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Tissa Hami: Stand-Up Humor in Hijab

Iranian American brings more to comedy than conservative clothes.

By Jeff Baron, Staff Writer.
This article first appeared in America.gov, June 8, 2010

Tissa Hami says she performs covered for part of her act to show that she is the same person no matter what she is wearing.

Washington — Tissa Hami is funny for a cause.

“I came at [comedy] from the point of view of an activist,” said Hami, an Iranian American. “I knew it had to be funny, or it wouldn’t be comedy. … But if I could get people to think of Muslims and Middle Easterners differently, that was definitely my goal, too.”

Hami said she had been funny before she turned to comedy as a way of opening minds, but she didn’t aim to be a comedian. “I tried lots of serious jobs. I wanted one of them to stick,” she said. “I wanted to have a normal, boring life. But that just didn’t work for me.”

Hami was 5 when her parents moved with her from Iran to the United States, in 1978. Both of her parents are called “doctor” — he has a doctorate degree, and she is a dentist — and Hami said they expected her to have the same title, maybe as a physician. She grew up as “the quiet, smart kid” and did as she was supposed to, more or less: Instead of applying to Harvard University, which she decided was too close to her parents’ home in Lexington, Massachusetts, she went to a different school in the prestigious Ivy League, Brown University, and took pre-medicine courses until she was certain that she did not want to become a physician.

Thinking that law school might be next, she worked for two years after college as a paralegal and rejected law. Thinking that business school might satisfy her instead of law school, she took a job at an investment bank until she gave up on a career in business.

“My co-workers would always say to me: ‘What are you doing on Wall Street? You’re so funny. You should be a comic,’” Hami said.

But that didn’t happen until after she had collected two graduate degrees, one in New York and one in Paris, and the turning point came on September 11, 2001. Hami had just returned home from Paris, and it seemed to her that all of the Middle East experts she saw interviewed on television about the terrorist attacks on the United States were white men of European ancestry. “I kept thinking, ‘Where is our voice?”

“The message coming through was that Muslim women were voiceless and faceless and oppressed, and I want to show that that’s not true.”

So Hami conceived of a stand-up comedy act in which she would portray a Muslim woman, veiled, going through airport security. She had taken a semester off from graduate school to live in Iran and get to know members of her extended family, so she had the long coat and head scarf that she had worn there. They became her essential props onstage.

She had not tried any sort of comedy before. She had never been to a comedy club. She was too nervous to sleep the night before her first appearance, and too nervous that day to do much other than go to the bathroom 30 times. Yet she went on stage and performed. “I look back now, and I can’t believe I did it,” Hami said.

Of the 10 comedians who performed that night in November 2002 at the Comedy Studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she was the only one who was invited back on the spot.

“My concept from the very beginning was to do part of the show veiled and part of the show unveiled,” Hami said. “I wanted to show that I was the same person no matter what I was wearing.”

The coverings made Hami distinctive, but they didn’t make her funny. She learned the craft of comedy and got better. She also started figuring out what sort of audience would be most receptive to her humor: open and intellectual; often on college campuses; and not necessarily Iranian or Muslim.

“I’ve traveled and performed in 25 states,” many of them far from Iranian-American populations, Hami said. “I go to places where I’m literally told by organizers beforehand, ‘We’ve never seen a Muslim before.’”

She knows that to get her jokes, people at least have to be aware of what’s going on in the world. “People know a lot more than I gave them credit for,” she said.

Hami’s career has changed over the years. She moved to San Francisco from the Boston area three years ago. She is working on a book, but that requires a lot of self-discipline, and without a deadline, it is going slowly. She also would like to do a one-woman show “and still have it be funny but not have the limitations of stand-up.”

Hami said the audience has also changed considerably: The fear and ignorance about Islam and Iran that she encountered at the start have dissipated. “In the seven years I’ve been doing comedy and traveling across the country, the attitudes have changed for the better, and I’m so glad of that,” she said.

Still, she says she hasn’t worked herself out of a job. Plenty of people need to learn a bit and laugh out loud at her.

(This article is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)

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