I'm Not a Terrorist, But I've Played One on TV

by Maz Jobrani

Me: “Didn’t see that one coming, but okay, I can see how they’re evil.”

  Bush: “Eye-rack.”

  Me: “Hmmm. Interesting choice, interesting choice. I wonder where he’s going with this. Must be saving Egypt or Saudi Arabia for last.”

  Bush: “And Eye-ran.”

  Me: “Eye-what? Did he say Eye-ran? What the hell just happened?”

  How did Eye-ran get into the axis? I’m Eye-ranian . . . I mean Iranian. I’m not evil. Okay, Iran does have a nuclear program. But it’s a peaceful nuclear program. They might make a bomb, but they would only use it to deliver flowers and ice cream, probably to Israel, the Great Satan, or any other infidel state that didn’t believe in peace.

  Like much of the country, I began questioning the administration’s ulterior motives with Iraq. They were using September 11 for their political agenda, and I felt it was my duty, as a comedian, to bring this to light onstage. I would mention in my shows that after the September 11 attacks there had been an outpouring of support for the victims from around the world. There was even a candlelight vigil in the streets of Iran. It felt like the world had come together against terrorism. And yet, just a couple of years later, we had ignored that gesture of unity and decided to take a hawkish route toward war.

  The whole thing was a big joke, with the United States organizing a “coalition of the willing” to attack Iraq. This was an attempt to show that the world was behind us in beginning this war. The willing included the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland, all legitimate allies. But then it went on to include the Marshall Islands, Eritrea, and the Federated States of Micronesia. I think Eritrea sent five soldiers. And what the hell is the Federated States of Micronesia? That just sounds like a place where Asians brew beer.

  I went on the offensive with my jokes, making fun of the war, but not everyone was on board. Quite often I would be in the middle of a set, doing a joke about Bush, and someone would tell me I couldn’t make fun of the president. This happened once at the Comedy Store. A young girl sitting in the front row told me that she was in the military and that she took offense at my jokes about our commander in chief.

  “We’re at war. You can’t make fun of the president.”

  “According to the administration, that’s one of the main reasons we’re at war: to bring democracy to Iraq,” I told her. “And you’re telling me that in our own country I should limit my freedom of speech because you disagree with me?”

  “Yep.”

  “The reason I love the United States is because we CAN make fun of the president. That’s what differentiates us from Iraq or Iran. If I were to make fun of the president of Iran in Iran, it’s safe to say that would be my last show in Iran.”

  On the eve of the war with Iraq, the administration sold a line to the public that if you criticized the war, you were criticizing the troops. It was ridiculous, but people were hesitant to laugh at jokes about Bush or the war. I had to remind audiences that I wasn’t making fun of the troops. You never hear a comedian say, “I love the administration. I love that Dick Cheney. It’s those damn troops that piss me off.” It was all pretty hairy. It was made even hairier because the words were coming out of the mouth of a Middle Easterner whose allegiance could be questioned. I had a few people walk out on me because they didn’t like what I was saying. The war was being fought thousands of miles away, but the repercussions were being felt in comedy clubs around the country.

  Old Women Heckle, Too

  Heckling doesn’t always take a political form. It runs the gamut. Stand-up comedy isn’t exactly a gated community. Anyone with twenty bucks can get into a club, so the dregs of society can show up and ruin your set. I’ve even been heckled by old Persian women who have sat through an hour of my show waiting for me to tell jokes in Farsi. Why they are at my shows in the first place if they don’t speak English is beyond me. I think what has happened is that people in the Persian community have heard my name, maybe seen a clip or two on YouTube, and they assume that when I perform live I will bust out all the Farsi jokes.

  One night during a show, a woman in her sixties, dressed in furs, expensive jewelry, and clothing you would more likely see at an ambassador’s ball than a comedy show, hollered, “Tell us some joke in Farsi!” When I explained I didn’t do jokes in Farsi, she replied, “You should!” This all sounds innocent enough, but her tone had the subtext of, “You’re not funny, maybe if you tried it in Farsi you’d be funny. You suck!”

