SILVERDOCS: Stand Up
Here’s one you might reasonably assume you’d misheard: “I doubt I would ever have gotten into stand-up comedy if not for 9/11.” The speaker is Tissa Hami, one of the five subjects of Stand-Up: Muslim American Comics Come of Age, local D.C. filmmaker Glenn Baker’s almost too-brisk profile of a loose group of comics who have banded together to challenge the perception that all Muslims are humorless fundamentalists. While Hami is the only one of the five here who didn’t begin performing until after the terror attacks (and perhaps not coincidentally, the only one for whom comedy is not a full-time gig), all of them say that the blanket vilification of Muslims that followed 9/11 sharpened their sense of their own religious heritage.
Dean Obeidallah, a former lawyer and off-camera Saturday Night Live staffer who has gone on to produce the Muslim-themed The Watch List for Comedy Central, says he never even thought of himself as a Muslim-American until after the attacks. Like Maysoon Zayid, another of the comics here, Obeidallah grew up in New Jersey, where “there were two ethnic groups: Italians and my dad.”
Ahmed Ahmed, meanwhile, laments that the only roles Hollywood ever offered were terrorists – the clip of his performance from the 1996 should-they-shoot-the-hijacked-airliner-down-or-shouldn’t-they thriller Executive Decision is one of the biggest laughs in the documentary. (They paid him $30,000 for three weeks’ work, he says, by way of bashful justification.)
Stand Up is always lively, and devotes just enough of its 54-minute running time to performance clips to give us a sense of each comic’s sensibility. Still, one might have wished for more material on the obstacles these artists face from more conservative quarters of the Muslim community. Hami is the only comic who deals with this head-on, stating flatly that she’d be arrested if she stepped onstage to tell jokes in her native Iran. While waiting to begin her set at a mosque, she asks, “Do other religions pray before a comedy show?” Meanwhile, Zayid (sample joke: “I’m a virgin by choice: My father’s choice”) tells us that her Palestinian dad couldn’t be prouder of her. Then she points out his uncanny facial resemblance to Saddam Hussein.
Stand Up screened only one time at SILVERDOCS, but check out the film's web site for updates on when you might have another chance to see it.