Ethnicity Blent with Humour at Just for Laughs

Counter stereotypes through humour with Maz Jobrani

I don’t know if self-help pioneer Dale Carnegie ever considered candy and comedy. But for Maz Jobrani the two together were a sure-fire way for the new kid in school, from Iran, no less, to win friends and influence people.

The actor-comedian has no discernible accent other than the one he picked up in California, having moved there from Iran at the age of 6. “I’m Iranian-American,” he says, “and as you know those two countries don’t like each other so it causes me a lot of inner conflict; part or me likes me, part of me hates me, part of me thinks it’s going to have a nuclear program, the other part thinks I can’t be trusted with one.”

Jobrani is coming to Montreal to host the popular Ethnic Show at the Just For Laughs Festival. The show is partly about breaking down barriers, but first and foremost about making people laugh. With that in mind, it makes sense to have Jobrani at the helm. He says his first goal as a comedian is to be funny. But once he realized just how one-sided the Western portrayal of people from the Middle East is, he did make it a bit of a mission to counter those stereotypes through humour. “People can come to my show and they can laugh with other people of different ethnicities,” Jobrani says. “Another goal of mine is to make people realize that every ethnicity has good people, every ethnicity has laughter.”

Jobrani has amassed quite a list of television and movie credits. Given his ethnicity, however, he acknowledges that he’s played a lot of terrorists or other characters that perpetuate the negative stereotype. “I’ve stopped taking those parts,” he assures me.
That he wanted to be an actor and a comedian was a tough sell for his parents. They would have preferred him to be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. His mother had even suggested he be a lawyer during the week and a comic on the weekend. But now that he’s made it big she’s his biggest fan.

The Ethnic Show has great line-up this year, including Greek-Canadian Angelo Tsarouchas, Italian-American Sebastian Maniscalco, Jewish-American comic Modi, and Haitian-American Wil Sylvince. “The more material you see from these different backgrounds,” Jobrani says, “the more you realize how much we have in common.”