  As I’ve mentioned, when challenged by a heckler you have to be ready with a good comeback. So when a lady your mother’s age, dressed in ballroom attire, heckles you, you have to be quick, but you must be sure it’s not too cruel lest you force the crowd to sympathize with her.

  “Ma’am, are you aware that there are five hundred other people watching the show in English and enjoying it?”

  “Yes, but I am not. Tell a joke in Farsi.”

  “You are interrupting the show to make a personal request. I am not a jukebox. Don’t you feel selfish?”

  “No, I don’t. I paid for my ticket. Now tell a joke in Farsi, Meester Jukebox.”

  After a show, these ladies occasionally approach me and speak in broken English.

  “I am sorry if I make terouble. I not mean to haggle you.”

  “Haggle me?”

  “My kids. Dey say I haggle you.”

  “You mean heckle.”

  “Heckle, haggle. Same ting. You know problem? You should tell joke in Farsi. Might make you funny!”

  The irony is that haggling is what Middle Eastern people do innately, and very well, at bazaars and department stores. I once had an aunt haggle with a salesclerk at a department store in Italy until the guy crumbled and gave her his own employee discount. The art of haggling is in our blood. Heckling, on the other hand, is not one of our more natural states. As a culture, Middle Eastern people are taught to be respectful and not to be too outspoken in public. Even if we do heckle, we do it in a coy way. Rather than shouting, “You suck!” a Middle Easterner might say, “I vonder if you’ve ever considered anodder career.” Not as hard-hitting, but just as effective.

  The Time Barak Touched My Wife

  Washington, D.C., has always been good to me. I feel like I’m surrounded by like-minded people there. Part of the reason is that it’s a pretty liberal place. Even during the Bush administration, when audiences around the country would get upset at Bush jokes, the folks in D.C. howled at them. All you had to do was mention his name and a thousand people would roar. I almost felt bad for the guy when he was living in D.C. and no one there seemed to respect him. Part of it was that the crowds I was attracting were opposed to the war. I’m sure there were a few covert FBI or CIA types monitoring my shows, and they were instructed to laugh in order to blend in. Some of those same guys might be reading this book right now, looking for clues to my involvement with jihad. Let me save you the trouble, guys, and tell you that I gave up on jihad a long time ago. First, when I heard about the size of beard you had to grow to fight for Allah, I stopped going to weekly jihad meetings. Then I just lost interest altogether once I learned they were putting bombs in their underwear.

  D.C. is also a great place because sometimes you see these big leaders you’re used to seeing on TV out and about and you’re reminded that they, too, are human. I remember after September 11, Bush appointed Tom Ridge as the secretary of Homeland Security. If you don’t remember Tom Ridge, he was a big guy with a flat nose that looked like he’d been a boxer or a football player. He was basically Sheriff Number One in the country fighting terrorism, and he seemed like a pretty serious badass. I remember seeing him one night outside a fancy restaurant talking to a young lady. I thought, Holy shit! This guy wants to get laid, too? Shouldn’t he be looking for Osama? How does he have time to flirt? If another attack happens it could be because he was trying to get lucky with a girl half his age. This guy was the secretary of Homeland Sec
urity. Can you imagine the pickup lines?

  “You must be al-Qaeda. One look at you and my alert level goes up.”

  “You’ve been randomly selected. For a Big Tom cavity search.”

  One of my coolest trips to D.C. was when I got invited to the Obama White House for a Christmas party. When you get an invite from the White House and you’re not a world leader or an ambassador, you think it’s most likely junk mail requesting a donation. But my wife inspected it and it was legitimate. I couldn’t believe it. I had no idea why I was being invited. Being the paranoid Middle Easterner that I am, I thought maybe it was a ploy to get me there and arrest me for something I must have done, or was about to do. Or maybe it was an attempt to turn me into a spy for the administration. Either way, I was going to D.C. to hobnob with the president and first lady, sugarplums and delusions of grandeur dancing in my head.

