Attending comedy shows in today’s political climate always seems like a bit of a risk to me, but after seeing Hasan Minhaj recently at The Englert, I felt more open to the experience. Mission Creek Festival brought Daily Show Correspondent Michelle Wolf, comedian Janelle James, and two local comics Spencer Loucks and Arish Singh to The Mill on Saturday night.

The night began quite awkwardly. Loucks (the only white guy performer of the night) got on stage and dramatically declared “Guys… Stop thinking about sex… Hostess sells ice cream!” His first joke was met with mostly silence and confusion. After his weird bit about short orgasms and eating Twinkie ice cream, he became more comfortable on stage and got more laughs with some self-deprecation about embarrassing acting auditions and awkward dates.

Loucks introduced the first guest comedian to Iowa City, Janelle James, whose performance consistently drew laughs. James, who has been opening for Chris Rock’s comedy tour, shared uncomfortable but hilarious thoughts about the transition from “pee-pee” to “dick” in her thirteen-year-old son, and racist casting calls for angry black women.

One of my favorite jokes regarded the popular reality TV show The Bachelor, and how the sought-after single man of the title is just some “basic white dude named Ben.” She also pointed out that in the “900 seasons” of the show, the token black woman and token Latina woman get cut in the second week of the show, even though “minorities put up their best” to audition.

James joked about her confrontations with white people having lived in the Midwest, confessing that she likes white men: “Not as human beings or as people, I mean in a sexual fetishizing way.” She transitioned from this joke to discussing how disappointed she felt when she realized that a bonfire is just a fire, despite the “hype” by white people.

After a short intermission following James’ set, Arish Singh, a comic who splits his time between Chicago and Iowa City took the stage. Having seen Singh perform before, I knew about his provocative jokes that many white neo-liberals of Iowa City respond to with tight lips and discomfort. When half the room did not laugh at James’ joke about the whiteness of The Bachelor, I was curious how they’d respond to Singh’s request that Republicans in the room chant “race war, hell yeah” followed by a minority group they hate.

Unsurprisingly, those audience members did not appreciate his frankness, but the majority of the room did. They laughed at his plea to eradicate the evils of ventriloquism by calling their senators and exposing Jeff Dunham as a cheap racist hack. Then, he introduced the headliner, Michelle Wolf.

Like Singh, she wasted no time before getting political. Wolf brought up how politicians are “trying to figure out where trans people should go to the bathroom,” suggesting an ingenious idea: “bathrooms.” She explained that the only thing women worry about in bathrooms is making sure no one knows they’re the ones pooping: “I tried to cough a lot and only go when the hand dryer was on.” Wolf suggests that pooping loudly in a bathroom is a great way to avoid predators, though; she said that farting on the whole walk home could ensure one’s protection.

Wolf told one of my favorite jokes of the night when she described the “fatal flaw” of women: wanting to help other people. She tells a story of sitting in a meeting and seeing a man who needed a napkin, and becoming so distracted with this “poor baby” and wanting to help this man so badly. “I know where the napkins are, I have legs, I could go get him the napkins and I could save him!” I’ve had this thought so many times before, and while I don’t know about generalizing all women, I could definitely identify with this joke.

While Wolf had some great high notes to her set, she also had numerous moments during her performance when I felt confused about her jokes. Several times in her set, she compared the gender identity and sexuality of gay men to straight women in problematic ways. Wolf included a joke in which a trans women wore a shirt better than her, and told the woman to “stay in her lane.” When Wolf began a joke with “there are some jobs immigrants are just better at,” I really felt disconnected to her comedy.

While she revealed her problematic feminism, I still appreciated some jokes about so-called feminist movements like the Free The Nipple campaign, which she suspected originated from a creepy man wanting to see nipples on the internet. She suggested that Instagram and other social media platforms simply ban male nipples instead.

While Janelle James was my favorite performer of the night, the other comics all had great moments in their set. Thanks to Mission Creek for bringing them to Iowa City!

The post Mission Creek: Michelle Wolf @ The Mill 4/8/17 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

I had been looking forward to this show for weeks.

