My name is Zahra, I’m so happy to be here. Raise your hand if you’ve ever said the words, I’m not that funny. Good job, you’re being complicit in white supremacy. I’m a stand-up comedian, I’m trying not to quit stand-up comedy. Give it up for me. Thank you, thank you, thank you. The bar and stand-up comedy circuit is the only pipeline to the development of commercially recognized, successful comedians. Thousands of other comedians like me need an alternative pipeline, not just for the sake of our careers, but because the future of culture depends on it. I think so because you guys talk about comedy a lot. Yes? Yes? All right. I started, I’ve been a stand-up comedian for 15 years, but I would say my career in comedy began when I was five years old, protecting my mom from hate crimes. My mom wore hijab in the 80s, back when wearing a headscarf told people that you were Iranian and a hostage taker. I remember this one time there was this guy that came up to us at a grocery store costing her to say, why do you hate America? And I slid between them with a box of Lucky Charmed cereal. And I said, please, please, please tell her to buy me Lucky Charmed. She’s an immigrant, she doesn’t understand every kid gets it in America. They’re magically delicious. And he laughed and said, you do not need more sugar. Listen to your mother. That was my first experience of being a foil. I started stand-up at UC Berkeley, at the Iranian Student Cultural Organizations Talent Show. I told these stories about my dad. And this is the story that I told when I was growing up. My dad was always on my case. One day I brought home an A-minus. Immigrants in the house? Diaspora? You do not bring home an A-minus, right? I love it. I call them Chad’s cis straight white men in the room. They’re always like an A-minus, but you’re trying. Did you have fun? Did you learn something? What I said to the Iranian parents at the talent show was, I brought home an A-minus and my dad said, what the shit the hell is this? An A-minus? Minus? So I went and I studied and I brought home the A. He said, what the shit the hell is this, Zahra? An A? Why not an A-plus? So I went and I studied and I brought home the A-plus. He said, what the shit the hell is this, Zahra? An A-plus? Why’d you take such an easy class? There’s no winning! I wanted to do stand-up comedy for real. And when I performed for these Iranian community events, they wouldn’t let me talk about politics or sex or religion. They just wanted to hear about my dad’s struggles. Meanwhile, in the stand-up comedy circuit, they just wanted to hear my dad’s accent. So, who can tell me what makes up a joke? It is… Wrong, haha, you fell for my straw man. This is actually the definition of a joke. Establish a shared context that generates anticipation. This is what we love so much about comedians and social justice. Now you deliver a surprise that has a lingering impact that ideally alleviates tension. But here’s the thing. Who’s tension? Yes. And what context? What shared context? What happens when you don’t have a shared context with your audience? What happens for a lot of people of color and people who identify as LGBTQ, people who are women, people like me, is that you rely on stereotypes. Because stereotypes are an easily accessible cultural reference with built intention. But there’s no winning. Because when you use a stereotype, then the other chads at a comedy club see it as a kind of cheating. It says it is pre-crafted humor. And I could talk about this slide all day. To me, the most important thing that I want you to take away from this talk, and you should have me back again to talk more about it, is this idea of context and shared context. When a white man gets on stage, a chad. I remember Sean Taylor telling me at a conference earlier this week to put peer before taxonomy. So chad, chad, where are you chad, what’s up? You’re my peer. Don’t be afraid. When a white man gets on stage, then he begins at anticipation. He has a culturally shared context for patriarchy. He’s on stage with a mic, we get it. Everyone’s paying attention for where he’s headed. When I get on stage, everyone wants to know where I come from. It slows down the joke. So what happens to a lot of people classified as other, seen as other, or whose narrative is further from the heteronormative experience of a white man, is that you get relegated to the theater and college circuit. You create a one-person show where you have some agency over your narrative. You can reframe it. Because there’s no time to do that at a bar. Because at a bar, you’re being judged by other chads who attend a bar and are looking at your tempo and how tight you are. When I started out in stand-up comedy, I did it because I didn’t want to be in politics. I was so sick of politics, I just wanted to be able to be silly. I wanted to be Cory Feldman. But here’s what happened, and here’s where I got stuck. I want you guys to pay attention to the numbers on the screen at the bottom there. 21 times a week, you have access to an open mic show. And this isn’t even in the New York comedy scene. In the New York comedy scene, there’s lots of bars, lots more bars than this. In San Francisco, this is how it was for me. There’s all comedy, there’s showcases, but all of them are functioning under the same narrative expectation that I’m going to explain where I’m coming from to my deficit with an audience because they want to know in order for me to be able to move forward. Otherwise, I get this guy after a show, hey, so how come you didn’t talk about being Sicilian? Are you not proud? I’m proud. And when I would talk about my identity, I was handed so many questions to answer on behalf of all Muslims that I was not prepared to do. I was not politicized. I didn’t know how to wield these conversations and write jokes at the same time. It’s really special for me to be here today performing right after Alan Jenkins. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here. Thank you. Yes, please. When he invited me to the creative change retreat at Sundance, he invited me as a peer to comedians that I admired and revered like Hari Kondabalu and W. Kamau Bell. And casually over lunch, he asked me, so Zara, how come we don’t have more comedians and social justice like you, Hari, Kamau? And I had to stop him because there were two firsts happening for me. I had never been classified in a tier along with comedians like Hari and Kamau as two comedians who made it through the bar scene. I escaped. I did the great escape. And the other thing that he asked me that I had never come across before was, why aren’t there more of you? As a woman of color, I had internalized this notion that there were enough. They were doing the job. Why did you need more of me? And he asked me, you know, what’s going on to the talent pool? What is depleting the talent pool? I also met Katie Bourne-Chateau. Please give it up for her. She was amazing today. And in my complaints about stand-up comedy, she told me this is analysis. And that was amazing because then I also was connected with Tracy Van Slike and Bridget Antoinette Evans of the Pop Culture Collaborative, where I am a fellow talking about stand-up comedy and this pipeline for social change. And I started to think about what is depleting our talent pool. Here’s the thing. To become a comedian, you have to perform for five minutes, five nights a week for two years before you’re seen as a legitimate comedian to other comedians. In your city. That’s just to other local assholes. You all gather at a hub, a comedy hub, the punchline, the improv, etc., where you’re able to perform stand-up for two years, then four years, then six years. You get auditions, then eight years. You actually get an opportunity at TV staff writing gigs. Is everybody doing some fast math? Five minutes, five nights a week, eight years. Either you’re a double agent, you quit, or you’re drinking the Kool-Aid. So I’m here to tell you that we need to expand this talent pool. There is no alternative pipeline. When I left for the Great Escape into theater and one person shows, what happened was my material morphed for the translation of a theatrical stage in a theatrical setting in audience. So that comedy bookers then looked at me and said, well, you’re not doing the formula that I know, that I can book, that I can tour. What comedians need is what Jerry Seinfeld has. People of color, people who identify as LGBTQ, says, woman, we need fail-safe studio time where you can just show up. It’s not self-produced. It doesn’t matter if you fail or not. And you’re there with a cohort of like-minded individuals, right, who you don’t have to constantly establish your context with. You can find what the joke is, what gold comedy is doing. Development language, mentorship, career prospects so that you know that this investment that could go to medical school or law school these eight years is going into comedy to go somewhere. You need the ability to mentor. And I think that if we do this, we can really create this pipeline. We can build this pipeline into a kind of stand-up comedy that incorporates social justice. It’s so easy. We so can do this. I’m doing it. I have a comedy special called On behalf of all Muslims, a comedy special. Thank you. It’s debuting in June. I pitched it in June of 2015. It’s debuting in June of 2019. Talk to me. Let’s work together. Let’s find how we can create this bridge between access for people who are in theater, performing in theater to be seen as comedians. And that in part begins with a way that we see our senses of humor and how it is being shaped by a sense of white authority and that standard on comedy. Thank you. That’s my time. Thank you.