No Land's Man (19 page)

The longer I spent time on
The Daily Show
standing in front of a green screen pretending to report from war zones and hot spots around the world—most often from somewhere in the Middle East—the more I began to realize that
The Daily Show
was radicalizing me. I was being allowed to express the outrage that had lain dormant in me since the aftermath of September 11. I was becoming a terrorist of comedy. This was my joke madrasa run mostly by Ivy League-educated Jews, and I was being taught how to commit a jihad of irony against the bullshit, the hypocrisy, the ignorance. I was learning to fire missiles of satire across the basic cable airwaves and blow the minds of a million people. Sometimes we even got up to two million if it was election time. I was able to retaliate on behalf of a sector of society that needed to know that someone, kind of, sort of, had the balls that no one on FOX or CNN had. American Muslims, whether they were religious practitioners or whether, like me, they mostly identified with Islam from a cultural standpoint, had not been allowed the luxury of being both patriotic and critical of America at the same time.

This was evidenced by the brown-faced cabbies on the streets of New York who had adorned their yellow cabs with so much red, white, and blue that they looked like floats in the Fourth of July parade. Anyone with a thick Middle Eastern or South Asian accent quickly replaced
Inshallah
with
God Bless America
.

“Even though on the outside I may look like those that did you harm, I am not one of them,” they were attempting to say. “I get that you are angry and afraid but if we just connect for a moment, you
will see that I’m actually Armenian or Sikh or from Poughkeepsie. And if I do happen to be Muslim, I am not that freedom-hating type of Muslim. I believe in peace, and baseball. My blood runs apple pie so you can pass over me. Oh ye angel of freedom, liberty, and ignorant racially-driven outrage, pass over me.”

Inshall—I mean God Bless America.

My tenure at
The Daily Show
started during the decade after September 11 and fear of Muslims was at an all-time high. Politicians and the media seemed to dial the fright, mistrust, and animosity up to a fever pitch to gain votes and ratings. From supposed experts on the mainstream news reporting absurdities like the spelling of the Muslim holiday of Eid written backward spells
die
, as if Islam was a Led Zeppelin album imbued with backward satanic messages. Or that the definition of jihad has something to do with “death to America,” even though Mohammad (PBUH) was born a thousand years before Columbus and if this was true, it would be the mother of all pre-emptive strikes. Or that everyone in India eats chilled monkey brains for dessert (okay fine, that was from
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
, but honestly it had been bothering me since the mid-eighties). To the coverage of less absurd and more dangerous stuff like the Ground Zero mosque protests or proposals that all young Muslim men’s names be put into a database, as if they were pedophiles, or the fact that mosques were being infiltrated by undercover informants hired by the NYPD to spy on Muslims who had committed the crime of simply being Muslim. My point is, I was never short of a story to pitch.

I spoke to a woman who was protesting the building of a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee because she believed that it
was a terrorist training camp. She also said one in five Muslims are terrorists. I told her that amounted to almost three hundred million terrorists. She didn’t balk until I said, “Well, I can’t understand what is taking us so long.”

I spoke to a young cartoonist who was upset that Marvel was creating a Muslim Batman. When asked why this bothered him, he said, “How can you trust him? He might say he is good but what if he is not?” I felt the need to inform him that Batman was a fictional character in a fictional world created by cartoonists, to which he replied, “. . . exactly, and since there are no Muslims in that fictional world, he shouldn’t be there.” It was impossible to argue with that kind of air-tight logic. I mean impossible.

I spoke to a panel of New Yorkers who had just watched a parody sitcom we had created based on the idea of a Muslim Cosby show called
The Q’usoby Show
. One gentleman said he could not believe it was a real family. I asked him how we might make it more real. He thought for a second and then said, “What if they had a terrorist uncle who lived in the basement with a goat? Then it would be more believable.” Like I said, impossible to argue with.

As the years went by, I can honestly say I began to feel a vague sense of accomplishment by highlighting the absurd and ridiculous. To add fuel to my self-congratulatory fire I was soon being given awards by Muslim organizations for my work. In 2011 I was invited to receive a “Courage in Media” award from the Council on American Islamic Relations. I flew out to California, then got picked up in a limousine and driven to the award show where I was to be honored essentially for making fun of racists and Islamaphobes. As I sat at my table with the other recipients eating my radicchio salad, I got to talking to the young man next to me.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Malek Jandali,” he replied. “I’m a pianist from Syria.”

“And what award are you receiving?” I asked.

“The Freedom of Expression Award,” he answered. “You?”

“Courage in Media,” I laughed. “Honestly, these awards sound a bit overzealous, don’t they? I mean, what did you do? Dress up like Lady Gaga in the middle of Damascus?”

He gave me an odd look.

“Over the summer I performed at a rally in Washington, D.C. in support of the Syrian opposition,” he explained, “and because of that the Syrian army invaded my family’s home in Damascus and brutally beat my parents.”

“Okay, then . . .” I stuttered, tasting the dirty leather of the foot that was in my mouth. “See now . . . that’s exactly the kind of thing . . . I mean, that’s the very definition of . . . I mean good for you . . . I mean not that it was good . . . but you know . . . the thing you did was . . .”

My voice trailed off as I tried not to make eye contact.