Not surprisingly, I was surrounded by mostly white folks who think they’re so #woke because they watch The Daily Show. Despite the regular Iowa City majority, I saw quite a few Desis in the audience, which was encouraging and comforting. Their presence became clearer through the night.

The show opened with Arish Singh, a comedian raised in Waterloo but now splits his time between Chicago and Iowa. He began the show by discussing the difficulties of being an Indian Sikh kid growing up in Waterloo, from watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (which I refuse to link to because it’s so racist) with his white friends, to attacking questions about his turban.

One of my favorite jokes in his set consisted of dividing the audience along bipartisan lines. He asked Republicans “when I say race war,” republicans say the minority group which they’d like to harm, and asking Ds “when I say class war,” deny any wrongdoing. At this point, I was very curious about the reactions of all the old white ladies in the audience.

Singh ended his set with a powerful call to action against corrupt state and local politicians, citing examples of the University of Iowa revoking scholarships from over 2,000 students, to Iowa Senators Grassley and Ernst and their deafening silence among hate crimes in this country, to the state government taking away collective bargaining. “We can’t let Iowa become Nebraska,” he declared as he ended his set to laughter and applause. He gave Hasan Minhaj a touching introduction calling “Homecoming King” one of the best works of comedy he has ever seen, and left the stage.

Minhaj began his set discussing childhood, and with the help of his slideshow projected on the screen behind him, explained the conditional nature of “brown love,” the relatable phenomenon of brown/immigrant parents hitting their kids (which Minhaj claims led to the creation of “Indian sociopath” Bobby Jindal), and more.

Minhaj came to Davis, California with his father while his mother stayed in India until he was eight completing medical school. When his mother finally came to live with him in America, she shows up with his little sister who Hasan didn’t know existed until she walked through the door. He dubbed this situation “Maury for immigrants.”

He used this incident to explain two facets of immigrant life: immigrant parents love secrets, and his negative attitude towards immigrants (mainly his sister). Minhaj jokes that at that point, he “believed in the wall,” referring to Donald Trump’s plans to construct a wall along our southern border to keep immigrants out. 

Minhaj frequently incorporated Hindi words and phrases throughout his show, most notably “log kya kahenge” which translates to “what will people think?” For a Desi Muslim man to get on stage in Iowa City and speak to a largely white crowd using Hindi and Urdu reveals courage and audacity, to me.

He translated most of the words for the non-Hindi speaking population, but his references to movies like Jodha Akbar, Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gham, and more without an explanation was a bold move. The absence of an explanatory comma with these references made me feel welcomed, like I was chatting with Hasan in my living room.

In addition to his hilarious jokes, Minhaj used lighting techniques and sharp emotional contrasts to tell traumatic, unfortunate experiences from his life too. He saved one of his funniest jokes to precede a dark moment in the show, the moment his father suffered a heart attack.

He described a tragic moment immediately after the terrorist attack on 9/11 where some white kids who attended his school vandalized his family’s property, stole his backpack and called him racial slurs including sand n*****, a name I was called often in my childhood.

He tries to keep this moment of the show palatable to white folks by explaining that he knows “white people have problems,” because he has seen “Girls” on HBO and Lena Dunham’s character hasn’t found love yet. However, he stands firm in his explanation of white privilege here.

He explains that immigrants feel they have to pay this “American Dream tax,” which requires them to accept moments like these. Immigrants constantly adapt to America, bend for America, and have to release “press releases to prove their patriotism” after moments like 9/11, and other terrorist attacks that many Americans wrongly connect back to the Muslim community as a whole. This part of his show resonated with me, and my experiences as an immigrant in this country grappling with my parents’ acceptance and passivity to bigotry and my refusal to compromise with racism.

From an ongoing story about a spurned (probably racist) prom date to a dramatic triumph in marrying a Hindu woman, Minhaj created a piece of art that connected with Iowa City audiences of all backgrounds.

His references to Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Mario Kart comforted the general public, but his inclusion of Hindi/Urdu phrases, Desi cultural explanations and immigrant experiences reached out more specifically to people of color and Desi folks in the audience.

Without tokenizing or making fun of brown folks or other people of color, he honestly showcased his own experiences in this country.

The post Show Review: Hasan Minhaj @ The Englert Theater 2/25/17 appeared first on KRUI Radio.