Sarfraz Manzoor

It is Wednesday evening and inside London’s Hammersmith Apollo the African American comedian Chris Rock is sharing his theory for why black women dislike black men dating white women. ‘Its very simple: black women don’t find white men attractive’ he says ‘a black women will not sleep with most white guys but a black man will near enough f**k any white woman.’ The audience takes a collective intake of breath. ‘A black man won’t even care if the woman is fat’ continues Rock ‘he’s just thinking there’s more white to f**k!’ The crowd shriek and whoop. Amongst those cheering are more than a few black men sitting with their white girlfriends. This, it strikes me, is why Chris Rock is a comedy genius: he uses humour to take audiences where they might otherwise fear to tread. He is utterly fearless in his subject matter and is willing to smash taboos and say the unsayable and in so doing he not only makes us laugh he also makes us think.

Having the chance to witness Chris Rock was thrilling but it was also rather depressing as it made me wonder why it was that some minorities have managed to produce great comedians while others have not. The African American community for example has produced Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor and Chris Rock while the impact of Jewish comedy barely needs to be stated- everyone from Lenny Bruce to Woody Allen to Jerry Seinfeld. And then you have Muslims. They don’t, it is fair to say have a huge reputation for mirth-making. You only need to think back to the riots that greeted the publication of the Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad or more recently the case of British school teacher Gill Gibbons who was threatened with 40 lashes by the Sudanese government for naming a teddy bear Mohammed. And just this week we hear that a story based on the Three Little Pigs has been turned down from a government agency’s annual awards because the subject matter could offend Muslims. You would be forgiven for thinking Muslims were a pretty sour-faced lot who are quick to take offence. But I know, from growing up in a Muslim family who were hysterical in both senses of the word, that this just isn’t true. That was why I set out in a BBC Radio 4 programme to be broadcast on Friday to try and find out why Muslims have this humourless reputation and meet some of those who are trying to challenge this image.

Muslim comedy may not be the oxymoron some may suspect but it is still in its infancy. The success of shows such as Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at Number 42 may have pushed British Asian comedy into the mainstream but none of the comedians was Muslim. In Britain Shazia Mirza achieved some notoriety following September 11 with her line ‘my name is Shazia Mirza- or at least that’s what it says on my pilots licence’. She has since been reluctant to describe herself as a Muslim comedienne. She refused to participate in the radio programme. Instead I spoke to Jeff Mirza who is not related but is also a British Muslim comedian. Although he is a Muslim his material isn’t really about the faith, its more gentle observational comedy about coming from a particular culture which just happens to be Muslim; if anything I thought his humour was very British. He isn’t out to shock or satirise or break any boundaries but actually the very fact that he’s a Muslim and trying to make people laugh is pretty ground-breaking. British Muslim comedians may still be thin on the ground but across the Atlantic there are more signs of a growing confidence in Muslim comedy. In Canada one of the highest rated sitcoms is called ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie’ and depicts the lives of the Muslim population of a fictional prairie town in rural Canada. In a piece for G2 last year I interviewed Azhar Usman, one of the American Muslim stand-ups in a travelling tour called Allah Made Me Funny. Curious to see how a British audience would take to Azhar and his fellow comics, I went to see the Allah Made Me Funny show in London for myself. Outside the main hall I saw a man selling t-shirts saying ‘Muslims do it 5 times a day’ and inside the audience were doing something you would think Muslims never do: laughing and having a good time. It shouldn’t have surprised me to see Muslims having a good time, but to be honest it did a little. As a Muslim myself I know Muslims aren’t like they are sometimes depicted. It is not as if have a less entertaining or amusing time with my Muslim friends than with non-Muslim ones.

All the Muslim comedians I spoke to were keen to assure me that Islam was not incompatible with laughter, that Muslims were allowed to have a sense of humour. And yet the common thread running through ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie’ and the comedy of Jeff Mirza and Azhar Usman was that it was all rather gentle. It preferred to concentrate on easy targets such as the public perception of Islam and the treatment of Muslims at airports rather than tackling more daring subjects. According to one of the imams featured in the programme this was because while Islam does encourage humour Islamic humour has very particular characteristics, the main one being that it doesn’t look too favourably on jokes which may be insulting. That sort of humour is unacceptable. This distinction between acceptable and unacceptable humour is an important one. The power of the comedy of Chris Rock, Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor comes from its fearlessness, a willingness to say the unsayable as a means of shining a light on our deepest prejudices and thus exposing hidden truths. Its that same fearlessness one can find in Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Jerry Springer the opera. When the BBC broadcast Jerry Springer the opera on television is sparked huge protests, including 55,000 emails, from some Christian groups for whom the production was deeply offensive- but it was still broadcast. It is hard to imagine that the corporation or anyone else would risk incurring Islamic wrath by doing anything which, as one imam told me, aimed to ‘sneeze in the face of Muslims.’ Now you could say this is a welcome sign of cultural sensitivity and that communities need to feel confident within themselves before they can start telling jokes against themselves. This, the argument goes, explains why there are so many Jewish comedians and so few Muslim ones. It isn’t that Islam doesn’t have a sense of humour or that Muslims can’t be funny but rather that the British Muslim community has only really been around for four decades and many still feel too vulnerable to be cracking gags. Although this argument is not without merit it seems to me that there is a danger that if everyone else is too sensitive Muslims are not being encouraged to adapt to the cultural norms of the country they live in. That is why comedy is so important because humour can make some very serious points. Which is where we return to Chris Rock in Hammersmith. His greatness lies in the fact that his humour is not afraid to offend the very people who are paying to see him. That, it seems to me, is what it currently missing from much of the discourse and discussion amongst Muslims and it is largely absent from Muslim humour. Muslims have been dismayingly successful in being offended, it would be encouraging if more demonstrated the confidence to dare offending each other.