“What do you do?” he asked, earnestly.

“Umm . . . Me?” I said. “I’m a smart-ass.”

He stared at me with a blank expression. I smiled awkwardly, buttered my bread, and wished that the Syrian army would come and shoot me.

After Jandali received his award, there was not a dry eye in the house. That was followed by my award, which was introduced with a video of me doing pratfalls and making faces into the camera. I stepped up on to the stage, received my award, then went to hug the hijabi woman who gave me the award, forgetting that conservative Muslim women don’t hug strange men, and then proceeded to do a stand-up set that they had asked me to perform.

The audience seemed to be amused, even though given the context I felt like I was personally undeserving. I realized, though, as I stood on that stage and did jokes about being racially profiled at airports and Americans being unable to tell the difference between a Mosque and a Mexican restaurant, that this was not really about me. Who I really actually was, personally, was irrelevant. They were not giving this award to
me
. They were giving this award to something that existed in a larger cultural context. I was the representative of an underrepresented character who looked and talked like me but was not really me. He was the creation and the handiwork of myself and many smart funny people: the jihadist of irony.

A few months after that award was given to me, my role as the mouthpiece for that character came into even starker relief when I received a call on my cell phone from Jon Stewart. Jon had never called me before and at first I didn’t even recognize his voice.

“I have a question for you,” he said. “Trey Parker and Matt Stone showed an image of Mohammad in a bear suit on South Park the other night and they are now being threatened by some Islamic website. I want to do something on the show in response. Can we have an image of Mohammad on the show?”

“No,” I said. I didn’t even have to think about it. “Definitely not!”

I didn’t say no because I was scared. I said it because it felt too easy, too incendiary.

“You’re right,” said Jon. “Fine. Can we have Jesus on the show?”

“Sure,” I said, “Jesus loves the camera.”

“Or,” said Jon, thinking for a moment, “how would you feel about talking? We do a chat at the desk and I just talk to you about how you personally feel? As a Muslim. Would you be okay doing that?”

My parents’ words came back to haunt me:
If Jon Stewart asks you any questions about your opinion on Islam, don’t say a word, just have them call your mother
.

I was unsettled and a little terrified.

“Can I call my mother?” I asked.

“Umm . . . sure, whatever you have to do,” said Jon. “Let me know.”

Later that day, I sat at the desk of
The Daily Show
wearing my suit, in front of an audience about to go on air. Jon leaned over and said, “Thanks for doing this, I know you were hesitant about it.”

“You know, Jon,” I replied, “it’s just that I’m not really a very good example of a Muslim and I can’t speak for all of Islam.”

“I know,” said Jon, as the music began and the stage manager counted us down, “but right now . . . you’re all we’ve got.”

I
WISH TO THANK
the numerous people who made this book possible. The friends and colleagues who I cannot repay, who gave me their time and their ears as they listened to me obsessively read my stories again and again and again. Often the same story. Often the same friends. Whether it was at a formal reading, a writers’ workshop, in their homes, in their cars, over the phone, in the emergency room, or at their children’s birthday parties, they listened and they shared with me their thoughts, even if that was simply to say, “Aasif, seriously, you cannot just ignore a restraining order.” I recognize that some of those friends no longer speak to me, and they will probably never read this acknowledgment, but I still wish to thank them here, for they were paramount in helping me create this book.

I would like to offer a special thanks to my editor Emily Haynes for her tireless work and putting up with me missing every
sodding
deadline. And thanks to Neil Egan and Gregg Kulick for the beautiful jacket and book design, despite having to work with a photograph of me as the raw material. Also to Leigh Haber for helping me begin this process and believing that I had a book inside me. Thank you to my wonderful manager Lillian Lasalle for her commitment,
encouragement, and friendship, to my amazing agent Bonnie Bernstein for her support and guidance on this and everything else, and to my literary agents Jennifer Joel and Andrea Barzvi who masterfully put all the pieces together.

On a more personal note, I would like to thank Shaifali Puri for holding my hand and never letting me doubt. Also Jill Anderson, Siddhartha Khosla, Ayad Akhtar, Janina Gavankar, Jim Wisniewski Ruma Bose, Sheetal Sheth, and Nimitt Mankad for their inspiration, wisdom, creativity, and friendship.

Thank you to all the people, too many to name, upon whom the characters in this book are based. In many cases I have changed your names, but you know who you are and I thank you for being part of the story and your teaching along the way.

Finally, I would like to thank Shabana Churruca, Jose Churruca, and Anisa Churruca who continue to teach me the meaning of family, and of course my eternal gratitude to my parents Hakim Mandviwala and the late Fatima Mandviwala, my source material, who always allowed me turn their lives into art and who never compromised their love.

AASIF MANDVI
is a correspondent on Comedy Central’s
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
and one of the stars of HBO’s upcoming series
The Brink
, for which he also serves as writer/producer. He won an OBIE award for his one-man play
Sakina’s Restaurant
which he later adapted into the film
Today’s Special
. He has appeared in numerous theater, film and television productions including the Pulitzer Prize–winning play
Disgraced
at Lincoln Center, and the films
Million Dollar Arm
and
The Internship
. He lives in New York City. To learn more about the glamorous life and well-informed opinions he pretends to have, follow him on Twitter @aasif.