Muslims eh? Striding around in their big spinning bow ties and massive shoes, custard-pieing innocent civilians at the first opportunity. Oh no wait, that’s clowns.
Indeed “Muslim” and “comedy” aren’t two words normally brought together in newspaper headlines. But stand-ups Azhar Usman and Preacher Moss aim to change all that. This November, their Allah Made Me Funny tour returns for a second outing, to “address misconceptions about Muslims ... and promote tolerance and understandings between Muslims and the non-Muslim world.”
With jokes like “people look at me like I’m responsible for 911 ... me? ... I mean 711 maybe ...”, as well as staples about the look of fear on passengers’ faces when a Muslim steps into a plane, the comics use self-deprecating humour to flip preconceptions on their head.
A former lawyer, Usman (below) admits to having flirted with radical Islam in his younger days. “My formative years were during the Rushdie affair and the first Iraq war, so at college I got wrapped up in the fallacy that somehow there is a contradiction between Western culture and Islam,” the Chicago-born stand-up has said. But now he has swapped jihad for jokes.
Visit www.allahmademefunny.com for tour dates.