  An interesting thing I learned about being invited to the White House: Everyone in your life will suddenly have a very important message for you to deliver to the president. One friend, a Democrat, told me to ask the president to raise taxes. My Republican friend asked me to tell him to cut taxes. My mom reminded me she doesn’t pay taxes because she buys everything in cash, but to tell Obama that she loved him.

  That’s a characteristic of a lot of immigrants and definitely of Middle Easterners—we like to deal in cash and we keep it in secret accounts, or under our beds, or in the walls. That way, no one knows how much you have, and you’re ready to escape in case a revolution occurs. My grandmother used to keep all her money in her bra. We thought she was a D cup until we went to buy a house and she pulled the down payment out of her bra, revealing that she was only an A cup.

  I had no idea what the party would be like, but as the messages piled up I thought I would have to corner the president for a good hour to relay all the missives from my friends, family, and neighbors.

  When my wife and I arrived, we learned this was one of many Christmas parties the White House would be having during the holiday season. We also discovered we would only meet the president and first lady for five seconds total. Just long enough to take a picture and have me tell the president to raise taxes, then to reduce taxes, then that my mom doesn’t pay taxes but she loves him, and with the leftover time tell him all about my grandmother’s bra bank. Time was limited so I just ended up telling him my mother loved him. At least I delivered one crucial message.

  The best part of going to the White House was that it was a great date night for my wife and me. We had been in the trenches with our kids for a while and it gave us an evening to get away. There’s no better way to impress your wife than to tell her you’re taking her to a party at the house of the most powerful man in the world. Most of the night we just walked around eating free food and taking pictures with paintings of former presidents. As if to say, “We never met the real person, but we did once stand next to an image of him.”

  My wife worried that the pictures we took with the Obamas had not come out well. She claimed that when the cameraman told us to look, the president had put his arm around her waist, making her turn to him and not look at the camera.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you mean he put his arm around your waist? You mean flirtatiously?”

  “I just felt him pull me in tight so I looked at him.”

  “Pull you in tight? Who does he think he is? The president of the United States?”

  “I’m just saying that it messed up my picture concentration.”

  “You want me to go back and ask them to take another picture?”

  “No!”

  “I’d like to go back and ask him why he put his arm around your waist.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I can’t believe he touched you like that. What about me? I’m the one who got us the invite! The least he could’ve done was put his arm around both our waists. You know how many years I’ve been coming to D.C. to perform? You have any idea how many times I’ve had to deal with hecklers, defending this guy’s politics? I just want to be held.”

  Denver, Colorado

  Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, I was carrying a duffel bag through an airport on my way to a gig. It was a tense time in the world—not just for Middle Easterners like me, who because of my ethnicity might merit a more intimate pat-down by burly TSA guards, but also for regular folks worried that the al-Qaeda-looking hoodlum—that would be me—was stowing some sort of liquid in his duffel bag, and as soon as the plane reached thirty thousand feet and the seat-belt signs were turned off—­Kaboom! I would either unleash a liquid bomb or just get everyone wet. But really, really wet. So wet they would be terrorized with wetness.

  Rather than feel animosity toward my fellow travelers, I sympathized with them. After all, they thought I was trying to kill them, and even though I wasn’t, it was probably terrifying to have to walk around an airport knowing someone like me was nearby. I fit the profile—Middle Eastern male, between eighteen and thirty-five, Muslim, sometimes smarmy looking. The fact is, I was thirty at the time, so if I were a terrorist I would probably be at the tail end of my career. Terrorists are like football players in that they have short careers—the better the terrorist, the shorter the career.

  I’m Iranian but deeply Americanized, as I’ve been in the United States for most of my life. I love hamburgers, hot dogs, and Budweiser. (That last thing I don’t really love, but when I was in my fraternity in college it was the only thing we could afford. Yes, I was in a frat—Zeta Psi—during my “really trying super hard to blend in as an American” days.) I’m not very religious, but I’ve got Muslim friends whom I respect—does that make me Muslim-ish and, by association, fit me into the profile? The point is, I understood that I could be mistaken for a bad guy, and I felt sorry for the poor people who had to endure my terrifying presence on their flight.

