by Maz Jobrani
Whenever the passport control guys would see I was born in Iran, a little shimmer would come into their eyes. They’d give me a knowing nod as if to say, “Welcome brother! I am sure you have brought us some bazookas from your country of Iran. We will make the drop when the time is right.” I did not want to disappoint, so I would smile back and mumble in broken Arabic, “Salaam alaikum,” which means “hello.” But my “salaam alaikum” was meant to also convey, “Yes, I have the bazookas. I will make delivery as soon as you stamp my passport and let me in.”
I don’t know why passport control in almost every country is set up to make you nervous. Do these guys watch episodes of Homeland in preparation for work every day? For whatever reason I always feel nervous and, depending on where I am, I try to show my allegiance to them and their country in any way possible. When I land in the United States it’s a hearty, “What’s up, sir? Good to be back stateside.” I can even muster up a southern drawl if need be. In Lebanon, “Salaam alaikum, habibi!” (“habibi” means “dear”). When I’m in Sweden: “Hello my fancy blond friend. Big fan of the Swedish Chef and Björn Borg!”
The first time I went to Saudi Arabia, I had to be prepared to lie to the guys at passport control. They did not allow live public performances in Saudi, so you were not permitted into the country on a performer’s visa. We basically had a prince who supported what we were doing and instructed us to tell the passport guys that we were consultants coming in to consult on something. I was never briefed as to what, exactly, we were consulting on, but it was something big, and very important, and we were going to consult the hell out of it. As I approached the passport guy, I could feel the back of my shirt getting drenched with sweat. My nerves were getting the best of me. What if they figured out my real reason for being there and arrested me? I had heard on Fox News that they cut off your hands for stealing in Saudi Arabia. What would they do if they found out you were planning on telling jokes? Illegally! Maybe they would cut off my tongue. Maybe they would cut off my tongue and hands so I couldn’t hold a microphone again! I felt like the guy in the beginning of Midnight Express when he’s trying to sneak heroin out of Turkey. Except I was trying to sneak jokes into Saudi Arabia.
I hate lying to authorities to begin with, and this was Saudi Arabia, where said authorities were probably just waiting for fibbers so they could make an example out of me. I could see the headline: “Iranian-American Jokester Attempts to Make Joke Out of Anti-Joking Laws.” I was just hoping they would see the American passport and not bother asking too many questions. As I approached, there was a British guy on the other side going through passport control at the same time. When the Saudis saw his nationality, both my passport control guy and the guy doing the paperwork for the British guy perked up and said in broken English, “British?”
“Yes,” the man answered.
“James Bond!”
“No, I’m not James Bond.”
“Yes, yes, James Bond!”
“No, no. Really, I am not James Bond.”
“Yes, British. James Bond.”
I don’t know why these guys were so impressed to see a British dude, but I encouraged it. I figured if they were busy being starstruck by a fake James Bond—who was wearing prescription glasses and carrying a leather dossier—then they’d let me slip right through. I could have easily pointed out the un-James-Bond-like qualities of this guy: “Bond has twenty-twenty vision and would never carry a case like that. He also has better teeth than this guy and is well built. This guy is too skinny to be Bond. He looks more like Mr. Bean.”
Instead I smiled at my passport agent and agreed with him. “James Bond,” I said.
He understood. “Oh yes, James Bond.”
I even started speaking in broken English to blend in. “Yes, yes. I say him James Bond.”
As the agent looked longingly at the retreating double agent, he quickly stamped my passport and let me through. Saved by 007!
Conversely, the worst experiences I’ve ever had going through passport control always occur in Kuwait. For some reason every time I’ve gone there, they’ve detained me and asked extra questions. I don’t know why, but I’m told that Kuwait does not get along with Iran. So a typical experience at passport control in Kuwait, for me, might go like this. The guy will see my American passport and say,
“American? Great!”
Then he will look inside and see the place of my birth,
“Born in Iran? Wait! What is your father’s name?”
