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.”