By Anand Holla
 
Within three minutes of entering a little meeting room at the La Cigale hotel, Maz Jobrani has cracked thrice as many jokes. Not laugh-out-loud sorts, but clever, off-the-cuff kinds. Not because he must sound funny, but because he can’t help being.
Throwing a quick look around, the affable Iranian-American wonders aloud, smiling: “Why do my press conferences always have just two journalists?” What’s funnier, in this case, is that it’s true.
Not that the press matters to Jobrani, whose credit is so solid that his fans turned up in droves  on Wednesday for his sold-out show at the Al Wajba ballroom.
As we catch up before the show, Jobrani says, “With comedy, you talk about what’s on your mind. Comedy is like therapy. The more you do it, the more breakthroughs you have about yourself.”
The face of Middle Eastern humour in the West has earned his wisdom through experience. “Eventually, after 15 years of doing comedy, the person that’s on-stage becomes closer to the person off-stage,” Jobrani explains, “Without even knowing it, you are writing off-stage.”
No kidding. Moments before our chat, Jobrani was casually grilling a hotel staff on what the name means. An hour later, he would use all that ammunition to fuel his stand-up blitzkrieg on around 1,000 people.
Jobrani’s off-stage personality, in fact, blends quite seamlessly with that of his on-stage funnyman. A generous supply of smart humour is as free-flowing in both worlds.
He is sporting a horseshoe moustache for his upcoming Pink Panther-like comedy movie Jimmy Vestvood: Amerikan Hero — in which he will emerge as the first hero of Middle Eastern descent in Hollywood. Jobrani looks sharp. His eyes sparkle with confidence and his mischievous grin punctuates the points he makes.
“As a comedian, you don’t think about being a voice, you just think about being funny,” he says of being hailed as possibly the most popular comic voice to satire on Middle Easterners being misunderstood in the West.
“I didn’t set out to do that, I just wanted to be funny,” Jobrani says, “People from the Middle East come up to me after shows, and say they are happy that I show them in a different light. I just do what I do.”
But there’s no denying that by joking about racial profiling, Islamophobia, being Iranian, or being Muslim in the post-9/11 world, Jobrani, over the years, has lightened the tension dogging such issues. So is Jobrani’s comedy borne out of angst?
“Absolutely,” he says, “All comedy comes from anger, frustration, or out of not understanding something. You go on stage and say this happened to me… can you believe it? You talk about how frustrating it is to know, for instance, if Muslims were discriminated against.”
On the other hand, it’s difficult to make a joke on winning a lottery funny, Jobrani feels. “You can crack a joke on that, but it’s better if your humour comes from angst,” he reasons.
It’s easy to give into Jobrani’s wit not merely because he is effortless but because he has made the most of his Iranian-American vantage point.
Born in Tehran, Jobrani grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area after his parents moved to the US soon after the Iranian Revolution. He was six and his first shot at acting — playing a tree in a school play — planted the acting bug in his head.
At 12, he developed a passion for acting in plays. “Around the same time, I started watching stand-up comedy. Eddie Murphy was my hero. I wanted to be like him,” Jobrani says.
His parents though pushed him into studying something more “serious.” But after doing Political Science to fulfil their wishes of seeing him become a lawyer, Jobrani changed tracks and signed up for a Ph.D. at the UCLA so that he became a professor.
Much to his mother’s exasperation, Jobrani dropped out only to embrace his moment of clarity — acting and comedy. “I was 26 when I finally decided to start acting professionally. I started doing comedy,” he grins.
So life-altering was that decision that Jobrani has maintained that the day he decided to act is when he considered himself successful. Since then, he has starred in films like Friday After Next, 13 Going on 30, and The Interpreter, and TV shows like Knights of Prosperity and Life on a Stick.
But Jobrani hit big time with the Axis of Evil, a rollicking comedy tour that he did with Arab-American stand-up comics like Egyptian-American Ahmed Ahmed and Palestinian-American Aron Kader.
Like rockstars on a wild run, the trio pulled off 27 shows in 30 days across half a dozen countries in the Middle East, including performing in front of the Jordanian monarch. The Axis of Evil Comedy Central Special premiered in 2007 as the first American TV show with an all Middle Eastern-American cast.
Sample a Jobrani joke from his Axis of Evil tour that lampoons the post-9/11 paranoia: “You never turn on the TV and see a United Airlines commercial with a Middle Eastern pilot. You never see me standing there like, ‘Come, fly the friendly skies… I dare you.’”
The rules for performing stand-up in the Middle East are simple, feels Jobrani: No sex, no religion and no politics. “The number one rule is no local politics!” he laughs. “But the good news is that I am not even aware of it. I am coming from 12 time zones away, you know.”
And sometimes, you can’t fish for jokes from news. “Like I don’t have any joke on what’s happening in Ukraine,” Jobrani says, “But back when George Bush was the President of USA, you didn’t have to write a joke. You just would report on what Bush did that day and it was funny.”
On the other hand, it’s a lot harder to write material on Obama, he admits. “Comedy is all about what’s on your mind. It’s about story-telling. So you lay out the story and then bring the joke,” says Jobrani.
The writing process for Jobrani has evolved considerably. He now writes mostly on stage. “Once an idea comes to me, I go to local clubs in Los Angeles, and I riff on it. You know, keep talking and a minute later, I find a couple of jokes,” says Jobrani.
Once in a while, Jobrani encounters a stand-up comic’s worst fears. “Sometimes the audience is staring still. But if you really think your joke is funny, you must return to it, find a way to get past and make it funny.”
On Wednesday night though, none of Jobrani’s jokes was lost on the audience that was erupting in howls.
Here’s a quick run through some: “Every year, I come to Doha, I see 10 new buildings and one new parking lot.”
“Parking in Doha is basically driving for two hours and then coming back to the same place.”
“Qatar, you are going to win the World Cup because every other team will melt!”
“I am Iranian, my wife is Indian, our maid is Guatemalean and our children… are confused.”
And there was of course his classic on him not having performed in Iran in a decade because the authorities would have arranged “a special show” for him in prison.
Much of his humour came off impromptu talks with the audience. This confidence to “riff” comes from finding your voice, believes Jobrani.
“When you first start out, you don’t know what you want to talk about. You have jokes that are all over the place; about your parents, college, sex, everything.”
Seven years of comedy later, Jobrani found his voice. “I could decide that THIS is what I want to talk about,” he says, “Comedy is like going to a psychologist and just talking. 15 years later, you tell yourself… Oh, now I understand who I am.”
When asked about how fondly does he, at 42, look back, he sighs, “Oh man, don’t bring up Father Time!”
With a twinkle in his eyes, Jobrani says he misses being young. “But I also enjoy the progress and knowledge that comes with getting older,” he says.
“I always tell people to do whatever they love to. That’s because you will blink your eyes and time would have passed. I say that as I continue to procrastinate about taking piano lessons,” Jobrani laughs.
He should take them before he changes his mind, right? “Definitely man,” he says, grinning, “The next time I come to Doha, it will hopefully be for my piano concert.”


Related Story