Allah Made Me Funny, will first make you burst into side-splitting laughter and then leave you pondering over your own prejudices, writes Shivangi Ambani-Gandhi
In a 2-day comedy festival, with over 200 comedians, it is tough to keep the audience laughing through your hour-long gig. It is even tougher to keep them thinking long and hard after the final jibe has been made.
The trio of funny Muslims, Allah Made Me Funny, were a comic act with a message performing at the World’s Funniest Island comedy festival held at Cockatoo Island on October 17 and 18, 2009.
“Sir Peter Ustinov once said: ‘Comedy is just a funny way of being serious,’” Founding member of Allah…Azhar Usman says. “That’s the history of standup as an art form. It is born out of the politics of racial agitation of the 1940s and 1950s in the United States, developed by Black American and Jewish American comedians,” he adds.
Allah Made Me Funny confronts every stereotypical notion about Muslims and demolishes it, while eliciting side-splitting laughter. During his gig at Cockatoo Island, Usman said, “What are the two biggest stereotypes about Muslims? Muslim men are terrorists and Muslim women are oppressed. If they had ever been to a Muslim household they would find that it is in fact the exact opposite. Muslim women are terrorists and Muslim men are oppressed.”
On a more serious note, Usman writes in our email interview, “There is a long history of Western portrayals of Muslims as barbaric and violent. Interestingly, in the Middle Ages, European Christendom held two dominant views regarding Muslims: that they were violent, and that they were sexually promiscuous. Nowadays, so-called “Westerners” tend to think of Muslims as violent and sexually repressed. That’s an interesting shift, and probably the subject of a fascinating PhD dissertation. I sure would like to know what the hell happened along the way!”
The other myth that the Allah… trio often try to dispel is the notion of the homogeneity of Islamic communities in the US and around the world. In fact the trio is exemplary of the diversity of the community: Allah… comprises of Indian-American, Usman, African-American Bryant "Preacher" Moss and Arab-American Mohammed "Mo" Amer.
This also means that each of them finds unending fodder for comedy in their own cultural backyards. “My standup is very personal. I talk about myself, my life, my experiences, and my own ideas,” says Usman. The trio pick on seemingly innocuous activities that often turn into tense situations for Muslims: greeting fellow Muslims in Arabic in public, calling out to a naughty nephew named Mohammed in a crowded mall, and the worst of all, going into an airport.
Amer draws on his Palestinian background and his very Arab family to elicit laughs over everything from checkpoints to marital misunderstandings. Moss offers a warm and irreverent perspective on being both Black and Muslim. Meanwhile Usman can hardly resist taking on Bollywood dance sequences and Indian accents and mispronunciations.
Usman also does a show with a couple of other Indian-American comedians called Make Chai Not War. “The present tensions between religious identity groups in South Asia are very modern manifestations of distortions of religious teachings,” he says. “It is religious fundamentalism of the ugliest kind, because it seeks to reduce hundreds of millions of people into simple labels. Our show acts as a small antidote to that phenomenon by recalling the good ole days when Hindus and Muslims lived and worked together as brothers and sisters in Mother India.”
Usman is also currently working on a humour book project titled Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Muslims but Were Afraid to Ask (No Really Afraid!). He also works as a writer and producer, and is currently developing treatments for two screenplays, as well as two TV shows. He is star and creator of Tinku’s World, a semi-scripted alternative web comedy show
Besides comedy, Usman is involved in various forms of activism. “My comedy is supplemental to the rest of my life, in that regard, where I find myself involved with all sorts of activism and social projects besides my work as a standup.”
He helped co-found the Nawawi Foundation (www.nawawi.org), a research institution that primarily supports the ongoing research and academic writing of the Scholar-in-Residence, Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah. “He is one of my shaykhs (spiritual guide), and his writings inspire and inform just about every aspect of my life and thought,” he says.
Usman was also inspired in his teenage years by alternative readings of U.S. history, including Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States and the books of Naom Chomsky. “I also came of age against the organic musical phenomenon of hip-hop and rap music, heavily inspired by the lyrics of Public Enemy and the like.”
However, he was always a funny kid, he says. “The class clown, so to say. But I never imagined a life as a professional standup comedian. I finally decided to try standup in early 2001, and I quit my day job as a lawyer to pursue my comedy career full time in early 2004.”
Since then he has toured around the world, including a short tour of India in 2008 and the first standup comedy show in the history of Egypt in 2007. He has even done a private show for former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, while he was still the sitting leader. “It was at a guy's house in Dallas, Texas. That was one of the most surreal nights of my life. I remember him laughing. A little.”
For more information visit www.allahmademefunny.com and www.azhar.com
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