Personal and Political

Tissa Hami strode onstage at a Boston comedy club this past August in black pants, a thigh-length black coat and a head covering, stared down her audience and deadpanned "I really should be wearing a long coat but, well," and her voice suddenly turned valley girl, "I was feeling kind of slutty today!"

The crowd erupted in relieved laughter, and Hami, 31, still a newbie on the Boston stand-up circuit with only two years under her belt, went on to launch sardonic riffs on fake passports, the racism she faced as an Iranian growing up in the Boston suburbs and the dearth of other female Muslim comics: "Well, I didn't want the competition so I stoned them."

She probably won't have to revert to sticks and stones since there really are only a handful of female Muslim comics performing in the United States (plus British-born Shazia Mirza, whose act draws a crowd whenever she crosses the pond). In many ways they don't resemble each other much beyond their religion, a penchant for edgy humor and jokes about getting through airport security. Their families are from very different countries, including Iran, Pakistan and the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, and they certainly don't agree on the need to be activists or to "represent."

Using the personal, however, has never seemed so political when these women do it. In a post-9/11 world where, as New York-based sketch comic Negin Farsad, 28, puts it, Islamic people are portrayed in the media as either terrorists or "dusty people hanging out in villages with no jobs," their wittily crafted personal stories and one-liners about Islam, immigrant parents and racial profiling are sure to prick the interest – ire – of their audience.

Their male counterparts, including Palestinian American stand up comic Dean Obeidallah and a well-publicized group called The Arabian Knights, may tread similar ground, but they don't have to struggle with decisions about dressing in hijab on or off stage, nor do they get to use jokes about virginity, sexism and the pressures to get married.

'Bootleg Islam'

Farsad, a veteran of the New York underground sketch comedy scene, is an Iranian American who plumbed her Iranian background for a one-woman show, "Bootleg Islam," that quickly sold out to audiences at last August's New York International Fringe Festival. The show got a rare mention in The Wall Street Journal and was included in a piece about political theater in The New York Sun.

Yet in many ways Farsad's show hardly seems political. She does gently comic impressions of her family in Iran, including a playboy, hard-drinking uncle whom she casts as a Prohibition-era gangster, and one of her cousins, a wide-eyed, 23-year-old virgin wrapped in a chador and looking forward to seeing her husband naked on her wedding night. Farsad said she was startled by some of the responses.

"I think one of the funniest things for me was that people said after the show 'Hey, that was really funny and it was really educational,' and I never set out to do anything educational," she said. "I guess I take it for granted, but most people don't know what life is like in these other countries."

"I think people are very curious about the Middle East; they're very curious about Muslims," agreed Hami, who was born in a northern province of Iran and moved to the States when she was 5.

Hami had never seriously considered taking her sense of humor to the stage until 9/11 happened and she became frustrated by the repetitively negative coverage Muslims were getting in the media. So she took an adult education class on stand-up comedy and two years ago she stepped onstage for the first time at the Comedy Studio in Cambridge, wrapped in hijab clothing, terrified and determined to make a mark for her sex and her religion.