“My father passed away. His name was Khosro.”
“What is your grandfather’s name?”
“Well he passed away even before, but his name was Jabbar.”
The whole time I’m thinking, How far back are we going with this thing? Is this passport control or Ancestry.com?
One time it seemed like Inspector Clouseau would keep going: “What is your great-grandfather’s name? What was HIS great-grandfather’s name? And his? And his? Has anyone in your family ever been named Moishe? I knew it! You’re Jewish!” Fortunately, he just looked at me and simply said, “You wait. I be back.”
Whenever they say that to me—“You wait. I be back”—I always get nervous and start fidgeting. I had not done anything, but I also didn’t know what kind of crap my grandfather might have been into. I thought Clouseau might come back and say, “Your grandfather has a parking violation from ninety-seven years ago. He was parked in a handicap camel parking zone. It is way overdue. You owe us two million dollars!”
Ironically, whenever you’re leaving a country, the folks at passport control and security don’t seem to be as concerned. I remember leaving Kuwait once, and the same country that had given me a full interrogation coming in didn’t even care what I had in my bags as I left. I put my backpack on the conveyor belt and went through the metal detector. As I went through I noticed that instead of observing the contents of my bag, the security guy was busy checking out the ass of the lady who was in front of me in line. I could’ve been walking through with a Kalashnikov and he could have cared less. He was more concerned with getting a peek than stopping me from hijacking a plane. Who knew that all al-Qaeda had to do to hijack a plane was start working with Kim Kardashian.
Anyway, back in Lebanon, passing through the Beirut airport I was Iranian-ing myself up as much as possible. “Salaam! Salaam!” Hand to my chest in respect with a slight bow and a smile. A look in my eyes as if to say, “I’ve got the weapons. I’ve got plenty and plenty of weapons.” The whole time I was sweating, praying they did not look me up on YouTube and see all my jokes making fun of the Iranian leadership. “Do you guys have WiFi at the airport? Because if you do, I just recommend that you never watch anything on YouTube. You can never trust anything you see on there. All doctored videos. Total American propaganda.”
Funny Shiite Coming Sunni
Lebanon is a country of contradictions. You have so many different political factions and religions that it would take a Ph.D. in political science to understand them. Fortunately, I had a few months of Ph.D. education under my belt. There are Christians and Druze and Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims and a million other groups in Lebanon. This makes it particularly hard when you’re a comedian who likes to work the crowd and build jokes around the audience.
Now here’s a little secret for comedy fans: A lot of times when we do crowd work, the jokes we seem to come up with on the fly are jokes we’ve used a thousand times. But sometimes that can start to feel a bit hacky, so I actually like it when I’m given something unexpected from the audience. I did a show one time in New York and a guy in the audience was named Osama Hussein. Yes, this poor fellow had the first name of Osama bin Laden and the last name of Saddam Hussein. What are the chances? That’s like being named Adolf Mussolini during World War II, or like being a Red Sox fan named DiMaggio Mantle. The only way it could’ve gotten worse is if his middle name were Kim Jong-il—Osama Kim Jong-
il Hussein. So obviously, when Osama Hussein comes to your show, you’ve just been gifted five minutes of new material by the comedy gods. Just the time it takes to inspect his ID to make sure he’s legit takes a good two or three minutes.
In Lebanon, this doesn’t always happen. That’s because there are a lot of Christian Lebanese and they do not have the types of names that will help with your act. One time I was in Beirut doing a show on top of a bar. That’s not a misprint—I was performing a stand-up comedy routine on top of a bar where patrons drink alcohol, just like in the movie Coyote Ugly. I had just done some shows in Saudi Arabia the night before, where drinking is strictly prohibited, and now I was in Beirut, where not only was drinking allowed, but they had me standing in front of a hundred bottles of alcohol telling jokes. Before I went up, the club manager asked if I wanted anything to drink.
“You wouldn’t happen to have any tequila?” I inquired.
