The joke's on you: Muslim, Arab comedienne laughs in face of hostility

“If there was an Oppression Olympics, I would get gold; I am a Palestinian, Muslim with cerebral palsy from New Jersey with no health insurance, so if you don’t feel better about yourself, maybe you should.”

This is how Maysoon Zayid introduces herself to her audience.

Maysoon is a disabled Palestinian-American actress, comedian and activist; regarded as one of America’s first female Muslim comedians and the first person ever to perform stand up in Palestine and Jordan, although she is wary of such a claim “because maybe there was someone in the 1950s that we just don’t know about.”

She didn’t start out wanting to be a comedian, her dream was to star in the US daytime soap General Hospital, but she realised when auditioning that there weren’t people who looked like her on American television.

Completely unaware that comedy was its own art form, she signed up for a comedy class and was an instant success because telling jokes was a “natural talent I never knew I had until I did my first stand up show.” She soon started performing comedy sketches in New York clubs, where none of the other performers “cared that I was brown, Muslim, disabled, or female. They just hated me because I got more laughs.”

In the Middle East, because they weren’t used to stand up comedy, most people didn’t know what to expect when she was on stage, which she thought was the ideal atmosphere for a comedian; the element of surprise. They also didn’t expect her to be telling her jokes in Arabic. “I use a heavy Palestinian farmer’s dialect that they don’t expect to come out of the mouth of someone born and raised in New Jersey.”

There is a myth in the US that women are not funny, so she enjoyed being able to perform stand up comedy in a place where people did not have that bias. Her favourite shows were in Jerusalem and Beirut where she performed uncensored and uncovered (not wearing a hijab) which Maysoon says were “so shocking to Americans. I honestly feel less censored in the Arab world than I do stateside.”

Despite breaking so many boundaries and challenging conventional stereotypes, Maysoon is currently facing a new challenge as an Arab comedian in the US, where there is significant hostility towards Muslims – particularly with the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.

When Maysoon and her friend and producing partner Dean Obeidallah launched the New York Arab American Comedy Festival, one of the goals was to show that not all Arabs are Muslims. So Maysoon’s experience as an Arab and Muslim comic are different because people’s experiences as a result of faith and ethnicity are not identical. “Sadly, this is the first time in my career I have felt unsafe as a somewhat public figure who is Muslim,” she admits. Although she is often threatened by strangers, she recognises that that anger is “influenced by the Muslim-hate spewed by politicians and the media.”

She constantly finds herself in the role of educator, something she does not enjoy. “I’m sick of it and I am ashamed that bigotry is so mainstream in the US,” she says.

It is this same bigotry that ironically inspires Maysoon’s work. “Anger and pain fuel a lot of my comedy. From day one, I have always joked about Israel and Palestine because that subject infuriates me.”

All of the prejudice and discrimination Maysoon has experienced has been limited to online abuse. She claims that “people don’t have the guts to confront me in person.”

“I don’t feel like I need to make people like Muslims through my comedy,” she insists. Instead, she sees her goal as making people laugh and showing them “how ridiculous the hate is.” In Maysoon’s view, her job as a comedian is to make people laugh, not to convert them.

It is the same way that she approaches her disability in her comedy. “I am the first shaking comedian without a drug problem,” she often tells her audiences.

Because of society’s attitude to people living with disability, success for disabled performers is almost impossible, she believes. Indeed, she believes that “Hollywood hates disabled performers.” She sees no other explanation for the lack of positive images of disability in the American media. “We are the largest minority and the least represented in entertainment. It is a constant battle and much more difficult career-wise than being Palestinian, Muslim, or female, which is saying a lot.”

She is still pursuing many dreams, including her own talk show, and “of course, I will also continue pursuing my goal of being on General Hospital.” But ultimately, she is hoping she can also help bring an end to able-bodied actors playing disabled characters on screen. “It is cartoonish and offensive. In my opinion, disability, much like race, cannot be acted.”

Find out more about Maysoon Zayid by logging onto her website.