  I did not begrudge anyone racially profiling me as I anxiously gripped my boarding pass and headed toward the gate. In fact, I started profiling myself. To begin with, why was I so paranoid if I wasn’t doing something illegal? How well did I really know myself? I was born in Iran, after all, and while the September 11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, innocent people cannot split hairs over geographic subtleties when their lives are in danger. I had packed my own duffel bag. I knew I had not packed a gun or a bomb. I did not own a gun or a bomb—but still I found myself creeping closer to security, wondering if the TSA guards would find the gun or the bomb that I had not packed and did not own.

  I knew how it would all play out—me, duffel bag in hand, California driver’s license in my front pocket ready to be flashed as proof of my American-ness, everyone else wondering when I was going to unleash my falafel-fueled fury. I would walk slowly through the metal detector and, of course, it would beep.

  “What have I done? Someone stop me!”

  “It’s okay, sir,” the security guard would caution. “Probably just your belt buckle.”

  “That’s what they all say. Check my bags. CHECK MY BAGS!”

  “The buckle’s made of metal, sir. Calm down. It’s typically the buckle.”

  “But you can’t be sure. People sneak guns and bombs on planes all the time! These metal detectors aren’t perfect! Frisk me, damn it! Anal cavity probe—pronto!”

  “You can walk through again if you’d like.”

  “Someone stop me! It should not be this easy to board an airplane!”

  Fortunately, it never came to this because the TSA just let me go through with no hassle. I think the reason was—and if you’re al-Qaeda reading this, please skip this section because I don’t want you figuring out how to get past the TSA—that I made a point to overenunciate my English. This ensured that they knew I was one of them and not some low-life terrorist. I found myself talking slowly: “Hell-oh my fell-oh American! I am just here to board the air-o-plane! Carry-ons? Just this American flag. That is ALL I
am carrying on!”

  And so, it was settled, I was not a terrorist. Or was I?

  Maybe I Am a Terrorist

  Doubts about my own innocence were innate by early 2009, when I landed in Denver to do some shows at the Denver Improv. I had not been following the news that day. A white guy from the club picked me up and immediately asked me what I thought about the arrest of Zazi, the terror suspect. I had no idea what he was talking about. He figured since I was of Middle Eastern descent, I would have an inside track. (I get these types of questions often: “What do you think of the recent hike in gas prices?” “Why are your people so pissed off?” “When is the next terrorist hit going down?”)

  I learned that the man’s full name was Najibullah Zazi and that he had been a Denver cab driver accused of planning suicide bombings in New York City subways. I didn’t think much of the case, but it was a bit suspicious that this guy had been arrested the same day I arrived in Denver.

  A few months later I was in Austin, Texas, doing a show and I had to drive to Houston in the morning. When I woke up, I turned on CNN to find a report about a guy flying his plane into the IRS building in Austin. I couldn’t believe it. What were the chances that I would be in Austin the same day there was a terrorist attack in that city? I watched and prayed that it wouldn’t be a Middle Easterner, and to my relief it turned out to be a disgruntled white guy. But then again, I’m Iranian. Iranians are white. Hmmm . . . Once again, I was beginning to suspect I was up to no good.

  Soon after I was at Los Angeles International Airport flying to Philadelphia to perform when I saw a headline in the newspaper about a lady named Jihad Jane. She had been arrested for trying to recruit al-Qaeda operatives out of her home in, where else, Philadelphia. Again, she was a white lady, but she had turned to a life of terrorism and acquired a cute Arab-sounding nickname. That I had been near these activities three times now was beginning to concern me. The fact that two of the wrongdoers were white people gave me a bit of relief. I was keeping score: White people: 2, Middle Easterners: 1.