The Lebanese are proud people. The manager responded confidently. “Of course we have tequila. Why wouldn’t we have tequila?”
“Would you happen to have Don Julio?”
The manager, feeling challenged: “Of course we have Don Julio. Why wouldn’t we have Don Julio?”
“Can I have a double shot of Don Julio on the rocks?”
Manager, now cocky: “You will have a whole bottle!”
“No, no,” I said, worried. “I don’t need a whole bottle.”
“This is Lebanon. You’re getting a whole bottle!”
And so a bottle of Don Julio was designated as my personal bottle for the evening and brought to me in the manager’s office, where I was feeling fairly smug about things. Eat that, Bill Cosby.
Now, I don’t like being drunk onstage. If I ever drink during a show, it’s usually one glass that I will sip during my set. But this was Lebanon and I was telling jokes on top of a bar, so things worked differently. I went onstage . . . I mean I went on a bar with my glass of Don Julio, leaving the bottle behind. At a certain point I decided to riff on a joke about how hard it is to travel being a Middle Easterner and asked a guy in the audience his name. I was expecting Ahmed or Mohammad or Ali—something I could work with. Instead the guy had the most common name ever.
“Joseph.”
“Joseph? As in Joey?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Is that a made-up name?”
“No. It is my given name.”
“Oh, okay. Then your friend there, what’s his name?”
“Anthony.”
“As in Tony?”
“Yes.”
“And the guy next to him?”
“Vincent.”
“As in Vinny? What are you guys, the Sopranos?”
“No,” he said without a hint of a smile. “We’re Christian.”
Buying time, I reached for the tequila and took a sip. I hadn’t noticed, but I had worked my way to the bottom of the glass as I struggled to turn the joke. Soon enough, a waiter showed up with another glass. I think the manager saw that I was struggling a bit and decided to send me more inspiration. Besides, this was Lebanon, and it was my bottle for the night; he wanted to make sure I finished it.
There I was with two double glasses of Don Julio warming my belly, standing on a bar in Beirut, trying to figure out my next move when I noticed a group of women in the corner laughing, talking, and completely ignoring me as if I weren’t standing on a bar with microphone in hand.
“Excuse me, ladies. What’s going on here?”
They were screaming and yelling. “Bachelorette party!” one of them shouted, indicating I should stop bothering them.
“Bachelorette party? We have a stand-up comedy show going on.”
More hollering. “Whatever, dude.”
“No, ladies, this is an advertised show. These hundred and fifty people staring up at the bar have paid to see me perform. You have to keep it down.”
“Woo-hoo!” they hollered. “Keep it down!”
“No, you’re not supposed to yell ‘Woo-hoo, keep it down’ at me. I’m telling you to keep it down.”
More screaming and shouting, and I’m on the verge of losing control.
“Why is the bachelorette wearing a penis balloon on her head? This poor girl is getting married. She’s got many years of humiliation ahead of her. Don’t make her wear the penis balloon.”
“Penis balloon!” they hollered. It was clear they did not understand why I was standing on the bar. Everything I said, they repeated. They thought I was leading them in cheers instead of performing stand-up.
Another sip of tequila. A new glass arrived.
To recap: For a comedian who does Middle Eastern jokes, names like Joey, Tony, and Vinny can really throw you for a loop. Add to that the fact that you’re performing on a bar, sipping your third glass of a double tequila, and engaging in call and response with a bachelorette party, and it can cause real confusion. Was I in Beirut or Las Vegas?
Making things worse, a man who was the chaperone for the bachelorette party approached the stage—which, have I mentioned, was just a bar?—and asked me in broken English when I was going to be finished telling my stories. It seemed the women were getting restless and had heard enough of me babbling into a microphone. They wanted dance music to get the party started. He actually interrupted me midjoke as 150 people were watching my set.
“You. When you finish?”
“Excuse me?”
“When you stop?”
