Organic Comedy (Not About Body Parts)

You may or may not be aware of the rising Arabic American Comedy trend. This trend starting around year 2000 may be perceived by a bystander as an orchestrated event of brining to the stage new age western comedians of Middle Eastern decent. Contrary, the trend is more organic in its origin than it may seem today. The start of Arabic American comedy (and to a greater extent Middle Eastern – Western comedy) is rooted in the personality conflict and conflict of values that second generation westerners face growing up in a new society.

Weather you are Pakistani Englishman or Palestinian Americans, it is difficult to grow up in a conservative Muslim household with a traditional outlook on everything in life (education, dating, & politics for example) while at the same time trying to meld into a western day to day lifestyle that may be more progressive, more liberal, and differently valued. A good example of this conservatism is how immigrant families in general (weather Middle Eastern or otherwise) place more emphasis and higher admiration for professional degrees such as engineering, medicine, IT, and Law in order to secure for their children a safe haven in the new western world that they may not have been able to secure in their country of origin. In some cases you find that a child from a multi cultural house hold is almost obligated to pursue one of these careers and constantly bombarded by stories of the hardships that his parents or grandparents overtook in order to immigrate to the western world.

It is this crisis of identity and this conflict of value that gives Arab American comics such a wealth of material to work with by reaching into their personal struggles with their identity and their struggles with being misunderstood or misrepresented by society to create new comedic material and deliver their personal message through their comedic content. Within the Arab American Comedy movement we find that many of the comedians were trained and educated in professional degrees: