whatever he had to say. “USA! USA! USA damn it! Let’s get them damn terrorists! Go Dubya!”
I remember when he coined the term “axis of evil.” He was explaining how we needed to fight the terrorists. The terrorists from September 11 had been Saudis and Egyptians, so I figured he would mention something about reviewing our relationship with those two countries. Not that I wanted to attack them per se, but I figured if he’s announcing an axis of evil, one of those countries was going to make the list. He named the axis.
Bush: “It’s North Korea.”