I checked my watch. “I’ve got another half hour. This is a comedy show. They paid me to perform tonight.”
Obviously a professional in his chosen field, he was prepared to work through such trivial roadblocks. “You sing?”
“Do I sing?”
“When you do some songs?”
“I’m not singing. Me do comedy. Ha-ha. Jokey joke.”
“Not funny.”
“You barely speak English. How do you know I’m not funny?”
“I know. You not funny.”
Great, half loaded on tequila in front of a less than ordinary crowd, I run into the Lebanese Simon Cowell. “So you’re a judge of comedy in a language you don’t even speak?” I asked. “Go over there and sit down next to the girl with the penis balloon on her head so I can finish my show.”
At this point he didn’t look too happy with me. I’m not sure if he understood what I was saying, but he seemed upset. He was holding a small bowl of cashews and popping them into his mouth, just crunching the nuts slowly and staring at me. I didn’t know if he was going to pull out a gun and shoot me or if he was blitzed out of his head even more than I was.
Trying to lighten the mood, I asked, “What’re you eating?”
“Nuts.”
“Throw me one.”
He reached into the bowl and tossed a cashew in my direction. I was at least five feet above him and the cashew sailed high overhead in what seemed like slow motion. This was risky; in fact, it was the tequila talking. If it had hit me in the eye, or I had somehow reached for it and lost my balance, I would have ended up looking like an idiot. Even worse, I could’ve fallen off the bar and ended up in a Lebanese hospital. But I kept my composure and somehow snapped the nut out of thin air with my mouth—like a seal at the circus. The audience was impressed: a roaring round of applause. And the chaperone, head hung in defeat, waddled back to the bachelorettes. Bill Cosby NEVER did that!
Making Hezbollah Laugh
I was being exposed to all the different religions and people of the country and at some point someone thought it would be a good idea for me and the Axis of Evil comedians to set up a meeting with Hezbollah leadership and film it. We were in the middle of a five-country tour and had been filming the whole thing to come out with a “behind the scenes” documentary that we would air on Showtime Arabia, a cable network that showed Western programs. Our meeting w
ith Hezbollah would be part of this new format. I guess having three Middle Eastern–American comedians meet with Hezbollah would make good television, right? What nobody thought about was the fact that the United States considers Hezbollah a terrorist organization and would probably not encourage three of its citizens to set up a meeting and film it—even if we were comedians. I can imagine the State Department representative discouraging us.
“Hezbollah is a terrorist organization.”
“Yeah, but we’re comics, so it’s cool.”
“They are a TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.”
“We just want to talk to them. Maybe tell a few jokes.”
“THEY ARE TERRORISTS! THEY WILL KIDNAP YOU!”
“We understand that, but do you think they will laugh at our jokes? Kidnappers have to laugh too, right?”
The person making the introductions told us that our “fixer” would meet us in the parking lot of a grocery store to take us to the meeting with Hezbollah. Anytime you hear the word “fixer” in the Middle East, there is cause to be nervous. In Los Angeles, where I live, a fixer is someone who comes to your house and fixes the washing machine. In foreign countries, a fixer is a guy who is connected and can get you into seedy situations. As we waited for our fixer, I had a feeling he wouldn’t be showing up with a tool belt.
The other comedians and I were waiting in two cars in a grocery store parking lot; the fixer was running late. The more we waited, the more nervous I became. I kept thinking of the opening scene of The Insider with Russell Crowe, in which the Al Pacino character sets up a meeting with Hezbollah and they throw a burlap sack over his head and rush him to the rendezvous with guns drawn. I felt like we were about to be given the same burlap sack treatment. I told one of the Axis comics that this is how every bad kidnapping movie begins—with the victims waiting in a parking lot, in the back of a van, to meet the bad guys. What had seemed like an interesting idea when we were first presented with it was beginning to feel like a really, really bad idea. Also, it was a sunny day. The last thing I wanted was to not be able to enjoy the great weather because I had a burlap sack over my head.
